Business, Space, Technology and Society

Blue Origin

25 Comments

…returns to flight:

Powered by a BE-3 engine, the spacecraft flew to 307,000 feet, the edge of space, and returned smoothly to the ground. The company said it was able to recover the reusable spacecraft./blockquote>

I believe that the BE-3 is the smaller version of the BE-4 that will power the new ULA rocket. So it’s a LOX/LNG vehicle. They didn’t recover the propulsion system, but don’t seem concerned about it. Like SpaceX, now that they’re flying again, they’ll continually improve. A very auspicious event as I get ready to drive to Phoenix this morning for the Space Access conference, which starts this afternoon.

25 thoughts on “Blue Origin”

  2. Interesting that the booster recoveries for both SpaceX and Blue Origin were foiled by hydraulics failures.

  3. BE-3 is LH2/LOX. Bizarre for a suborbital boost stage, but they’re apparently targeting it as an eventual upper-stage engine. (Each of their 4 engines has been a different fuel; I imagine they’re “developing competence”.)

  4. No, the BE-3 is LH/LOX while the BE-4 under development will be methane/LOX. The BE-3 is a contender for ULA’s Vulcan upper stage engine. It’s throttleable down to about 20,000 pounds of thrust and up to over 100,000 pounds of thrust.

    1. Oh, I’d assumed that having an existing smaller version of the engine was one of the things that gave ULA confidence in the BE-4. I should have known that.

      1. I think ULA looked at the BE-3 development and the work already underway on the BE-4 to make the decision. A good LH/LOX engine is a non-trivial R&D effort. Making one that’s designed to be throttleable and reusable is even more challenging. That BO successfully built their BE-3 indicated they have a good engineering team. The reports that they’ve already been working on the BE-4 for a year or two also are important.

  5. I assume the crewed version won’t land quite that hard, or was it actually not as bad as it looked? At any rate it sure looked neat.

      1. Based on the size of the dust cloud that was kicked up at landing, it looked like they did use some sort of retro rocket to soften the landing. The Russians use a rocket that’s up in the parachute bridle. If BO uses one, it’s mounted on the bottom of the vehicle.

        Watching the longer video at Space Flight Now, they mentioned the capsule was descending at 24 feet per second, or about 16 MPH. I often came down that fast when I was a paratrooper carrying a load of equipment. I always managed to walk (sometimes stiffly) away from that impact but hitting softer is better. People inside the capsule would be lying on their backs. Perhaps their seats would be able to absorb some of the impact but retro rockets would still feel better, so long as they don’t start a brush fire.

        1. “The Russians use a rocket that’s up in the parachute bridle. ”

          No they don’t. Soyuz rockets are on the bottom of the vehicle, exposed when the heat shield is jettisoned.

          They used parachute-mounted landing rockets on the Voskhod vehicles, I believe, but not on Soyuz.

          1. I just checked a video and you’re right. I’m pretty sure the earlier Soyuz capsules used the bridle mount (which is what they use when they airdrop tanks and other heavy equipment) but this video clearly shows the braking rockets on the bottom of the spacecraft.

    2. It might depend on the location of their intended landing site. If landing operational cre in Van Horn, then perhaps they need more chute at 4,000. But if landing near or on the sea, then those chutes would have slowed the capsule much more.

      For CEV pad abort 1, NASA spent a lot of money to design test-specific chutes so people wouldn’t see a hard landing at the higher landing altitude. Flight op chutes were smaller. The redesign was expensive and invalidated parts of the test data that were the entire point of PA-1. It’s not just larger chutes, but larger housing, redesigned coupling between the abort motor and capsule, and software modifications. All to keep people cringing at a hard landing that would not occur at the operational sea level landing.

    2. Yes! I can see the “Blue Feather Tickler” vibrator appearing soon at a sex shop near you!

  7. I think the landing was probably softer than it looked. Looked like some Soyuz-style breaking rockets fired at the end of the capsule landing. Liquid or solid I wonder?

  8. Really glad to see this. While I’m impressed by the commercial guys, I’m worried that we won’t end up with enough real competition.

  10. Thanks for setting me straight about the landing, all I saw was the cloud at impact. I should have thought about Soyuz-style rockets at the end. I guess they weren’t as worried about this test vehicle, but surely commercial passengers would need something a bit softer, maybe a longer rocket burn at the end?

  11. Well that was interesting. A lot more than I ever expected from Blue Origin. Kudos. They still need to make recover the launch vehicle though.

    1. I wonder if the recoverable stage will be usable in other ways, for example as the first stage of a higher energy launcher

  12. A good flight, and the new details revealed on the BO site show a well thought-out design- I espeically like like the ring and wedge fins. I’m curious as to what the turnaround time between flights will be given the need to re-pack parachutes and stack the capsule back on the PM.

    Also, if this was the first flight it doesn’t seem a very incremental test programme- did they not do any bunny hops first? It might have prevented vehicle loss if they had done.

    Finally looking at the orbital design, I wonder what it’s payload capacity will be (the pic looks like 4 BE-4 engines, so it will have double the thrust of Vulcan), and how much the orbital and suborbital capsules will have in common?

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