Keep the shuttle flying: Fwd: ULA taps Blue Origin for powerful new rocket engine

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From: "Gary Johnson" <gjohnson144@comcast.net>
Date: September 18, 2014 9:40:01 AM CDT
To: "Gary Johnson" <gjohnson144@comcast.net>
Subject: FW: ULA taps Blue Origin for powerful new rocket engine

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Rocket Engine
Sep 17, 2014
United Launch Alliance and Blue Origin Announce Partnership To Develop New American Rocket Engine
Centennial, Colo. and Kent, Wash. – Sept. 17, 2014 – United Launch Alliance (ULA), the nation's premier space launch company, and Blue Origin, LLC, a privately-funded aerospace company owned by Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos, announced today that they have entered into an agreement to jointly fund development of the new BE-4 rocket engine by Blue Origin. This new collaboration will allow ULA to maintain the heritage, success and reliability of its rocket families – Atlas and Delta – while addressing the long-term need for a new domestic engine.
"This agreement ensures ULA will remain the most cost-efficient, innovative and reliable company launching the nation's most important national security, civil, human and commercial missions," said Tory Bruno, president and chief executive officer of ULA. "Blue Origin has demonstrated its ability to develop high-performance rocket engines and we are excited to bring together the best minds in engineering, supply chain management and commercial business practices to create an all-new affordable, reliable, American rocket engine that will create endless possibilities for the future of space launch."
"ULA has put a satellite into orbit almost every month for the past eight years – they're the most reliable launch provider in history and their record of success is astonishing," said Jeff Bezos, founder of Blue Origin. "The team at Blue Origin is methodically developing technologies to enable human access to space at dramatically lower cost and increased reliability, and the BE-4 is a big step forward. With the new ULA partnership, we're accelerating commercial development of the next great US-made rocket engine."
The ULA/Blue Origin agreement allows for a four-year development process with full-scale testing in 2016 and first flight in 2019. The BE-4 will be available for use by ULA and Blue Origin for both companies' next generation launch systems.
The BE-4 is a liquid oxygen, liquefied natural gas (LNG) rocket engine that delivers 550,000-lbf of thrust at sea level. Two BE-4s will power each ULA booster, providing 1,100,000-lbf thrust at liftoff. ULA is investing in the engineering and development of the BE-4 to enable availability for national security, civil, human and commercial missions. Development of the BE-4 engine has been underway for three years and testing of BE-4 components is ongoing at Blue Origin's test facilities in West Texas. Blue Origin recently commissioned a new large test facility for the BE-4 to support full engine testing.
About United Launch Alliance
With more than a century of combined heritage, United Launch Alliance is the nation's most experienced and reliable launch service provider. ULA has successfully delivered more than 80 satellites to orbit that provide critical capabilities for troops in the field, aid meteorologists in tracking severe weather, enable personal device-based GPS navigation and unlock the mysteries of our solar system. Bringing rocket science down to Earth.
For more information on ULA, visit the ULA website at www.ulalaunch.com, or call the ULA Launch Hotline at 1-877-ULA-4321 (852-4321). Join the conversation at www.facebook.com/ulalaunch and twitter.com/ulalaunch.
About Blue Origin
Blue Origin, LLC (Blue Origin) is a private company developing vehicles and technologies to enable commercial human space transportation. Blue Origin has a long-term vision of greatly increasing the number of people that fly into space so that we humans can better continue exploring the solar system. For more information and a list of job openings, please visit us at www.blueorigin.com.
© 2014 Blue Origin All rights reserved.

Boeing, Lockheed Martin join project to create new US rocket engine
September 18, 10:45 UTC+4
The new engine is to undergo full-scale testing in 2016 and is to be used for a rocket launch in 2019

© EPA/MICHAEL REYNOLDS

WASHINGTON, September 18. /ITAR-TASS/. US major aerospace industry companies Boeing and Lockheed Martin announced on Wednesday they teamed up with Blue Origin, a company run by Amazon.com Inc founder Jeff Bezos, to develop a new rocket engine that is to replace Russia's RD-180.
United Launch Alliance (ULA), a joint venture of Boeing Co and Lockheed Martin Corp, said it would invest heavily in a new rocket engine being developed by Blue Origin, Reuters reported. The new engine, called the BE-4, could be ready for use in four years, and would offer substantial cost savings over the Russian-built RD-180 engine now used to power ULA's heavy-lift Atlas 5 rockets, officials from both companies told reporters.
The new engine is to undergo full-scale testing in 2016 and is to be used for a rocket launch in 2019. ULA and Blue Origin will use the BE-4 engine in their next-generation launch vehicles, according to ULA. Work on the liquid oxygen, liquefied natural-gas engine has been under way for three years in Kent and in West Texas, and four more years of development are expected before first flight.
The discussions in the United States on the need to create own US rocket engine intensified this May after Moscow made statements that Russia might stop the supplies of its RD-180 engine to American companies, if the Pentagon continued its use for orbiting spy satellites. ULA has a many-year and multibillion contract with the US Department of Defence on launches of such spacecraft.

© Copyright 2014 ITAR-TASS. All rights reserved.

ULA taps Blue Origin for powerful new rocket engine
BY STEPHEN CLARK
SPACEFLIGHT NOW
September 17, 2014
United Launch Alliance announced Wednesday it is teaming with Blue Origin, a secretive space company led by Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos, to develop a new U.S.-made rocket engine that could replace the Russian engine used to power Atlas 5 first stage boosters.

A model of the BE-4 engine presented Wednesday at the National Press Club in Washington. Credit: ULA

The arrangement comes after building concerns over ULA's reliance on Russian propulsion to loft U.S. national security satellites into space, and ULA's chief executive said Wednesday the choice of Blue Origin as a new engine provider is part of a potential overhaul of the company's Atlas and Delta rocket fleet used to send up spacecraft for the Pentagon, NASA and commercial customers.
"I think it's pretty clear it's time for a 21st century booster engine," Bezos told reporters at the National Press Club in Washington. "The great engines of the past were truly remarkable machines in their own right. The engines that you remember built in the '50s, '60s and '70s were remarkable pieces of hardware, but we have tools and capabilities, software simulations, computational horsepower that the builders of those great engines could have only dreamed about."
Formed in 2006 as a 50-50 joint venture by Boeing Co. and Lockheed Martin Corp., United Launch Alliance announced a review of new rocket engine concepts in June.
ULA's selection of Blue Origin's Blue Engine-4, or BE-4, left out the company's primary engine vendor, Aerojet Rocketdyne, which builds powerplants for the Atlas and Delta upper stages, plus the hydrogen-fueled RS-68 engine at the bottom of ULA's Delta 4 rocket.
"We selected Blue for a couple of reasons," said Tory Bruno, ULA's president and CEO. "First, they are way ahead ... Also, they have this really innovative technology that's going to allow us to modernize, increase performance and lower our recurring costs."
Blue Origin has already completed three years of development on the BE-4 engine.
"It's 550,000 pounds of thrust, it has a very low recurring cost and low life cycle cost," Bezos said. "Cost to space is a very important factor, so basically cost and reliability are the two driving factors. It's (fueled by) liquefied natural gas, it's reusable and it's built, tested, designed and engineered 100 percent in the United States."
Bruno said the engine could be integrated on a ULA launcher within about four years, in half the time other experts projected.
"There is no way to rush a rocket development process," Bezos said. "You can't cut corners. It needs to be methodical and deliberate, so the reason we can accelerate the timeframe of the BE-4 is because we're already three years into the process."

Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos discusses Blue Origin's partnership with United Launch Alliance in a briefing with reporters Wednesday. Credit: ULA/Blue Origin

Bezos said ULA has committed a "very significant dollar amount investment" to complete development of the BE-4 engine, which Blue Origin has so far funded internally and intends to use on its own space launcher.
"There's a second thing which is very unusual -- probably the rarest of things that you can ever find in a rocket engine -- and that is that the BE-4 rocket engine is fully funded," Bezos said.
Budget legislation under consideration in Congress would give the Air Force funding to devote to a new rocket engine project managed in a public-private partnership between government and industry. While the BE-4 engine program announced Wednesday is a purely commercial effort, Bruno said ULA's stakeholders -- presumably including the Air Force, the company's biggest customer -- were kept informed of the private engine initiative.
The White House released a policy statement in June against a government-funded rocket engine development program. Citing an independent study commissioned by the Pentagon, the White House said a U.S.-built rocket engine and a new rocket to host it would cost $4.5 billion and take eight years to design, test and fly.
Officials declined to reveal financial details of the agreement between ULA and Blue Origin.
Deteriorating relations between the United States and Russia in the wake of a Russian-backed rebellion in Ukraine raised questions about the viability of continuing the use of the RD-180 engine for U.S. military satellite launches.
Built near Moscow by NPO Energomash, an RD-180 engine burns a refined type of kerosene and generates 860,000 pounds of thrust at sea level.
Boasting a perfect success record, the RD-180 engine powers the first stage of the United Launch Alliance Atlas 5 rocket, one of two launchers that put the bulk of the U.S. government's national security payloads into orbit. ULA also builds and launches the Delta 4 rocket, which has a U.S.-built booster engine.
Exports of RD-180 rocket engines to the United States have continued despite threats issued by Russian deputy prime minister Dmitry Rogozin in May that Russia would cut off the supply of engines for launches on military missions.
ULA took delivery of two RD-180 engines in August, with three more engines due to arrive from Russia this fall.

Making its 49th flight, an Atlas 5 rocket powered by a Russian RD-180 booster engine lifted off Tuesday from Cape Canaveral. The RD-180 engine has a perfect flight record. Credit: ULA

Concerns over the Atlas 5 rocket's use of Russian rocket engines was amplified in April, when ULA rival SpaceX filed a lawsuit against the Air Force to overturn a sole-source $11 billion contract awarded to ULA for 28 rocket launches through the end of the decade.
Led by Elon Musk, an Internet pioneer like Bezos, SpaceX claimed it could perform nearly all of the launches at a fraction of the cost of ULA, but the Air Force says SpaceX did not meet technical certification criteria when ULA won the launch deal.
Gen. John Hyten, head of Air Force Space Command, said Tuesday that SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket could be certified by Dec. 1 to be eligible to compete for contracts to loft the military's most valuable satellite missions.
A judge in the U.S. federal claims court has not ruled on the suit, which is now in arbitration.
Blue Origin's BE-4 engine uses an oxygen-rich staged combustion cycle, employs a single nozzle, and burns liquid oxygen and liquefied natural gas, a fuel that makes the engine cheaper, less complex, and easier to reuse, according to a fact sheet released by Blue Origin.
"It is a single turbopump, one shaft," Bezos said. "It's as simple as it can be while still being high-performing and highly reliable."
"The BE-4 is not a one-for-one replacement for the RD-180, which is a kerosene burning engine," Bruno said. "What we intend to do is to use a pair of these on our baseline Atlas vehicle that would provide actually higher performance -- higher thrust level -- together, than what we have now.
A new rocket booster with two BE-4 engines would produce 1.1 million pounds of thrust.
"We intend to stack on top of that the common components that we've developed in the upper stages that we already have in our Atlas and Delta family," Bruno said. "So it's really inserting an engine, modifications to the rocket to accommodate that, and then reaping the benefit of that higher performance."
ULA did not quantify cost savings associated with the BE-4 engine, but Bruno said it is "clear to us that they're substantial. We are going to pass those along to our customers."
Blue Origin's engineering team, based in Kent, Wash., and at a test facility in West Texas, has tested sub-scale components of the BE-4 engine, including elements of its oxygen-rich preburner and staged combustion testing of the preburner and main injector assembly, according to a fact sheet.
Next up will be tests of the engine's turbopump and main valves.
Blue Origin also completed construction of an engine test stand in West Texas to accommodate up to a million pounds of thrust.
Full-scale engine testing should begin in 2016, with a first flight of the BE-4 engine in 2019, ULA said in a press release.

ULA's family of Atlas 5 and Delta 4 rockets, sporting different shroud sizes and booster configurations tailored to specific types of payloads. Credit: ULA

According to Bruno, ULA is working on trade studies to design the company's next generation of launchers.
"We're four years away from our first flight, then we have to pass through a certification process that is appropriate to whatever degree of change that the vehicle has experienced," Bruno said. "So there are a number of years when the existing Atlas and Delta with the existing engines would be flying before the BE-4 is ready, then there would be an overlap where its feathered in to the future."
"Will this be only one engine for one type of vehicle? Trades are still underway," Bruno said.
He told reporters ULA could unveil the design of its new rocket family by the end of the year, leaving open the possibility of changes to the company's Delta 4 rocket.
"Our goal is to make the engine so operable, so low-cost and so reliable that ULA would be crazy to use anything else," Bezos said.

© 2014 Spaceflight Now Inc.

Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin to Build New Rocket Engine for US Launch Provider
By Miriam Kramer, Staff Writer | September 17, 2014 03:44pm ET

Jeff Bezos looks on as a new model of Blue Origin's BE-4 liquid rocket engine is revealed during a press event on Sept. 17, 2014.
Credit: United Launch Alliance Instagram View full size image
Blue Origin, the secretive private spaceflight company led by billionaire Jeff Bezos, has teamed up with a veteran space launch provider to build a new rocket engine designed to reduce U.S. dependence on Russian hardware.
In an announcement today (Sept. 17), Bezos and the launch provider United Launch Alliance unveiled plans to develop Blue Origin's new BE-4 liquid rocket engine. The new partnership will allow ULA's next-generation rockets to come equipped with engines that are built in America. At the moment, ULA uses Russian-made RD-180 engines to power its Atlas 5 rockets.
"ULA has put a satellite into orbit almost every month for the past eight years – they're the most reliable launch provider in history and their record of success is astonishing," Bezos, founder of Blue Origin and Amazon.com, said in a statement. "The team at Blue Origin is methodically developing technologies to enable human access to space at dramatically lower cost and increased reliability, and the BE-4 is a big step forward. With the new ULA partnership, we're accelerating commercial development of the next great US-made rocket engine." [Photos: Glimpses of Blue Origin's Private Spaceships]
A model of Blue Origin's BE-4 rocket engine on display on Sept. 17, 2014.
Credit: United Launch Alliance Instagram
View full size image
The United Launch Alliance is currently launches most U.S. government and military satellites using its Atlas 5 rockets, as well as Delta 4 booster variants. The company is a cooperative venture by Boeing and Lockheed Martin.
Blue Origin's partnership with ULA states that full-scale BE-4 engine testing should begin in 2016, with the first flight due for launch in 2019, according to representatives. Although ULA and Blue Origin did not release the cost of development for the BE-4 engine, it will be privately funded. Blue Origin and ULA have committed to funding it 100 percent for the next five years. Blue Origin began testing its BE-3 rocket engine in 2013.
"This agreement ensures ULA will remain the most cost-efficient, innovative and reliable company launching the nation's most important national security, civil, human and commercial missions," Tory Bruno, president and CEO of ULA, said in today's statement. "Blue Origin has demonstrated its ability to develop high-performance rocket engines and we are excited to bring together the best minds in engineering, supply chain management and commercial business practices to create an all-new affordable, reliable, American rocket engine that will create endless possibilities for the future of space launch."
Tensions between the United States and Russia have been heightened due to Russia's involvement with the conflict in the Ukraine. Because of that political situation, ULA has come under fire for its use of the Russian rocket engines.
Today's Blue Origin-ULA rocket engine news is the second time in two days that a commercial spaceflight vernture including Boeing has made headlines.
On Tuesday (Sept. 16), NASA announced that Boeing's manned CST-100 spacecraft, which is slated to launch on Atlas 5 rockets, was one of two vehicles picked to fly American astronauts as part of the agency's Commercial Crew Transportation Capability program. Blue Origin's BE-4 engine won't serve as a direct replacement for RD-180s that power Atlas 5 rockets. Instead, Blue Origin's new engine will outfit ULA's next generation of rockets, according to Blue origin representatives.
NASA also picked the Dragon spacecraft developed by California-based SpaceX, led by billionaire Elon Musk, as its second commercial space taxi for astronauts. The announcement Tuesday came after a four-year competition of aerospace companies that included Blue Origin's Space Vehicle and the Dream Chaser space plane developed by Sierra Nevada among the spacecraft contenders.

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