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.

link.

Engine FAQ.

Engine Progress & Details.