Blue Origin's launch vehicles

[selvaarchi]

Jeff Bezos disclosed new details about his company’s rocket.

http://spacenews.com/eutelsat-first-...ins-new-glenn/

"Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos disclosed new details about his company’s New Glenn launch vehicle March 7 and announced it had signed up its first customer, commercial satellite operator Eutelsat.

Bezos, appearing in an on-stage interview at the Satellite 2017 conference here, said the rocket, set to start launches in 2020, will have a payload performance that will make it it one of the largest vehicles in service."

Sent from my SM-G900F using Tapatalk

[cjameshuff]

The numbers aren't small, but they are a bit lower than I expected. I figured they'd aim for a vehicle that could handle most of the F9/FH market in a future fully-reusable version, with the partially-reusable version having a significantly larger payload than the FH, so the LEO number seems oddly low. And as EtOH notes in the comments to that article, the GTO payload seems low even in comparison to the LEO payload.

They don't have SpaceX's experience with building ultra-lightweight structures, so maybe it is a mass fraction issue.

[selvaarchi]

Animation of what the reusable rocket’s journey will look like.

http://www.theverge.com/2017/3/7/148...cex-comparison

"This morning, Blue Origin CEO Jeff Bezos revealed some new details about his company’s future orbital rocket, the New Glenn — touting the vehicle’s reusability and how much it will be able to carry into space. He also showed off a shiny new animation of what the reusable rocket’s journey will look like during a typical mission, and it certainly looks familiar."

Video of takeoff and landing sequence.

https://techcrunch.com/2017/03/07/bl...-in-new-video/

"Blue Origin is working towards the first launch of its super heavy-lift rocket, the New Glenn. Bezos’s rocket company just released a video showing how the rocket will launch and land. Spoiler: It’s a lot like SpaceX’s Falcon 9."


Photos of the New Glenn rocket engine .

https://qz.com/926521/jeff-bezos-has...s-to-the-moon/

"The privately funded rocket will mainly be propelled by seven BE-4 engines, each providing 550,000 pounds of thrust at sea level, according to Blue Origin’s website. The company has declined to provide any additional information about the photographs tweeted out by Bezos."

Sent from my SM-G900F using Tapatalk

[CJSF]

Maybe these are the specs for New Glenn 1.0 and, similar to SpaceX, there will be planned enhancements and performance improvements scaling it's capabilities up to and beyond Musk's rockets.

CJSF

[selvaarchi]

Maybe these are the specs for New Glenn 1.0 and, similar to SpaceX, there will be planned enhancements and performance improvements scaling it's capabilities up to and beyond Musk's rockets.

CJSF

I am confused as well. I have used as a guideline that the weight to GTO is roughly half of that the rocket can place in LEO. This does not conform to my assumption. HELP

Sent from my SM-G900F using Tapatalk

[Glom]

It looks like it, but to be fair, how much room for variation is there in the look of a rocket. It's a long pointy thing with a flame coming out the whatsit.

[selvaarchi]

A 20 minute podcast by Aviation Week. The first 5 minutes it about New Glenn and the remaining is pn small satellites and the effect they are having on launches and communication bandwidths.

http://aviationweek.com/space/podcas...ild-west-space

Blue Origin’s New Glenn is one among many launch companies that will lend a hand to companies eager to send spacecraft into orbit in a market where technological change can be faster than the pace of production. Listen in as our editors discuss the key takeaways from this week's Satellite 2017 conference in Washington, D.C.

[selvaarchi]

Blue Origin suffered a setback when one of the engines failed during a test.

https://arstechnica.com/science/2017...ne-test-stand/

"Ever since the first successful suborbital flight of its New Shepard spacecraft and rocket, Blue Origin has been leading a charmed life. The company, founded by Amazon's Jeff Bezos, has launched and safely landed its reusable vehicle five times. It has splashily announced a forthcoming orbital rocket, New Glenn. And Bezos himself has racked up a number of aerospace awards for his accomplishments.

But on Sunday Blue Origin announced a setback. "We lost a set of powerpack test hardware on one of our BE-4 test stands yesterday," the company tweeted. "Not unusual during development." The company declined to provide more information about the accident to Ars, but most likely the powerpack—that is, the turbines and pumps that provide the fuel-oxidizer mix into the combustion chamber of the rocket engine—exploded."

Sent from my SM-G900F using Tapatalk

[Nicolas]

They said they lost them. Perhaps they just mislaid them.

[CJSF]

Heh. No, it did say the powerpack exploded. So.

CJSF

[publiusr]

Hydrocarbon engines often have more troubled development than do hydrolox engines. Glushko hated LH2, yet his own RD-170 series suffered problems.

The Energiya core-block's RD-0120 engines (SSME equiv') were rather trouble free, by all reports.

The proposed M-1 was also to be simple in certain respects:

"In the case of the M-1, the resulting exhaust was relatively cool, and was instead directed into cooling pipes on the lower portion of the engine skirt. This meant that liquid hydrogen was needed for cooling only on the high-heat areas of the engine —the combustion chamber, nozzle and upper part of the skirt— reducing plumbing complexity considerably."

From the wiki.

Now--I would suggest that Bezos work with Dynetics and bring back the F-1 Pyrios booster concept
http://www.thespacereview.com/article/2410/1
http://tib.cjcs.com/9832/saturn-v-en...-move-forward/
https://www.nasaspaceflight.com/wp-c...012/11/Z81.jpg

He has the money--maybe a winged fly-back concept.

[publiusr]

Looks like Bezos is headed to my home state after all:
http://spacenews.com/blue-origin-ret...ystem-funding/

"Aiding that decision is an estimated $50 million in incentives offered by the state to locate the factory there. Alabama beat out offers from several other states, including Florida, where Blue Origin is building a factory for its New Glenn rocket, and Washington state. Blue Origin’s decision will make it neighbors with its competitor in the ULA engine competition. Aerojet Rocketdyne announced in January that it would build the AR1 in Huntsville, creating 100 jobs."

[selvaarchi]

Blue Origin test fired its BE-4 rocket engine.

https://spaceflightnow.com/2017/10/2...y-blue-origin/

Blue Origin has conducted the first hotfire test of its BE-4 rocket engine in West Texas, a powerplant fueled by liquified natural gas and liquid oxygen that will power the company’s heavy-lift New Glenn rocket and perhaps United Launch Alliance’s next-generation Vulcan launcher, officials announced Thursday.

The company released a six-second video of the test-firing, showing the engine from four angles. A Blue Origin spokesperson did not respond to questions on the hotfire test, and officials did not disclose the duration of the test or the engine’s throttle setting.

Backed by Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos, Blue Origin has developed the BE-4 engine with mostly private funding for multiple uses.

[Trebuchet]

Is there a particular advantage to LNG over hydrogen? More energy density or something?

[cjameshuff]

Is there a particular advantage to LNG over hydrogen? More energy density or something?

It's a lot denser, making mass ratios higher and high thrust engines easier to build, it doesn't require temperatures below the freezing point of air (slight overlap in liquid range with oxygen, in fact, greatly simplifying tanks and plumbing), much narrower explosive range, much less tendency to leak, it doesn't work its way into metallic structures and make them brittle, it's easier to arrange supply of in rocket-propellant quantities...

Nobody handles liquid hydrogen unless they have to. Natural gas is frequently liquefied just for ease of storage or shipment, which is done at scales that make the grandest ambitions of Musk and Bezos look small:
https://financialtribune.com/sites/d...0%20%20400.jpg
https://stateimpact.npr.org/pennsylv...e-LNG-tank.jpg

[Trebuchet]

Thanks. Makes me wonder why it hasn't been the fuel of choice for years now.

[cjameshuff]

Thanks. Makes me wonder why it hasn't been the fuel of choice for years now.

Competition has been nonexistent, and the established players have been extremely risk averse and unwilling to invest in anything unfamiliar. There's been little interest in reducing costs and a great deal of reluctance to change anything. NASA's few attempts to do anything new have suffered from political interference and a fixation on SSTO and the high performance possible with hydrogen fuel. Which is why SpaceX is now launching most of the world's commercial payloads, their competitors are still making excuses for not developing reusable launchers, and NASA's working on an appallingly expensive rocket based on components and designs nearly half a century old...

Japan did make an effort to design a launcher with a LOX/LNG second stage, but they used an Atlas V CCB first stage and had a rather small payload. The Atlas V being too expensive to compete for commercial launches even before SpaceX probably didn't help their economics, and it was canceled in 2009, though they apparently kept developing the LNG engine. And of course, SpaceX, Blue Origin, and Firefly Space Systems are all working on methane systems.

[Nicolas]

There is of course a very, very famous LNG powered rocket. Interesting read; contrary to its turbojet competitors the amazing Blue Flame appeared to be limited by its tires rather than its incredibly powerful engine.

[selvaarchi]

Blue Origin is on a roll. They have announced the 1st 5 flight of New Glenn will be dedicated to a customer missions. From mission 6 onward it could be shared launches.

https://spacenews.com/blue-origin-to...fifth-mission/

Blue Origin will begin flying two customers on the same New Glenn rocket after the launch vehicle has performed five missions with solo customers, according to Ted McFarland, Blue Origin’s commercial director of Asia-Pacific business.

“Our first five are all dedicated missions as we release margin and prove out our operational reusability concept,” McFarland said July 4 at the APSAT 2018 conference here. “But starting from launch six on, we will have a dual-manifesting capability.”

New Glenn’s first launch is slated for late 2020, and is designed from the start to feature a reusable first stage. McFarland said most customers prefer a dedicated launch, rather than sharing a rocket with a co-passenger, but Blue Origin is preparing to have dual launch as an option for those seeking to split the price of a mission with another satellite operator.

[Swift]

Blue Origin just completed another test flight with a successful landing.

[bknight]

Congratulations to them, but they need to start working on orbital flights instead of sub-orbital accomplishments.

[selvaarchi]

Looks like Blue Origin will have paying customers flying to space (suborbital) before any of their American rivals.

https://spaceflightnow.com/2019/05/0...rbital-launch/

Taking another step toward flying space tourists to the edge of space, Jeff Bezos’s space company Blue Origin again flew its New Shepard suborbital booster Thursday with a package of microgravity research experiments.

The single-stage rocket took off from Blue Origin’s privately-operated launch site north of Van Horn, Texas, at 9:35 a.m. EDT (8:35 a.m. CDT; 1335 GMT).

Named for Mercury astronaut Alan Shepard, the rocket climbed into a clear sky powered by a hydrogen-fueled BE-3 main engine, which accelerated the vehicle to a speed of more than 2,200 mph (3,540 kilometers per hour) in less than two-and-a-half minutes.

After shutdown of the New Shepard’s main engine, a pressurized crew capsule on top of the rocket separated as the vehicles coasted to a maximum altitude of more than 346,000 feet, or about 105.5 kilometers, according to preliminary flight data.

[bknight]

True but seems like the use is limited in nature to the couple of minutes microgravity. How big is the market that they captured?

[selvaarchi]

True but seems like the use is limited in nature to the couple of minutes microgravity. How big is the market that they captured?

They also have commercial cargo as the last flight demonstrated - it carried 38 scientific experiments, including nine procured through NASA’s Flight Opportunities program,

[docmordrid]

New Glenn's BE-4 engine just did an 87 second burn, about half mission length. They're hoping the next development engine version is the last.

[publiusr]

I want more info on New Armstrong.

[docmordrid]

Finally! They've been stuck at 70-80%

Blue Origin ✔ @blueorigin
BE-4 continues to rack up time on the test stand. Here’s a great shot of our full power engine test today #GradatimFerociter

IMG_20190803_001245.jpg

https://twitter.com/blueorigin/statu...78525575684097

[selvaarchi]

"Blue Origin may miss goal of crewed suborbital flights in 2019"

https://spacenews.com/blue-origin-ma...ights-in-2019/

The chief executive of Blue Origin said Oct. 2 it was increasingly unlikely the company would start flying people on its New Shepard suborbital vehicle by the end of this year as it ensures the vehicle is safe enough.

In an on-stage interview at the TechCrunch Disrupt SF 2019 conference in San Francisco, Bob Smith, chief executive of Blue Origin, said the company was “very close” to crewed flights on New Shepard, but that the company may not meet the goal it set of flying people on the vehicle before the end of the year.

“I’m never going to give up pressure on the team to actually try and go get it done this year,” he said. “Is it likely? Probably not, because 2019 is rapidly coming to a close.”

Since early this year company officials as well as its billionaire founder, Jeff Bezos, have said that the company expected to start carrying people, although not necessarily paying customers, on New Shepard by the end of the year. “This is the first time that I’ve ever been saying ‘this year,’” Bezos said in a February interview. “For a few years I’ve been saying ‘next year.’”

[selvaarchi]

"Blue Origin’s New Shepard conducts 12th test launch"

https://www.nasaspaceflight.com/2019...ght-12th-test/

Blue Origin launched its suborbital New Shepard rocket and crew capsule on an uncrewed test flight from the company’s launch and landing facility in West Texas. The launch, with multiple scientific payloads serving as the passengers for the mission, moved to Wednesday, following poor weather forecasts for the opening launch attempt on Tuesday. The flight was successful.

This was the 12th total test flight of the New Shepard launch system, and the 3rd such flight in the year 2019.

New Shepard is the first in a line of vehicles that Blue Origin will potentially operate. The booster and capsule were built to serve the suborbital space tourism market, which allows paying customers to experience a few minutes of zero-G flight before safely returning to Earth via a parachute-assisted landing.

[Trebuchet]

When I watched the launch, they showed a clip of New Glenn being built. All clean-room type conditions. The difference from SpaceX building Starship out in a field could not have been more dramatic.