Blue Origin and ULA to Jointly Fund New BE-4 Engine
United Launch Alliance and Blue Origin Announce Partnership To Develop New American Rocket Engine, Blue Origin
“United Launch Alliance (ULA), the nation’s premier space launch company, and Blue Origin, LLC, a privately-funded aerospace company owned by Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos, announced today that they have entered into an agreement to jointly fund development of the new BE-4 rocket engine by Blue Origin. This new collaboration will allow ULA to maintain the heritage, success and reliability of its rocket families – Atlas and Delta – while addressing the long-term need for a new domestic engine.
“The BE-4 is a liquid oxygen, liquefied natural gas (LNG) rocket engine that delivers 550,000-lbf of thrust at sea level. Two BE-4s will power each ULA booster, providing 1,100,000-lbf thrust at liftoff. “
Marc’s Update: I’ve added the video of the news conference to the press release.
Amazon Founder Jeff Bezos’s Startup Is Part of Bid to Deliver Astronauts, Wall Street Journal
“Blue Origin LLC, the space-exploration startup Mr. Bezos has been quietly toiling over for years, is part of a team led by Boeing Co. that is expected to soon garner a NASA contract to ferry astronauts to and from the international space station, according to people familiar with the matter. The role played in Boeing’s bid by Washington-state based Blue Origin, which describes its goal as “developing technologies to enable private human access to space at dramatically lower cost and increased reliability,” hasn’t been disclosed previously.”
Keith’s note: When I asked today if Blue Origin had been part of Boeing’s commercial crew proposal team (one that would use a United Launch Alliance rocket), ULA CEO Tory Bruno said “No”. He went on to say that their bid used existing engine capabilities. Blue Origin Founder Jeff Bezos added later that yesterday’s NASA commercial crew announcement and today’s engine announcement were totally separate and unrelated.
Ready to fly in 2017? That’s ambitious and I’d be very interested in seeing if they make it! Win, lose, or draw, it’s sure to light a few fire-crackers under a few seats in Hawthorne!
Ben:
Jeff Bezos has been (quietly) developing rocket stuff for over a decade. Blue Origin even out-cratered SpaceX a while back when their test vehicle self-destructed much higher and going very much faster than F9R.
Obviously Jeff had a ‘skunk works’ program in the wings trying to keep up with the Musks! 🙂
It looks like ULA will have to make a new booster stage if they use this engine. It will need a new thrust frame and new tanks (a liquid methane tank is larger than a kerosine tank (Atlas V) & smaller than a liquid hydrogen tank (Delta IV). They can still, and have so stated, use heritage hardware derived from the upper stages of the existing vehicles.
The Delta IV is the closer match to modify if they so chose. It’s already designed to handle cryogenic liquids in both tanks (liquid methane is just a few degrees warmer than liquid oxygen) and it has the option of in a three core heavy mode so they can fly without having to use solid boosters at all. If they used the venerable Centaur stage for this new vehicle, ULA could still have two completely separate launch vehicle families for redundancy. It wouldn’t bring down the price of the Delta IV any but I’ll bet they could build the new vehicle a lot cheaper if they put their minds to it.
One thing’s for sure: this deal spells the death nel for the Atlas V as we know it (They may keep the name though, in the same way SpaceX called the new Falcon 9 “v1.1”, so as not to spook folks).
Score yet another victory for Elon Musk!
tinker
“Score yet another victory for Elon Musk”
Tinker, Why you say this?
This has everything to do with the need for a new domestic rocket engine and nothing to do with Elon Musk.
Our unpredictable suppliers/partners in Russia are THE driver for this.
I suspect that it is because E. M. has severely and very publically criticized the Atlas V, mostly for its Russian engines. Also it is (was) the only US rocket even remotely (altho totally totally unlikely) possible to compete with Falcons. As John said: this deal spells the death knell for the Atlas V.
Musk also has formally put the hex on Ariane V (and I think VI).
The Proton is just about toast, Sea Launch is imploding. Soyuz has lost some serious cred in commercial markets.
These are all wins for Musk, regardless of how much direct effort he put out.
Delta is designed around horizontal integration, which would be fine except that DOD insists on loading payloads vertically, leading to long delays on the pad. I think ULA will keep the vertical integration and rail-based launch platform of the Atlas, and keep the Delta “as is” as a backup.
Does anyone know the basis for the DoD policy on integration aspect?
Yes it’s vertical and SpaceX have always said that they would accommodate this requirement. They’ll need it for crew anyway.
Cheers
Mr. Gardi
Did I miss it?
Did any one ask if this new ULA booster will be reusable?
Surely it will have to be, right?
Assuming it is, how do you think they will design it?
Will it have a center engine with a ring of engines around it?
How many engines do you think it will have?
Are we about to see an atles 9 or a delta with 27 engines
Can’t wait to see two rocket companies fighting to make space flight cheaper?
How should NASA help?
Methane fuel depots??
Mr. Gardi
Is it possible for either of these engines to run on the fuel of the other isn’t natural gas and methane very similar??
Should the first fuel depots be methane or natural gas?
Perhaps someone with engine design experience/knowledge can comment on how difficult the evolution from the BE-3 (LH2) to the BE-4 will be. Perhaps the evolution is such that it allows such a short development time? Won’t this require the redesign of the Atlas V first stage and the recertification of same?
It it interesting that now we’ll have two US developed “natural gas” engines.
Perhaps ULA has realized that SpaceX’s vertical integration (in the sense of one company making both vehicle and engine) really does reduce cost and development time. But ULA has never built an engine, and the existing companies guard their technology. So a partnership with an aggressive new company makes sense. Blue is willing to share its expertise at design for the chance of finally having paying customers.
Realized? Hell Howard Hughes proved that one 70 years ago.
Agreed, Dennis. Even after years of observation, few seem to realize that “old-space/new-space” is as much a contest of business models as of technologies.
With Blue making the engines, this would not be “vertical integration” at all as that term is defined; the term means owning a good stretch of one’s supply chain (back to the mine, the train, the steel mill, as would have applied in the inception of the notion long ago).
The Blue relationship would appear headed to be that of one more “supplier” (“buy”, not “make”) just as with the Russians and the RD180’s. It seems ULA thinks they have found another bargain. Notably, the Russian bargain, to judge from the poor information available of what ULA pays for Russian RD-180’s, did not translate into an inexpensive Atlas. That much is clear seeing both the prices ULA charges the Air Force, and judging from the lack of much commercial business, meaning marginal costs are stubbornly high.
Psi2:
As I say above, Liquid Methane is as ‘easy’ to work with as liquid oxygen. Liquid hydrogen is hell to work with. It is about twice as cold as liquid hydrogen and methane. That said, liquid hydrogen is a closer ‘fit’ to liquid methane than kerosine, so some evolution from BE-3 seems logical.
Staged combustion means that the fuel burned to spin the turbo pump is fed back into the combustion chamber. The extra efficiency is paid for by having a seriously difficult balancing act to perform, especially with a single shaft turbo pump. Throttling that motor will require eye of neut and late night incantations to get right, but once they do, it’d be a pretty reliable ride with maybe enough deep throttling for vertical landings too.
The BE-3 may have a second life as a high energy upper stage motor, where the hassle of using liquid hydrogen is worth the extra performance, at the end of the ride and not the beginning.
SpaceX has worked out that an oxygen rich burn with methane would only make the fuel tank 21% larger in volume than a kerosine (RP-1) tamk. Remember the Space Shuttle’s external tank? Well, the liquid hydrogen part was over twice the volume of the nose-cone shaped liquid oxygen tank. A liquid methane tank would be only 60% the volume of a liquid oxygen tank on either Bezos/ULA or SpaceX’s Raptor booster stages.
Hope that helps:
tinker
I thought I had read that the BE-3 was always intended as a high energy second stage?
From the link in the article, 2017 is not mentioned… “The ULA/Blue Origin agreement allows for a four-year development process with full-scale testing in 2016 and first flight in 2019. The BE-4 will be available for use by ULA and Blue Origin for both companies’ next generation launch systems.”
Also see Next Generation Launch Systems, but regardless a ULA Atlas V without an RD-180 is no longer the same rocket. Atlas VI anyone?
I’m glad to see Blue Origin take a more active role in orbital launch. But, how does this “maintain the heritage, success, and reliability” of Atlas and Delta? Isn’t it going to be a more or less brand new rocket developed by a team assembled for the task?
You mean, public. They’ve been actively developing capability, mostly in secret, for some time.
So, this could be a case of coming out of the Rocket Closet? 🙂 I’d bet Bezos hates this situation, having to start operating in the public eye instead of out of it.
Whatever the timeline, a methane engine will dictate a new launcher. Everything from the tankage to the control laws will have to change. We’re basically looking at a clean sheet of paper with “Atlas VI” at the top.
http://www.forbes.com/sites…
WOW according to Forbes this is going to be a REALLY unique engine:
The BE-4 will be fueled by liquid oxygen and liquid nitrogen gas to produce a total of about 550,000 pounds of thrust.
“You can’t change the laws of physics” Well maybe Bezos can<g>. He is so much smarter than Elon
LNG = Liquified Natural Gas, not Liquid Nitrogen.
Yes Brian well clearly you should have written the Forbes article. Obviously the Forbes write saw LNG and thought Liquid Nitrogen.
Actually, SpaceX is working on its own LCH4-fuelled engine. It would be about three times more powerful.
I see the Raptor rocket engine wiki sets the thrust for the SpaceX version of a LOX/methane engine at “661,000 lbf”. The Blue press release says that one BE-4 would have “550,000-lbf” of thrust (at their website). This would seem to be a marginal difference, not three times.
The raptor is 1.5 million lbf at sealevel.
Did everybody at Forbes sleep through high school chemistry?
Wow – how about that! The free market doing this without any government money! I like it! Maybe some new rocket company can use it for something besides Atlas and Delta.
SpaceX pays for it’s rockets and engines.
SpaceX has been working under NASA contracts for some time now.
What I meant is, SpaceX designs and build its Falcon and BFR rockets and their Merlin, Raptor and draco engines on their own dime – internal private money. The Dragons, on the other hand, are designed and built with some government subsidies, much of it to pay for their imposed certification process.
Now, while the government BUYS Falcon launches, but they are SpaceX paid for rockets.
So saying it again: SpaceX pays for it’s rockets and engines.
No government money? ULA gets 1 billion a year for “assured access” … that is a laughable statement considering how much launch costs are inflated by them… they are awash in government money.
perhaps a three way competition is in order here, IE the third entry would be a methane powered RS-25M
http://yellowdragonblog.com…
This would power both a Delta and SLS systems, I am not sure what would be the Glow of a Methane powered SLS or Delta however
The other thing that no one is talking about is ‘What the heck has Aerojet / Rocketdyne been doing?’. As one of the nations oldest makers of liquid fueled rocket engines why haven’t they on their own been developing new engines. They should have already been testing replacements for the RD-180 since they were licensed to do this. They should have had programs for new fuels such as the LNG already in the works so that they could have presented an affordable alternative.
Hope none of my 401K mutual funds are invested in that company!
Aerojet/Rocketdyne has been quietly laying off personnel and adding furlough days for the remaining people while waiting for some else to front the money for some new engine. Granted there are a few preliminary projects, but they will be problematic as the big machines and ovens are no longer available. Latest rumor was a doomed AR-1 with design split between sacramento and los angeles, using platelet technology.
Aerojet/Rocketdyne does not have a billionaire owner without stockholders that expect profit. This is the benefit of being a truly privately owned company. Years in the past when Rocketdyne was part of Boeing, it might have had the funding available to compete… now I dont think so.
Ahh yes…finally to the real news.
So, how long before Rock and their minions are screaming “industrial base sustainment” to all the right people on the hill? “Sustainment” where a new LOX/RP engine program, to replace the RD’s on Atlas, was the key $2B (or more) of future revenue?
What is ULA really up to here?
Alternately, I’d expect Rock will now ADD…oh, about $2B to the out-year plans & estimates for thier SLS core stage and upper stage engine costs (for the development and production after the run of the current stock of 12 SSME’s). SLS just got hit with an unknown-unknown that’s soon to be known.
Ok, Blue Origin/ULA is going for a larger engine fueled by LNG/O2 vs SpaceX smaller engine of Methane/O2. Both rockets are looking to breach the 1 Million-plus thrust level.
Um, anyone care to comment on the better approach, and what is the tradeoff between LNG and pure Methane? There wasn’t any info out there on the net from a cursory dig.
Other than that — Gentlemen, start your engines!! Can’t wait to see who actually lifts off first.
Other way around. The BO/ULA engine is going to be about half the size of Raptor.
Cheers.
Closer to 1/3 thrust of Raptor. The latest numbers from SpaceX have uprated to 1.5 million pounds of thrust.
A BFR SuperHeavy with 27 of those puppies will be a sight to behold (and maybe the last thing you’ll be able to hear).
Keith wrote:
“Jeff Bezos added later that yesterday’s NASA commercial crew announcement and today’s engine announcement were totally separate and unrelated”
So SpaceX and Boeing get a ton of free press and the typical response is for competitors to try and get something out that will grab some of those eyes, Lockheed Martin’s Atlas and Bezo are now also in the news right along with the commercial crew announcement.
Standard Business Practice.
How many BE-4 engines would be needed to upgrade the Atlas V to a triple core Falcon Heavy competitor?
depends on the size of the core. it’s pretty obvious this is going to be a new rocket family, or at least a new first stage, and without more detailed information on the design of the rocket / stage (which probably doesn’t exist yet), all you’re going to get is wildly inaccurate speculation. your guess is as good as mine or anyone else’s guess.
currently Falcon 9 is 12 feet and Atlas V is 12.5 feet. I had seen someone posted 5 meters for the new one. that would put them with the delta and really increase costs. you can run the 12 footers on trailers any wider and it constitutes a wide load and prices start to increase. The reason I thought SpaceX was doing texas was so they could manufacter the new heavy lift there and bypass tranportation on a 10 – 15 meter core.
the 5 meters (16.4 feet) diameter is based on the assumption that the core of this new stage will utilize the Delta IV architecture.
i gather that the justification for that assumption is that the Delta IV is already designed to handle Liquid Hydrogen’s low temperatures, and would therefore be easier to transition to LNG. this seems like a sound line of reasoning to me.
now to the other half of your comment, which is SpaceX and Texas.
the Brownsville launch site is designed for the Falcon 9 and Falcon 9 Heavy. it will be a commercial launch site for those launchers exclusively. Texas is fairly convenient for SpaceX since their McGregor test facility is there, and Brownsville is at a slightly lower latitude than Canaveral is, giving them a couple MPH speed boost on launch. the biggest reason they are there, though, is that the State of Texas sweetened the location with tax breaks and incentives.
an entirely new and massive launch facility will be required for SpaceX’s 10-15 meter diameter BFR. even Canaveral’s Pad 39A would be unable to contain the forces that that beast will unleash. as to location, i would guess not Texas and not Florida. Puerto Rico might be a better bet, imho, if the Puerto Ricans are okay with the noise pollution. the gargantuan stages can be shipped there and it’s got open ocean to launch over.
wouldn’t that be a violation of ITAR?
Puerto Rico is a US territory. Puerto Ricans are US citizens.
I was under the impression that ITAR prohibited shipment to “US Protectorates” such as Puerto Rico. I know some gun dealers couldn’t send gun stocks there because of ITAR .. that was a few years back though.
Not as far as I know. There may be non-ITAR regulations or restrictions on shipping weapons parts to Puerto Rico. There might be other ITAR restrictions, also (ITAR is dense reading and the text itself is very long), but section 123.12 specifically says “An export license is not required for the shipment of defense articles between the United States, the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico, and U.S. possessions.”
I started wading through it .. but like you said .. long row to hoe… that must have been it then a gun parts clause.. I know it was about the ruger mini 14. you can get stocks for it that make it look like an assault rifle.
yeah, ITAR is a beast. the company i work for is in the process of becoming ITAR certified. there are a lot of complicated regulations.
it wouldn’t surprise me if there were additional legislation somewhere covering gun parts being shipped outside the continental US. it might even have been some state law.
The research group I worked for in grad school was doing government funded research covered by ITAR restrictions. All of the equipment was off the shelf equipment that could be purchased anywhere, including ITAR restricted countries, but because of ITAR pictures couldn’t be released in publications and foreign students couldn’t use the equipment as pictured. There were allowed to use the equipment if the connecting wires were different. Lovely.
that certainly sounds like something the US government would do lol
Looks to be a staged combustion design with the single turbopump right over the injector plate to shorten the exhaust duct. Interesting.
V4:
Right on both counts! It is a single shaft turbo pump too. So, if they can manage the balancing act for each stage just right, the same oxygen rich mix should work through a the engine’s throttle range without change. Using liquid natural gas, with a similar cryogenic temperature to liquid oxygen should make that job easier from what I’ve been reading. Liquid natural gas or methane might be the ‘Goldilock’ fuel we’ve been looking for these last 60 years…
“The liquid hydrogen was too cooolllld, the kerosine was too hot, but liquid methane was juuusst right!”
(A twenty-first century fairy tale, adapted from the Grimm bros.)
🙂
tinker
Keith/Marc an interesting article in the Moscow times:
“Jeff Bezos Strikes Down Russian Space Rocket Engine Maker”
http://www.themoscowtimes.c…
“Energomash produced 11 engines in 2013, 8 of which were RD-180s.
These revenue streams have now been jeopardized, perhaps lost, by the larger political currents driving the six-month-old crisis in Ukraine, where the West accuses Russia of supporting separatist militias.
Before 2014, calls for the U.S. to dump the RD-180 fell largely on deaf ears, but the sanctions tit-for-tat over Ukraine has changed attitudes. When Deputy Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin said in May that Russia would end deliveries of the RD-180 for military launches, Congress responded swiftly, calling for a crash program to develop a domestic replacement. The Atlas V is too important for national security to risk supply disruption, lawmakers said.
Bad News For Energomash
Russian officials have issued contradictory statements about RD-180 engine exports. Although Rogozin has said Russia will limit exports to non-military launches, deliveries appear to have proceeded as usual, with two of the engines arriving in the U.S. in August.
On Monday, Oleg Bochkaryov, deputy chairman of the government’s Military-Industrial Commission, told the TASS news agency that the government had no plans to end the sales because it would not be profitable.
Yuri Karash, a space policy expert with the Russian Academy of Cosmonautics, told The Moscow Times that if ULA dumps the RD-180 outright, NPO Energomash would be in trouble.
“It will hurt. NPO Energomash representatives have said termination of RD-180 production would deprive the factory of its most significant source of income,” Karash said. “No Russian rockets, including those which may be developed in the future, use the RD-180 engines.””
Looks like they will have to close their doors if ULA dumps them.
Exactly…the spiel will be that ULA has only changed out the head on the hammer, but the handle has not been touched. Unlike SpaceX, which had all new hammers and wanted to take away business from proven hammer providers.
(Oh…and ULA will not mention that the handle was sanded…and re-varnished, and hell…it’s from a new supplier…and maybe not quite like the last one’s…)
Amidst all the hoopla…no mention on if the Atlas V (or whatever the new LOX/Meth version is called) will have prices that are commercially competitive, or on a par with Falcon 9’s.
So, besides the supplier being more secure in the BE-4 scenario, what is the advantage? Is there any?
KSC LSP: Jitters, nerves and costs of certifying and working in a new Atlas rocket for critical NASA science payloads. Possibly, costs are higher-unless the investment by ULA/Blue is a written off investment (from profits), and not recovered in future pricing.
SLS: Screwed. Royally. Air Force might one day have passed money along to Aero/Rock to pay full up for a new non-Russian engine for Atlas. Now Aero/Rock will go try to get that money from SLS and Gerst and NASA.
Elon: Probably wins multiple ways – as his closest competitor by scale/payload class now has TWO big mods in the pipe, basically a whole new rocket for a whole new engine, with no practical reason to believe costs will compete or even drop from current prices, while also adding a crew capability mod. Atlas launch rate slowdown anyone? While Elon ramps up. Also, should Atlas costs go up even more, NASA LSP (see prior) awards more NASA science payloads to Falcon’s. Also, should SLS run into trouble (see prior), more advocacy behind non-SLS, Falcon Heavy space exploration concepts.
Space Sector-Emerging: WINS. Cheaper LOX/Meth rocket engine on the market possibly, should Blue decide it may make better money as the next Aero/Rock (could buy them out to assure the end of trouble there) leading to a new GE/Pratt/Rolls Royce paradigm where rocket engine makers are no longer exclusive to specific rockets. Structured the right way, competition and access to space blooms.
The CEO of ULA said that they are still doing the trade studies and that they will be introducing the “family” utilizing this new engine. That is why I thought maybe they are going ahead with the phase II Atlas V and compete with the falcon heavy.
At the end of the day, ULA will have to convince their owners that this is a sound business move and will add shareholder value. Seems that they’ve got enough ok to do an engine or at least to start one.
It’ll be interesting to see what eventuates.
Cheers
ULA joins with BO. So, what does Blue Origin bring to the table?…
Yes, they have been building engines for a while. But what type of engines and for what purpose?
BO is building vertical take off and landing rockets and capsules.
They make throttle-able engines and advanced control avionics.
Could it be that ULA is not just planning to compete with Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy, but to compete with Falcon 9-R and Falcon Heavy-R?
Buying a shortcut to salvation?
http://www.youtube.com/watc…
http://www.youtube.com/watc…
This might be obvious to people in the industry, but in aerospace, is LNG code for methane in high-9’s purity? Or will Blue Origin’s engine really burn regular old standard LNG (Such as 90/6/2/1% – meth/eth/prop/but, with COâ‚‚/Nâ‚‚/sulphides and other cruft making up the rest.)
Am I alone in being somewhat perplexed on why ULA would select Blue Origins, a company with a dismal record, to develop a replacement for the RD-180? In the 14 years since its founding, Blue Origin has not even able to develop the suborbital launcher New Shepard that was suppose to begin commercial operations three years ago according to their 2008 press release. Blue Origin has developed the BE-3 engine on the test stand that has never flown on any launch system. This is the company that ULA is going to rely on? By comparison, SpaceX in 12 years has developed three classes of rocket engines, two launch vehicles, a pressurized cargo container, and now are launching both cargo to the ISS and commercial satellites. SpaceX has a full launch manifest for the next 3 years. Bezos and Blue Origin has not accomplished even 100th of what Musk and SpaceX have done.
What we have seen is Blue Origin being used as a foil for ULA. Filing patents for spacecraft water landings, filing lawsuits against NASA for lease of Pad 39A to SpaceX. In short, Blue Origins seems to be doing more to hinder SpaceX operations then develop their own launch systems. BE-4 exist only paper at this point, there is no working prototype on the test stand. If I were a betting person, I would not give good odds
I want to see 3 launches of this new ULA vehicle before DOD certifies it to launch DOD payloads just like SpaxeX has done.
A-R might be still going because they have the Orbital engine.
the orbital engine (AJ26) is an older russian engine ( NK-33). they may have a warehouse full of them, but finding ones that dont have excessive corrosion is an issue.