WASHINGTON — Capping back-to-back news that emphatically heralded the United States’ return to space exploration, Jeff Bezos on Wednesday unveiled plans for “a 21st century” rocket engine developed by his private aerospace company that could help reduce Russia’s role in U.S. orbital flights.
At a news conference at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., Bezos showed off a model of the BE-4, a liquid-propellant engine that will be used to power a new version of the Atlas rockets now used to launch telecommunications and spy satellites and other payloads into space.
The BE-4 will be jointly funded by Bezos’ Kent, Wash.-based Blue Origin and United Launch Alliance, a 50-50 venture between Boeing and Lockheed Martin. Work on the liquid oxygen, liquefied natural gas engine has been underway for three years in Kent and in West Texas, and four more years of development is expected before first flight.
The announcement came a day after the National Aeronautics and Space Administration awarded $6.8 billion in separate contracts to Boeing and a second company to build crew capsules to ferry astronauts to the International Space Station.
Since the U.S. retired the last space shuttle in 2011, that orbiting laboratory has been reachable only aboard the Russian Soyuz spacecraft launched from Kazakhstan.
The Soyuz is lofted by the Soyuz rocket, considered one of the most reliable launch vehicles in the world. The competing Atlas V launch vehicle from United Launch Alliance — which has a perfect record — also is powered by a Russian engine, the RD-180.
Blue Origin’s engine initially will be used to launch commercial and military payloads aboard a revamped Atlas rocket as a successor to the Russian engine. But it could eventually propel Boeing’s new CST-100 crew capsule — one of the two forthcoming American alternatives to the Soyuz spacecraft — into orbit as well, said Jim Muncy, principal with PoliSpace, a space-policy consultant in Alexandria, Va.
United Launch Alliance Chief Executive Tory Bruno, who appeared with Bezos, said the 1990s-design Russian RD-180 is a great engine and a real workhorse. But he said modern manufacturing technology and computer-aided design will produce engines that are more affordable and reusable.
“I think it’s pretty clear it’s time for a 21st century booster engine,” Bezos said.
Bezos, 50, founded Blue Origin in 2000, five years after his first company, Amazon.com, debuted online. His goal was to make spaceflight cheap enough to extend beyond the realm of astronauts and cosmonauts.
Bezos, who reportedly spends one a day week on Blue Origin, said running Amazon is his main “day job,” one he still enjoys. Still, as a space geek since his teens who dreamed of colonizing space a la the “Jetsons,” he made clear where his heart lies.
“You don’t choose your passion. The passion chooses you,” he said.
The BE-4 is Blue Origin’s fourth and largest engine. It builds on the company’s work on the BE-3 hydrogen-fueled engine, which will power Blue Origin’s New Shepherd vehicle, which flies closer to Earth’s gravity than orbital spacecraft.
The new BE-4 engine will ultimately be available for sale to other companies. That could include Boeing, which on Tuesday won a $4.2 billion contract from NASA to build the CST-100 spacecraft to transport crews to the International Space Station. Boeing plans to launch the CST-100 atop an Atlas V rocket.
NASA also awarded $2.6 billion to SpaceX, a Hawthorne, Calif., company started by Bezos’ fellow billionare Elon Musk, co-founder of PayPal and chief executive of Tesla Motors. SpaceX will develop its own crew capsule, which will use the company’s own Falcon 9 rocket.
The new American-built crew capsules are expected to dock at the space station beginning in 2017.
Blue Origin was among four companies, along with Sierra Nevada of Louisville, Colo., to initially compete for the NASA contract to come up with a replacement spacecraft for the space shuttle. But Blue Origin did not advance beyond the early rounds.
Musk, in an interview Wednesday with Fox Business Network, said he welcomed the Blue Origin-Boeing-Lockheed Martin alliance to take on SpaceX in the race beyond the earth’s orbit.
“If all your competitors are banding together to attack you, that’s like a good compliment,” he said.
©2014 The Seattle Times. Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services.
No comments:
Post a Comment