Blue Origin, the newspace venture of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, has made a significant step forward in the development of its suborbital New Shepard launch vehicle. It has completed acceptance testing of the BE-3, the liquid hydrogen-fuelled engine that…
Blue Origin, the newspace venture of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, has made a significant step forward in the development of its suborbital New Shepard launch vehicle.
It has completed acceptance testing of the BE-3, the liquid hydrogen-fuelled engine that will power its reusable launch system which will be used for space tourism and research purposes.
The New Shepard will feature a rocket-powered propulsion module, featuring the BE-3, and a crew capsule which will be able to carry at least three passengers. At a certain altitude the crew capsule will break off and the propulsion stage will return to Earth and perform an autonomous rocket-powered vertical landing.
Privately-held Blue Origin has said that the passenger craft will then continue to the edge of space – giving astronauts a view of the Earth’s curvature – before re-entering the atmosphere and landing with the aid of a parachute.
Blue Origin said that the BE‑3 can be “continuously throttled between 110,000-lbf and 20,000-lbf thrust” which it said is a key capability for vertical takeoff and vertical landing vehicles.
Bezos, the e-commerce billionaire who founded Blue Origin, said: “Liquid hydrogen is challenging, deep throttling is challenging and reusability is challenging.”
“This engine has all three. The rewards are highest performance, vertical landing even with a single-engine vehicle and low cost. And, as a future upper stage engine, hydrogen greatly increases payload capabilities.”
The space tourism industry is still reeling from the fatal crash of Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo in October last year. At the time some analysts believed the nascent space tourism industry as a whole could have been set back by several years by the crash.
In addition to the BE-3, Blue Origin is also developing the more powerful BE-4, which is being designed for orbital launches. This engine uses liquid oxygen and liquefied natural gas, and will be able to produce 550,000-lbf thrust at sea level.
Full-scale testing for BE-4 is due to take place in 2016, and then the engines first flight is envisaged in 2019.
The BE-4 has been selected by United Launch Alliance, a joint venture between Boeing and Lockheed Martin, as the primary engine for its next generation launch system.
ULA, which conducts 70% of US launches, is set to unveil its new system on Monday 13 April at a press conference in Colorado. The company faces increasing competition from Elon Musk’s vertically-integrated SpaceX, which has brought down the cost of putting satellites into orbit.
