Billionaire entrepreneur Jeff Bezos has invested about $500 million and possibly more into secretive Blue Origin, the space company he founded to pursue cost-effective human access to space.
Blue Origin Director of Business Development and Strategy Bretton Alexander said July 17 the $25 million the company has received as part of NASA’s Commercial Crew (CCP) human spaceflight program represents “less than five percent” of what Bezos has put into the company. Based in Kent, Wash., Blue Origin is developing technologies to enable human access to space at lower cost and increased reliability, according to its website. Boeing [BA], Sierra Nevada (SNC) and Space Exploration Technologies Corp. (SpaceX) are also pursuing CCP.
Alexander said Blue Origin is focusing on three things: chemical propulsion, reusable systems and reusable launch vehicles. Blue Origin is pursuing a vertical takeoff, vertical landing (VTVL) launch vehicle that Alexander said will return to earth with a re-lit engine and a soft, touchdown landing.
SpaceX is testing a VTVL vehicle called Falcon 9 Reusable (F9R), according to company spokesman John Taylor. Taylor said Thursday tests of F9R, which he called essentially a Falcon 9 v1.1 launch vehicle with legs, will eventually be run in New Mexico, as opposed to the company’s Texas site, because New Mexico will allow higher altitudes and more unpowered guidance.
Blue Origin is starting with a suborbital vehicle, Alexander said, so it can practice that reusable landing “50-to-100” times before moving to a much larger, and much more expensive, orbital vehicle. Called “The New Shepard,” Blue Origin’s suborbital vehicle includes a crew capsule carrying three or more astronauts atop a separate rocket-powered propulsion module, to be launched from the company’s west Texas launch site.
“By doing all those things together, we believe we’ll be much more cost effective and much safer than (the) historical human spaceflight program has been,” Alexander told an audience at the Future Space Leaders Foundation event on Capitol Hill.
Blue Origin has also developed a hydrogen engine, Alexander said, with about 100,000 pounds of thrust at sea level. The engine, called BE-3, is liquid-fueled and features a “tap-off” design in which the main chamber combustion gases are used to power the engine’s turbopumps. The company says tap-off is particularly well-suited to human spaceflight because of its single combustion chamber and graceful shutdown mode.
Blue Origin most recently in December successfully demonstrated deep throttle, full power, long-duration and reliable restart of the engine all in a single-test sequence. The company said BE-3 is the first completely new liquid hydrogen-fueled engine to be developed for production in the United States since the RS-68 more than a decade ago. The RS-68 is developed by Aerojet Rocketdyne, a division of GenCorp [GY].
Alexander said Blue Origin has “many, many” hours of test time on the engine over the last 18 months and will fly it on its suborbital vehicle sometime in the next year. Blue Origin will have an advantage because the engine will have many tens of flights of engine heritage baked in before it is put on an orbital booster, Alexander said. The company said the BE-3, as of December, had demonstrated more than 160 starts and nearly 152 minutes of operation.
Blue Origin chose hydrogen for its engine, Alexander said, because although it’s the hardest to develop, it’s also the most efficient.
“We’ve proven we can do that with a very small team at a price point that’s probably 1/10 of what traditional industry and government programs have done,” Alexander said.
Though Blue Origin is focusing on human spaceflight, Alexander said it will also be able to do payloads as well to launch “things people will need” like communications satellites.