Blue Origin is the other rocket company run by a billionaire. They are also trying to develop reusable rockets. The billionaire is Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazom.com.
Jeff Bezos has moved Blue Origin out of semi-stealth mode.
For almost four hours, Mr. Bezos, who only occasionally talks to the press, led 11 reporters on a tour of the factory and answered a litany of questions over lunch.
The reusable New Shepard spacecraft that launched to the outskirts of space in November and then made a return trip in January will launch again soon. Depending on how well the testing goes, paying tourists, six at a time, might start making the short trips, experiencing a few minutes of weightlessness in space as soon as 2018, he said.
About 600 people work at Blue Origin, most at the Kent headquarters with a small number at its test-launch site near Van Horn, Texas.
Bezos said that will rise to 1,000 within the next year and later to 1,200 as the company ramps up its engineering and manufacturing.
He let his engineers make their presentations about a new engine, the BE-4, which is under development with tests of a full version beginning by the end of the year.
BE-4 is an engine that is scheduled to fly by 2019, meeting the congressionally mandated deadline to eliminate dependence on Russian-built engines. The alternative engine option is multiple years behind and could not be integrated into a launch vehicle until at least 2021, extending our dependence on Russian engines well beyond 2019.
The BE-4 will power NASA’s next-generation launch vehicle, the Vulcan rocket built by United Launch Alliance — the joint venture between Boeing and Lockheed Martin.
Blue Origin will also use the BE-4 to power its own series of orbital rockets — much larger than New Shepard and, for now, nameless, though dubbed internally the “Very Big Brother” rockets. Those will be built and launched at Cape Canaveral, Fla., then land on platforms in the Atlantic Ocean.
Blue Origin expects to ramp up to building a dozen BE-4 engines a year in Kent, but it will need much higher production rates if NASA’s Vulcan and its own orbital rockets proceed as planned.
The company is actively searching for a site to build a large BE-4 production plant.
Much of the serious engineering in Kent is now devoted to the BE-4 engine.
In that engine’s core, where temperatures reach 5,000 degrees, liquid fuel circulates in carefully machined channels to prevent a meltdown.
On Tuesday, engineers in a small operations center monitored video from Texas of a test stand where BE-4 engine components are being tested this week.
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Reposted via Next Big Future
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