![]() Advertisementįurther Reading Despite Tuesday’s flight, Jeff Bezos is running out of time to save Blue Originīlue Origin's current plan involves testing two more development engines at its facility near Van Horn, Texas, this fall. It is based on anonymous sources at the company's headquarters as well as industry officials, some of whom would likely be fired if they were named. Therefore, this story attempts to provide some context for why the BE-4 engines are late. Finally, many in the space community are genuinely curious about the cause of the delay.ĭespite this widespread interest, however, Blue Origin has said almost nothing publicly about the engine development. They hope Vulcan provides lower cost launch services with engines manufactured in the United States. The military is also eager for this delivery, as ULA is a primary provider of launch services to the Department of Defense alongside SpaceX. This is partly because ULA has been working on its new Vulcan rocket for a number of years, and that rocket is important to the future of the company. The BE-4's delayed development has, increasingly, been the subject of keen interest. At the time of this initial agreement, Blue Origin said the BE-4 would be "ready for flight" by 2017. But with the BE-4 engine, Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos was promising a relatively low-cost, high performing engine with a power output comparable to a Space Shuttle main engine. It was a bold bet by ULA, a blueblood in space launch, on a new entrant to the market. United Launch Alliance, or ULA, first agreed to buy the engines from Blue Origin back in 2014. This delivery has been a long time coming. And in order to make this deadline, Blue Origin plans to take the somewhat risky step of shipping the engines to its customer before completing full qualification testing. ![]() ![]() The company aspires to deliver these two flight engines to United Launch Alliance before the end of this year, although that increasingly appears to be a "stretch" goal. Originally published on Reading Behind the curtain: Ars goes inside Blue Origin’s secretive rocket factory "We're thrilled to see another successful BE-3 engine test fire," McAlister said in a statement.Īccording to NASA, the BE-3 is the first new liquid-hydrogen rocket engine to be built for production since Aerojet Rocketdyne's RS-68 was developed for the Delta IV rocket family more than 10 years ago.įollow Megan Gannon on Twitter and Google+. Phil McAlister, NASA's director of commercial spaceflight development, added that Blue Origin has made steady progress since the start of its partnership with the space agency. "The BE-3 is a versatile, low-cost hydrogen engine applicable to NASA and commercial missions." "Working with NASA accelerated our BE-3 development by over a year in preparation for flight testing on our New Shepard suborbital system and ultimately on vehicles carrying humans to low-Earth orbit," Rob Meyerson, president and program manager of Blue Origin, said in a statement. With the retirement of NASA's space shuttle fleet in 2011, the United States currently relies on Russian Soyuz vehicles to bring astronauts to the orbiting outpost. The program aims to help the aerospace industry develop systems to ferry astronauts to the space station. Blue Origin is a partner in NASA's Commercial Crew Program, along with other private companies like SpaceX and Sierra Nevada Corp.
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