They’ve completed acceptance tests for their new suborbital LOX/hydrogen engine. Hope this means they start flying again soon.
9 thoughts on “Blue Origin”
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They’ve completed acceptance tests for their new suborbital LOX/hydrogen engine. Hope this means they start flying again soon.
Comments are closed.
I’m pretty sure there’s NASA programs that move faster than Blue Origin.
Well, I think they are going as Bezos pays. He seems to be more of a tortoise than Elon’s hare. At least now, with ULA, they have some schedule pressure.
Elon’s hare
Hey, watch it.
As usual with anything by Blue Origin the press release is sparse on actual details. I’ve collected this information from several sites:
BE-3 engine:
LOX/LH2
pump-fed “tap-off” cycle (i.e. expander bleed cycle?)
throttleable from 110,000-lbf to 20,000-lbf
now here are some guesses:
Isp 447?
channel-wall nozzle?
thrust-to-weight ratio 50?
As we can see from the picture they provided of the test the testing was done with a nozzle that seems to be optimized for atmospheric flight. i.e. the nozzle is intended for a first stage application.
They claim to be also developing a variant of BE-3 called BE-3U optimized for upper stage applications which can optionally use two kinds of nozzles with low or high expansion ratio.
As comparison this engine has 4x the thrust of the RL-10, 0.5x that of the J-2, and 0.17x that of the RS-68.
They also claim they are developing the BE-4 LOX/LCH4 engine which has performance parameters similar to the RD-191 engine.
Blue Origin developed the BE-3 for their own purposes but it’s interesting to ponder other uses. As you said, it’s far more powerful than the RL-10 except when it’s throttled down to 20,000 pounds of thrust. I wonder how its price and weight compare to the RL-10. Could it be a more economical replacement? The RL-10 is very expensive. From what I’ve read, Boeing plans to use the Atlas V 402 version with two RL-10s on the upper stage. Perhaps a single BE-3 would be a better choice.
I’d also like to see how the BE-3 compares to the J-2X in price and performance. It could prove a useful engine for deep space missions.
The interesting question is whether there is competition between BO and XCOR to build the engine for ULA’s new upper stage.
From what little I can find, the XCOR engine is intended to be a direct replacement for the RL-10. The BE-3 is a much more powerful engine but if the costs were low enough, it could be a viable alternative to the RL-10 and XCOR’s engine, especially for the Atlas V 402. It’s nice to have options.
Actually, it may be that XCOR’s engine is a replacement for dual RL-10s…
From what little I’ve read about it, the XCOR engine seems a replacement for the RL-10, singular. I don’t much about it but IIRC, they’re shooting for an engine in the 20,000-25,000 pound thrust range. Two of those would replace the dual RL-10s on the Atlas 402 nicely. One BE-3 throttled down could easily replace the dual RL-10s and would likely cost much less while potentially offering higher performance. It’s good to have options.