Blue Origin Completes Acceptance Testing of BE-3 Engine
Blue Origin Completes Acceptance Testing of BE-3 Engine for New Shephard Suborbital Flight
“Blue Origin recently completed acceptance testing of its BE-3 rocket engine, the first new hydrogen engine to be developed in the United States in more than a decade. “The BE-3 has now been fired for more than 30,000 seconds over the course of 450 tests,” said Jeff Bezos, Blue Origin founder. “We test, learn, refine and then test again to push our engines. The Blue Origin team did an outstanding job exploring the corners of what the BE-3 can do and soon we’ll put it to the ultimate test of flight.”
Every little piece helps.
I still wish some of these billionaires were more interested in funding robotic exploration than in being the 20th rich person to try and strike rich with manned spaceflight, but I’m glad that they’re supporting space-related stuff in general.
The real question – is it eligible for free 2 day shipping if you have Amazon prime?
Yes BUT delivery is by OnTrac. So it will be at least a day late despite the tracking info showing it as having been delivered previously… and they’ll just throw it from the back end of the truck to sowhere in the vicinity of your porch.
or possibly your neighbors porch.
or possibly to the “Blue Onion” restaurant a town over.
It delivers itself, but your yard may be a bit torched.*
*Minimum yard dimensions required.
Congrats to Blue!
I wish them all luck and every success, but golly: if only they weren’t wasting all that money on such an expensive fuel and all that comes with it. The proper measure of a launch system is minimum dollars, not maximum Isp.
LNG on the next engine. About the same as gasoline.
Price of fuel flown is not a cost constraint. A $ 60 million Falcon 9 launch uses only $ 200,000 worth of RP-1 . I don’t know the price of the LOX but it can’t be prohibitive. The next time that recovered F-9R stage flies, it sure won’t cost tens of millions all over again. That day is not far off.
What is significant about this Blue Origin BE-3 hydrogen engine is it is designed to be reusable, and with enough throttle agility to land tail first like the Falcon-9 R. New Shepherd will demonstrate that, even if only on a suborbital hop. The price of liquid hydrogen is not the limiting parameter. What I did not see in this article or anywhere else is an essential discussion of ‘man rating” the engines.
I’m presuming Blue Origin’s BE-4 methane primary stage booster will be engineered thus and so. SpaceX’s Raptor as well.
I wonder what Aerojet is working on that is similarly reusable ? If their new line of engines and booster are not designed to be reflown with minimal refurb , the market will not be kind to them. Throwaway rockets are heading for oblivion.
LOX is far cheaper than kerosene because you can produce it on site from air and electricity. A quick web search indicates that It cost NASA somewhere on the order of $100 per ton to produce on site (I’m guessing that equipment costs are not part of that).
Aerojet is working on a new RP-1 engine but its not reusable as far as I know
Aerojet could research the idea of a modified Methane powered reusable RS-25
Would this be less cost then a clean sheet engine for Aerojet?
http://yellowdragonblog.com…
can cryogenic Methane be crossfeed into a LH2 core stage?
It would gell I think but could this be at a rate(low enough crossfeed rate) that leaves the molar mass low as to not modify the core stages engine?
http://ntrs.nasa.gov/search…
Propellant grade LOX for Shuttle was 60 cents a gallon. LH2 was 98 cents. RP-1 is about $4 a gallon (comparable cost as it is much denser than LH2). Liquid propellant is a very small percentage of launch costs.
But the rocket equation means the size (and cost) of the rocket goes up exponentially with v/c, where c is essentially Isp. And as long as we are throwing rockets away, that makes Isp a huge deal. The cost of the propellant has almost nothing to do with it, it is the size and cost of the rocket that drives the expense.
And by the way, does anyone know what the Isp of this engine actually is? They say they are flight ready, but they leave out the most important parameter about the engine.
“BE-3 rocket engine, the first new hydrogen engine to be developed in the United States in more than a decade.”
Wow, nice skewed marketing there Blue Origin.
I guess we forgot about Aerojet Rocketdyne’s J-2X’s, which were clean sheet liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen engines designed from 2007 to 2010 and hot fired in 2011 until 2013. I think Blue needs to check their facts once and a while. Sadly this comes from a company that has 20% to 30% of their employees that are previous Rocketdyne employees.
Since the J2-X is being put on the shelf without vacuum testing (which was the whole point of developing it), I don’t think you can say it was *fully* developed.) Too bad we wasted all of that money on an engine too heavy for any practical upper stage.
BO will do sub orbs this year also. The abort test used A-R Crew Escape motors. If DTARS reads this, Super Draccos would cost to much to throw away each time on converting cargo Dragon to crew. Solids could be used for chasing ISS or boosting ISS. Maybe the same cost, buts sounds cheaper.
I admit to not taking Spaceman Bezos and Blue Origin seriously till I saw this article and realized the LH2 engine is real, and viable. We who constructively ( or not) criticize SpaceX for being less than forthcoming with timely information and progress reports as they evolve have a much stronger critique of Bezos and the Blue Men , keeping so much under wraps. Thankfully , that is changing now that they’ve openly partnered with the military-industrial complex Heavies to co-develop an all new booster family using BE3 and the coming BE4 methane engine. We are seeing sunshine on shiny metal , and hear the beasts roar.
Let us hope that the Raptor methane engine is well along and will be hot firing soon , now that the Merlin engine is verging on hitting its max performance marks and mass production is ramping up. It is good to see innovational R&D and actual flying hardware from several companies simultaneously. Imagine what the launch manifests and full-up testing regimens will look like only a couple years from now, on three continents..
I’m still a little skeptical. They are about where SpaceX was five years ago, with an engine and no real flight experience. I do wish them all the best, but can’t believe ULA is betting the farm on Bezo’s LNG engine (and in principle I love LNG.)
A nice vertical take-off and landing fro Blue origin from a few years ago:
https://www.youtube.com/wat…