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.

Comments

Game changing?

[wisebabo]

I read the linked article and maybe I'm old (Ok I am old) but I couldn't see how this was "Game changing".

Landing 11 story boosters and re-launching them? Yes

Making a new liquid fueled rocket engine (that wasn't even using LH2 which I hear is harder). Not so sure

I realize that of all the parts of a rocket, the engine is the hardest. Like an air-force general said "A new plane doesn't make a new engine possible, a new engine makes a new plane possible" you get the idea. Still, considering the number and variety of liquid fueled engines out there (from the Russian RS-180 to NASA's RS-25 to Space-X's Merlin and even to Aerojet's AR1 which they refer to in the article), I'm not sure how this qualifies as game changing. An improvement? Maybe but I didn't see where in my (brief) reading of the article. And does even a less than order of magnitude improvement merit being a game changer?

Is the term being overused here or am I missing something?

Re:Game changing?

[esperto]

Completely disagree, reusing the first stage reduces the cost so much that it left the other rocket companies running like headless chickens, they are really afraid to simply loose all lunches covered by F9 lifting capacity simply because spacex can potentially charge tens of million dollars less and still have a lot of profit.

Re:Game changing?

[Rei]

"Reusing airplanes isn't game changing either. It's an improvement, but not a game changer." Would you argue that?

No, the simple fact that something is "reused" isn't on its own the be-all end-all situation; you have to have a high enough launch rate to overwhelm your overhead costs. But SpaceX definitely looks to be en route to that, and Blue Origin likely as well eventually. Both are making good use of the lessons of the past in their designs.

Just because the Shuttle was hobbled by NASA's extremely high overhead costs, major cutbacks in the design phase that hindered reusability and turnover time, and a number of design flaws, doesn't mean that the concept of reusability is wrong. It's in most contexts essential for low costs. And while rockets are in many ways more challenging than airplanes, they're not fundamentally on some totally different playing field.

Re:Game changing?

[Anonymous Coward]

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/

Re: Game changing?

[D.McG.]

Disingenuous. The raptor has a higher efficiency by using full flow staged combustion. The current lower output is for two reasons. The first is for optimizing the thrust to weight ratio. Higher thrust engines disproportionately weigh more. The second is multi engine out support. If you have one big engine and it goes down, you crash. If instead you have 3 smaller engines in the same space and 1 goes down, the mission continues on the remaining 2. When landing becomes imperative with lives at stake, I'll take multiple engines over bragging rights.

Re:Game changing?

[K. S. Kyosuke]

Paraphrasing Edison, NASA merely found *one* way how not to make a reusable launcher.

Re:Game changing?

[K. S. Kyosuke]

"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.

What full-scale testing? This full-scale testing? That's already happening. If I understand the situation correctly, SpaceX has accumulated 1200 seconds of full-scale tests by now, whereas Blue Origin just now had its first several-second burn.

Re:Game changing?

[K. S. Kyosuke]

I didn't notice anyone, much less the US Congress, forcing ULA to buy their engines from the Russians. If anything, AJ/Rocketdyne and ULA on their own decidednot to fork out the money to manufacture the engines domestically about a decade ago.

Re:Game changing?

[K. S. Kyosuke]

The three actual benefits of methane fuel at the moment for SpaceX are 1) the enabling of the FFSC cycle which is impossible with RP-1, 2) improved prevention of fouling up the internal fuel lines in the engine necessitating extra maintenance, and later, 3) easy synthesizability on Mars. Lower price gets only important in the long run, perhaps around the time when 3) comes into play as well. For now, it's still two orders of magnitude cheaper than the flight hardware. So it only gets reasonably important when you get to the point of having >50 flights per vehicle lifetime or so.

Re: Game changing?

[fubarrr]

Russians are making Soyuz first stages for less than $1m a pop, and they don't even use aluminium there.

Re:Game changing?

[jbmartin6]

I think the game changed is the competition between various engine companies.

Re:Game changing?

[MightyYar]

Not only that, buying "Russian" engines also kept former Soviet rocket engine designers busy with something that did not involve a despotic regime. People forget how important that was (and to some degree still is).

Re: Game changing?

[hecksagon]

Falcon 9 has already actually proven engine out capability during a flight where a leak shut down an engine. Primary mission was completely successful and secondary would have if Nasa had relaxed rules about ride-sharing ISS flights.

Re: Game changing?

[stdarg]

Kind of an ironic comment... it's pretty obvious that the "????" meant incredulity that reusable boosters isn't game-changing, i.e. an invitation to explain why they are not game changing. That you assumed it meant that the sentence itself wasn't understood is really funny. "What is so hard to understand" indeed.

Who shortens state names like that?

[oobayly]

If you want to abbreviate surely use WA, TX, AL, or write the actual name. It's just bizarre reading Wash, Ala, etc. Capitals were used so they might as well have finished off the word.

Re:Who shortens state names like that?

[MightyYar]

In the early 80s, we still addressed our envelopes with the old-fashioned abbreviations. Fortunately, I grew up in a state where the old abbreviation was the same as the new, just with dropped punctuation :) N.J. -> NJ

Here's the list of proper abbreviations.

Re:Natural gas as fuel?

[physburn]

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

Re:Natural gas as fuel?

[K. S. Kyosuke]

Methane ought to have lesser CO2 emissions than RP-1. Anyway, the impact of spaceflight fuel is minuscule even compared to aviation, and even more so when comparing it to the impact of the global car population. There's just not nearly that many rockets flying around.

Re: Natural gas as fuel?

[fubarrr]

Hydrokarbons are for hipsters, real men fly on pentaborane + chlorine pentafluoride

Game changing because

[Kogun]

it will allow Bezos to put Amazon women on the moon.

Re: Natural gas as fuel?

[MightyYar]

No problem! We'll just build a cryogenic containment vessel so that any escaped gas condenses and save money that way!

Re:Natural gas as fuel?

[Immerman]

Indeed. In fact, methane produces less CO2 per joule than any other hydrocarbon fuel, since all four energy-rich carbon bonds are connected to hydrogens, rather than having carbon-carbon bonds "wasting" energy storage potential. The fact that hydrogen is practically massless compared to most other elements also means methane is pretty much the most energy-dense hydrocarbon fuel in terms of MJ/kg - about 20% denser than gasoline, and twice as dense as ethanol or potato chips. Plus it's not terribly difficult to liquefy and store - unlike pure hydrogen, which is about 3x as energy dense so long as you ignore the storage system, not to mention the oxidizer, which should be the majority of the mass even for methane.