Bezos Unveils Lunar Lander, Moon Plans and Vision Beyond

The richest man in the world also unveiled the new BE-7 engine, which is set to undergo testing this summer.

The event was clearly designed to re-introduce Blue Moon to the public and policy makers, and to position Blue Origin for NASA contracts to deliver astronauts and supplies to the lunar south pole.

During the presentation, Bezos took several shots at rival billionaire Elon Musk’s plans to settle Mars. It will be interesting to see of the SpaceX founder responds in some way to Bezos’ taunts.

The Red Planet is too far away to serve as a “Planet B” if Earth’s environment continues to decline. Mining the moon for resources and constructing floating space colonies will allow humanity to continue to grow and preserve Earth’s environment, Bezos said.

Blue Origin had earlier tweeted a photo of Ernest Shackleton’s ship, Endurance, which the famed British explorer used on one of his expeditions to Antarctica. This had fed speculation that Bezos would announce a mission to a crater named after Shackleton at the lunar south pole.

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Jeff Bezos is Aiming for O'Neill Cylinder Colonies

SpaceX’s Elon Musk wants to settle humans on Mars. Others talk about a Moon Village. But Seattle billionaire Jeff Bezos has a different kind of off-Earth home in mind when he talks about having millions of people living and working in space.

His long-range vision focuses on a decades-old concept for huge artificial habitats that are best known today as O’Neill cylinders.

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Blue Origin Successfully Tests Crew Escape System, Lands Booster

Blue Origin carried out a successful test of the abort system of its New Shepard suborbital vehicle Oct. 5, managing to safely land both the vehicle’s crew capsule and propulsion module.

The New Shepard vehicle lifted off from its test site in West Texas at 11:36 a.m. Eastern. The launch was delayed by more than a half-hour because of an unspecified problem with the vehicle discovered a little more than one minute before the original liftoff time, causing the countdown to hold and they recycle before restarting.

Approximately 45 seconds after liftoff, the vehicle’s crew capsule fired its solid-fuel abort motor, sending it away from the propulsion module. The capsule then descended under parachutes as it would on a typical flight after separating from the booster, landing four minutes and 15 seconds after liftoff.

Blue Origin had warned that the abort test would likely destroy the propulsion module, as the force of the abort motor pushed it off course and subjected it to unplanned aerodynamic forces. However, the booster continued to fly normally after the capsule escaped. The booster descended to a powered landing on a pad seven and a half minutes after liftoff, leaning to one side slightly and appearing singed, but otherwise in good condition.

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Blue Origin’s New Glenn Rocket Unveiled

Years in the making, but finally revealed on Monday, Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket has been shown for the first time via its founder Jeff Bezos. Arriving in two variants, the new – and surprisingly powerful – orbital rocket is scheduled to debut from Cape Canaveral’s SLC-36 by the end of the decade. Like its suborbital sister – the New Shepard – its booster stage will be reusable.

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The Blue Origin New Shepard Fine After Last Launch

On our most recent flight, we performed a test to prove the Crew Capsule could safely land with only two of its three parachutes open. On a nominal flight with all three parachutes deployed, the capsule descends at about 16 mph before firing a retrorocket just a few feet above the ground. This retrorocket firing is what creates the large cloud of dust you see just before the capsule lands, and slows the capsule down to 3 mph before it touches the ground. This last bit of speed is absorbed by a ring shaped crushable bumper made of aluminum honeycomb material mounted on the bottom of the capsule. The ring is made of eight segments.

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Blue Origin Rocket Fight

Blue Origin Planning on Webcasting its Next Rocket Launch on Sunday

Watch the fourth flight of the same New Shepard hardware this Sunday. Liftoff is planned for approximately 10:15 am ET and the live webcast starts half an hour earlier at 9:45 am ET at www.blueorigin.com.

On this flight, we’ll intentionally fail one string of parachutes on the capsule. There are three strings of chutes and two of the three should still deploy nominally and, along with our retrothrust system, safely land the capsule. Works on paper, and this test is designed to validate that. We’ll also use this flight to continue pushing the envelope on the booster.

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Blue Origin 3rd Flight Video

Blue Origin's Latest Flight: Launch, Land, Repeat

Will the 1% Recapitulate the 1970s "White Flight" and Move to Mars?

The world sucks right now. Terrorism. Climate change. Political acrimony. Nonstop Justin Bieber songs.

It’s nice to know Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos have a plan. They will help the richest people in the world go to Mars and start over, leaving the other 99 percent to suffer on a dying, warring planet. The only solace for those of us left here will be that the Biebs should be prosperous enough to go with them.

This is the unspoken flip side of Musk’s SpaceX and Bezos’s Blue Origin. The space travel companies say they are creating a way for the human species to endure by populating other planets. But the bottom line is that only the wealthy will have the means to move to Mars. Musk’s target ticket price is $500,000 a person in 2015 dollars, and that’s just to get there. Imagine the new outfits you’ll have to buy to go with that space helmet.

So you can picture a scenario that’s something like the 1970s white flight from inner cities, when the wealthier classes moved to freshly built suburbs, leaving the declining neighborhoods to the lower classes. In fact, the fleeing upper classes sped up the decrepitude of that era’s older cities by relocating their money and clout with them. Today, we’re seeing a similar situation in Syria, as the wealthiest and most educated people escape to the West, which will make the country even harder to stabilize and rebuild.

Such a dynamic could apply to the whole world in about 40 years. Maybe historians and scientists, charting Earth’s degeneration will trace a direct link back to this month’s climate talks in Paris. Couldn’t make a deal stick, they’ll say. Environment spun out of control. Drought. Upheaval. Anarchy. And then Wall Street bankers, tech titans, CEOs and Jay Z’s entourage decided to get the hell out and build McMansions in Martian space bubbles.

All this might sound crazy—except it’s not.

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Blue Origin Successfully Flies, Lands New Shepard Rocket

Blue Origin announced Nov. 24 that it launched its New Shepard suborbital vehicle on a second test flight, flying to the edge of space and successfully landing both sections of the vehicle.

New Shepard launched from the company’s West Texas test site at 12:21 p.m. Eastern time Nov. 23, reaching a peak altitude of 100.5 kilometers and top speed of Mach 3.72. The vehicle’s unoccupied crew capsule separated and parachuted to a landing, while its propulsion module made a powered vertical landing.

The test was similar to one flown in April, where the vehicle reached a peak altitude of more than 93 kilometers. On that earlier test, however, a hydraulic problem with the propulsion module prevented it from making a controlled landing.

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The Future of ULA's Vulcan Rocket now in Question

Five months ago, United Launch Alliance (ULA) formally announced its plans for a next-generation launch system, called Vulcan (the winning name in an online voting competition.) Most of the focus on Vulcan has been on the replacement of the Russian-built RD-180 engine with an American alternative, most likely Blue Origin’s BE-4.

Vulcan, though, is more than just about ending dependence on a Russian engine. ULA has laid out a long-term strategy for upgrading the Vulcan, including the development of a new upper stage, partial reusability, and other concepts to enable heavier payloads and reduce costs, ideas ULA officials discussed at the recent AIAA Space 2015 conference in Pasadena, California. But a proposal last week by another company to acquire ULA could put those plans in question.

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Blue Origin New Shepard Impact Site Found?

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Blue Origin's Flight

United Launch Alliance Unveils Vulcan Rocket

United Launch Alliance unveiled an incremental approach to replace its workhorse Atlas 5 rocket, an ambitious path forward that ultimately would include a new second stage and, later, reusable first-stage engines that would be captured midair by helicopter after each mission.

The plan would provide a competitive alternative to SpaceX’s low-cost Falcon 9 rocket but entails risk for ULA as it funds a significant development program for as many as nine years as its competition gains momentum.

Tory Bruno, ULA’s president and chief executive, declined to detail the company’s exact investment in the project but suggested that new rockets typically cost about $2 billion to develop, including the main engine. During an April 13 press conference on the eve the 31st Space Symposium here, he said that cost would be borne by ULA and its strategic partners, but that the company would not turn down government money if that becomes available.

The first step in the developing the newly named Vulcan rocket is developing a new first stage featuring the methane-fueled BE-4 engine by Blue Origin of Kent, Washington. ULA is also working with Aerojet Rocketdyne on the AR-1 engine, in case the BE-4 runs into delays.

The program is driven by the requirement to replace the Russian-built RD-180 engine that serves as the main powerplant for ULA’s Atlas 5. Congress imposed a ban on future use of Russian engines in U.S. national security missions following Russia’s annexation of Crimea from Ukraine last year.

In addition to the new engine, the Vulcan’s first stage would feature a stretch version of the tank used on ULA’s Delta 4 rocket, which the company is phasing out in 2018 because it is too expensive. The second stage of the initial Vulcan version, slated to debut around 2019, would feature the same Centaur upper stage and fairing now used on the Atlas 5, Bruno said.

The Vulcan could be augmented by up to six solid rocket boosters, giving it greater lift capability than the largest version of the Atlas 5 but not as much as the Delta 4 Heavy, which features three core stages in a side-by-side configuration. Bruno said he plans to issue a request for proposals within the next 12 months for the large boosters, which would likely be built by either Orbital ATK or Aerojet Rocketdyne.

ULA told the Air Force in February it plans to start two separate U.S. Air Force certification processes for the rocket later this year, one with the BE-4 and one with the AR-1. Certification is required for the Vulcan to carry U.S. national security payloads.

Bruno said ULA’s first choice is the BE-4 but that it continues to fund the AR-1 work as a backup option, and that ULA will make a final decision on in 2016.

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Blue Origin Teams With United Launch Alliance Rocket Engine Development for Atlas V Replacement

Jeff Bezos, founder of the online retailing giant Amazon​.com, has unveiled a new commercial engine design for legacy military rockets.

Bezos, who also heads up the private spaceflight company Blue Origin LLC, was on hand with Tony Bruno, the new chief executive officer of the Lockheed Martin Corp.-Boeing Co. joint venture, United Launch Alliance LLC, on Wednesday at the National Press Club to announce an agreement to jointly fund development of the BE-4 engine.

A single engine is designed to provide 550,000 pounds of thrust and replace the Russian-made RD-180 propulsion system currently on the Atlas V rocket, one of two boosters used by the Air Force’s Evolved Expendable Launch Vehicle program to lift military and spy satellites into space.

“This business is too hard if you’re not passionate about it,” Bezos said, referring to space launch. “Cost and reliability are the two driving factors.”

In a statement released after the event, he said, “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.”

Bruno, who last month replaced Michael Gass in a sudden change in leadership at ULA, said the partnership between the defense contracting giant and the space tourism start-up represented “the best of both worlds.”

In the statement, he said, “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.”

The pact calls for developing the engine over four years, with full-scale testing in 2016 and first flight in 2019. The system will be available for use on either ULA or Blue Origin rockets.

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Parabolic Arc Digs Into Blue Origins Plans

The FAA recently approved Blue Origin’s application to expand operations at its West Texas test site “to include new development vehicles, which would use liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen propellants.”

The supplemental environmental assessment was required because of a shift in propellants used in flight tests. The FAA conducted an earlier review in 2006 when it originally approved the testing of reusable propulsion modules and crew capsules (CCs) at the site.

The Final Supplemental Environmental Assessment for the Blue Origin
West Texas Launch Site is a fascinating in that it provides an insight into the vehicles and test operations of the notoriously secretive company.

What follows are excerpts from the report outlining key elements of the company’s future test plans.

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Blue Origin BE-3 Hydrogen/Oxygen Rocket Engine Video