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Blue Origin Successfully Test Fires Game-Changing BE-4 Rocket Engine (geekwire.com)
Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin space venture has successfully test-fired its BE-4 rocket engine, marking a key step in the development of its own New Glenn rocket as well as United Launch Alliance's next-generation rocket. GeekWire reports: ULA has been waiting for months to get good news about the BE-4 tests in West Texas. The company wanted to see a successful full-scale test before going ahead with plans to use the BE-4 engine on its Vulcan rocket, which is due to have its first flight in 2019. A Blue Origin competitor, Aerojet Rocketdyne, has been waiting in the wings with its AR1 engine, which ULA saw as a "Plan B" for the Vulcan in case the BE-4 faltered. Wednesday's initial hot-firing didn't reach full power or full duration, but the test's success nevertheless reduces the likelihood that ULA would turn to the AR1. The BE-4 engine, which uses liquefied natural gas as fuel, is built at Blue Origin's production facility in Kent, Wash., and shipped down to Texas for testing. Assuming that it's accepted for ULA's use, engine production will eventually shift to a factory in Huntsville, Ala. Engines for the orbital-class New Glenn rocket will go to Blue Origin's rocket factory in Florida, which is due to be completed by the end of this year.
A better article explains it betterer:
"SpaceX has also invested significant amounts of its own funds into its new Raptor engine, which has a sea-level thrust of 380,000 pounds. But this engine has yet to undergo full-scale testing.
Meanwhile, Blue Origin's BE-4 engine is more powerful, at 550,000 pounds of thrust—it is in fact the most powerful US rocket engine developed since Rocketdyne built the RS-68 engine two decades ago."
https://arstechnica.com/science/2017/10/blue-origin-has-successfully-tested-its-powerful-be-4-rocket-engine/
Methane has almost double the hydrogen of Kerosene, so this is in fact a great improvement in weight and CO2 production, on kerosene based rockets. Liquid Hydrogen is hard as a big volume, and needs cryogenics so methance is a good compramise
That's not game-changing, that's strategic advantage. Developing ICBMs, nukes, etc. is always a game changer - no matter how many others already have them. It moves you from the "kiddie table" to being taken seriously. Why do you think Russia felt no compunction about "liberating" a chunk of Crimea? Or that there's such strong opposition to various Middle-Eastern countries becoming nuclear powers? The existing powers have long been accustomed to trampling all over them, waging thinly veiled wars-by-proxy amongst each other for control of their resources - buying advantage for themselves at the cost of devastation to the locals. That becomes a lot less appealing when the locals can hit back.
Reusable launch vehicles (that don't cost more to refurbish than most disposables cost to build) fundamentally change the rocketry game. It's no longer just optimizing thrust-to-mass ratios and construction costs - it's developing long-term reliability, low-cost refurbishment, etc,etc,etc.
It changes the game from dialing in the final optimizations on a mature technology to gain a few percentage cost advantage, to using that technology as a starting point to develop completely new optimizations capable of reducing launch costs by several orders of magnitude in the long term - and even in the near term (10 years?) there's the potential for a 5-to-10-fold reduction in the cost of getting things into orbit. Which is a game changer for space exploitation - order of magnitude cost reductions in enabling technologies are almost always followed by massive changes across the industry.
We're already seeing Bigelow, etc. starting to get serious about their orbital-infrastructure projects - lots of companies have been basically biding their time developing technologies that require a big reduction in launch cost to see any demand. And now they're starting to rev up towards production to be ready for the rockets that will make them relevant.
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