Main Engine Cut Off - T+42: Blue Origin Introduces New Glenn

Episode Date: March 9, 2017

This week, Blue Origin shed some more light on New Glenn—by way of an animation, launch agreements, and a talk by Jeff Bezos at Satellite 2017—and the first fully-assembled BE-4 shipped to their test site in Texas for a hot firing. I discuss the new details we learned and how New Glenn will fit into the industry in the 2020s. This episode of Main Engine Cut Off is brought to you by 6 executive producers—Pat, Matt, Jorge, Brad, and two anonymous—and 36 other supporters on Patreon. Introducing New Glenn - YouTube New Glenn Specs, Customers, and More - Main Engine Cut Off Eutelsat signs up for Blue Origin’s New Glenn launcher - Eutelsat Corporate Blue Origin on Twitter: “Five more launches for #NewGlenn! Excited to announce our second commercial customer #OneWebForAll” Jeff Bezos on Twitter: “1st BE-4 engine fully assembled. 2nd and 3rd following close behind. #GradatimFerociter” Decision on Vulcan engine could slip to 2017 - SpaceNews.com Blue Origin Sheds a Bit of Light on Its Rocket Program - Commercial Spacecraft - Jeff Bezos - The New York Times - The New York Times (January, 2007!) The Delta Clipper Experimental Archive Delta Clipper Experimental Advanced (DCXA) Reusable Launch Vehicle - YouTube Details on Blue Origin Launch Site and Recovery - Main Engine Cut Off SpaceX Gets “Partial Win” in Blue Origin Patent Dispute Email your thoughts and comments to [e-mail] Follow @WeHaveMECO Subscribe on iTunes, Overcast, or elsewhere Subscribe to Main Engine Cut Off Weekly Support Main Engine Cut Off on Patreon

Hello and welcome to Main Engine Cutoff. I am Anthony Colangelo, back again this week with some more exciting stuff to talk about. This week of the Blue Origin variant. Last week was the hot drama from SpaceX and NASA and all of the lunar talk. This week, we've got more details on New Glenn, which is the orbital class rocket that Blue Origin is working on due to launch in the 2020s. Previously, we've seen a rendering of it and some light details about it. We saw it in context of the other launch vehicles that are out there, but we didn't hear any payload numbers. We didn't hear much outside of how many engines it had, how tall it was,

and some rough details like that. But we got a lot more to talk about this week, so let's dive into it. It started on Monday when Jeff Bezos tweeted out a picture of the first fully assembled BE-4 engine. This is their 500,000 pounds of thrust engine that burns methane and oxygen. This is going to be the thing that drives New Glenn. It's going to be the thing that drives Vulcan as well from ULA. There's going to be two on Vulcan. There's going to be seven on New Glenn

with an upper stage variant on the second stage of New Glenn. So this is a big deal to see the first one of these fully assembled and heading off to the test site in Texas for a hot firing. Bezos also said in his tweet that the second and third engine are following closely behind, so they've really picked up the pace of building these things in the past few months. We saw from some press photos last year when they got a tour of the Blue Origin factory, we saw some of the engine bells being worked on. But this is the first fully assembled functional engine that's going to head off to the test site to be hot fired. And we'll see what happens from there. It's going to be

exciting either way, as the famous quote is, rockets are exciting no matter what happens. And as a side note to the BE-4 discussion, not even talking about New Glenn yet, but this is a big deal for ULA's Vulcan because so far they've said the BE-4 is the primary path for Vulcan and the Aerojet Rocketdyne AR-1 is the secondary path. 80 that Atlas V flies with right now. This one, as I said, is a methane engine. So there's a little bit of difference of propellants there, which would lead to a different vehicle for Vulcan. So there's actually two different designs. The AR-1 driven Vulcan looks a lot more Atlas V-y. The BE-4 driven Vulcan looks like what you've seen in the press releases so far from ULA. Last year, we heard back in September, there was an article from Space News, from Jeff Faust, where they were talking about the hotfiring of BE-4 being a critical moment for Vulcan's development. Because after that hotfire successfully, if all looks good, ULA will declare BE-4 the official engine for Vulcan, at least from where we stand now. Anything could happen. Things could come apart and plans could change. But if this hotfiring is successful, Vulcan will use the BE-4 as its booster engine.

In that article from Jeff Faust from last fall, we heard that the hotfiring could slip from late last year to early this year. We hadn't heard much about it. I've mentioned it a few times in the past couple months, but now we know that's going to be happening in the next few weeks, few months. We're not sure exactly when, but this is a big moment to send that engine off to the test site, and I'm sure ULA is eagerly awaiting the results. They were pretty active talking about this BE-4 being sent to the test site and even using things like the Blue Origin hashtag. So they're really excited to see that happen,

which I think says a lot for the importance they place upon BE-4 for their Vulcan plants. So I just wanted to mention that up front to keep in mind, because BE-4 is the key to Vulcan as it exists today and New Glenn as it will exist in the future. This is the engine that will power both launch vehicles. Both are going to be very important in the launch vehicle industry, in the launch market. So it's important to follow this as far as two different launch vehicles are concerned because a launch vehicle is only as good as its engine. And this one looks to be a pretty awesome engine. So we're excited to see it hot fire.

But just keep in mind that this is pivotal for two different launch vehicles that will be entering the market in the 2020s. So that said, let's get back into New Glenn talk. We've got payload capacity specs, we've got a lot of other details to talk about. Blue Origin released a full video of an animation of a New Glenn launch, the two-stage variant specifically, that included erecting the launch vehicle, launching it, you know, doing the whole flight pattern there, even including the recovery on the ship downrange. So there's a lot in that animation to dissect. So let's get into it. Let's start with the payload capacity, since that was the big question mark coming out of the unveiling of Nuclein last year.

Now, we only got numbers for the two-stage variant of Nuclein. There's going to be a two and a three-stage variant. The two-stage variant is, as I said, a first stage of seven BE4s and a second stage of one BE4U, which is the upper stage variant of a BE4. The three-stage is those same first two stages with an additional Hydrolox third stage. And we haven't had any discussion of that in Bezos' talk or the things that were surrounding it this week. We only heard about the two-stage variant. So there's still a big question mark around the three-stage variant. But as far as the two-stage goes, 45 tons to low Earth orbit, 13 tons to

geosynchronous transfer orbit, which is a huge, huge payload capacity. This is more to LEO than Delta IV Heavy, more than Long March V, more than the Angara A5 for whatever that's worth. Delta IV Heavy does about 29 tons to LEO. Long March V does 25 tons, as does the A5. So it's a good margin more than that. It is less than the Falcon Heavy is stated to do to LEO. That's been stated at 54 tons. So this would put it in that range between Delta IV heavy and Falcon heavy. So if this were flying today, it would easily be the largest launch vehicle possible to launch on, both in terms of height and also payload capacity. When it does fly in the 2020 range, presumably SLS will have flown once, presumably Falcon heavy will have flown

once. So it will come in third, unless presuming that China doesn't get the Long March 9 up and active by the time that this gets off the pad. It's still going to be a big rocket, but it will not be the heaviest lift launch vehicle available. But it's still a very, very big launch vehicle. And I'm very interested why they chose this particular size, because certainly for the customers they're going to have, unless they're going to do some dual launch capabilities like Ariane 5 does, they have a lot of payload capacity that a lot of their customers, like the ones that they've already announced, get into, just don't need yet. And certainly there's a, if you build it, they will come sort of mentality. There's a, you know, maybe these payloads don't exist because those launch vehicles don't exist. And part of it could play into what Blue Origin's plans are that we haven't heard yet. You know,

we've just heard the plans for the launch vehicle. We don't know what Blue Origin is planning to do with it themselves, but they certainly have ambitions that outsize right now their capabilities. So there's always that thing that you need to consider with Blue Origin, that they have their own plans, just like SpaceX does, and what they're building could very much play into that, that they're selling what they're building that they need for themselves to pay for the whole operation. So anyway, the 13 tons to GTO, that is less than Delta IV Heavy and the Long March V. They both have about 14 tons to GTO. So it's more to LEO, less to GTO than what's out there right now, but still very, very large. And as I said, we don't know what the three-stage variant can do. That's the one with the Hydrolox upper stage and

the seven-meter fairing. So that thing could really, really put a lot up into orbit. And that might give you an idea of what Blue Origin might be doing with this thing. Space stations, space hotels, all that stuff comes to mind when you start looking at what Blue Origin has done already, which is a lot of work in New Shepard for space tourism and suborbital flights like that. Think about that in an orbital mindset. They might need some big habitats. You know, all that comes along with a rocket this large. Now, as far as the recovery goes, as I said, it lands downrange on a ship. The interesting thing here is that the ship that Blue Origin is going to be using for recovery,

it is much bigger than the ships that we've seen SpaceX use so far, because it's a much bigger first stage. But the other interesting thing is that this ship will be underway when's a much bigger first stage. But the other interesting thing is that this ship will be underway when they're recovering the first stage. So instead of the way that SpaceX has been doing it, where the barge keeps its position tied to a coordinate, and the rocket guides itself back to that coordinate, and they're both there at the same time, the Blue Origin recovery ship will be underway at sea to provide more predictable stability because, as Bezos pointed out, in heavy seas, things are more stable if you're moving than

if you're sitting in one spot, so you're less likely to have large movements of the deck at the last second. That makes things pretty interesting for recovery. There's going to be probably more ship-to-rocket-and-back communication than there are for SpaceX's recoveries, because right now, as I said, the ship sticks to a coordinate, the rocket guides back to that coordinate, they don't talk, the vehicle downlinks to the ASDS, but they don't communicate in terms of recovery. But in this case, if the ship's underway and the rocket's obviously underway, they're going to need to communicate a little bit, or maybe the rocket's just going to be a little bit more smart and actually, you know, looking at what's out there at the sea and where it needs to land. We don't know how much that's

going to work yet or how that's going to work yet. I doubt we're going to hear anything about it because Blue Origin keeps things pretty close to their chest until they actually are ready to talk about it. But just to note, that is going to be a more complicated recovery than SpaceX's have been, where it's just keeping two vehicles, same spot relative to the Earth. This is a whole nother level of moving target, moving, you know, moving rocket to a moving target. That will be pretty amazing to see. So we've pretty much heard the details of a Blue Origin recovery before. There were some documents floating around about what they were going to do. There was that whole patent lawsuit about landing on a boat. The interesting thing is that Blue Origin, as of yet, is not planning any return to launch site

landings. All of their landings will be downrange. And it's sort of splitting the difference between what SpaceX is trying to do and sort of what ULA has said that they would try to do with reusability when it comes to Vulcan, where they will be recovering the engines downrange because they don't want to waste the propellant to recover the rocket. Blue Origin's sort of splitting the difference, saying we're not going to use all the propellant to get back to the launch site. We are going to do a propulsive landing, but it's always going to be downrange. So after separation, they're going to flip the rocket around with their thrusters, use their aerodynamic surfaces to guide its way back to the ship and do a propulsive landing on the ship.

But, you know, no return to launch site landing. So that will be interesting to see how big of a fleet they have to recover these boosters. Also depends on what their flight rate is, how far downrange they're going to be recovering these stages. Can they do more than one per ship, etc. There's a lot of logistics that we don't know yet that maybe they don't even know yet, but will be interesting to find out when they do it of how they're going to work that recovery operation. Another interesting component of the landing system on New Glenn is that it has landing leg redundancy. So there are six landing legs on New Glenn. If one fails or one fails a deploy or something happens to one of them, the landing isn't

compromised. The rocket will stay standing. It can land on five legs. So a single leg failure does not compromise the entire launch vehicle. That's something I've always felt was missing from Falcon 9 and certainly from SpaceX's ITS. As we saw with the Jason 3 launch, a single leg failing is completely destructive to Falcon 9. That one leg didn't lock out on the Jason 3 launch and it toppled over onto the ASDS and exploded. So that's something that the Falcon 9 lacks. You know, it's obviously, you got to do some cost benefit analysis. If the extra weight of another landing leg or two really, you know, does that cost in terms of sheer cost of investment, but also cost of, you know, payload capacity and all of that, does that benefit you to save every single core or can you lose one every once

in a while due to a failed leg? That's the cost-benefit analysis you have to do. Can you lose a launch vehicle every once in a while and make up the difference in the benefits that you get from not adding those extra legs to the launch vehicle? In Falcon 9's case, I think that answer is probably. New Glenn is obviously a much bigger rocket, so it's more expensive to build and all of that. And, you know, it's just different tactics there from Falcon 9 to New Glenn. ITS is the one, to me, that gets pretty interesting because a failed leg at Mars is a problem. That's a big problem. So I wouldn't be surprised if that's

something that gets addressed in a future version of the ITS in a more refined design, but it's something that right now is very specific to New Glenn. Now that said, I'm not at all surprised that New Glenn has landing leg redundancy, because it's no secret that some members of the DCX team, that project back in the 90s for a recoverable rocket stage, a vertically landing rocket, they got hired by Blue Origin back in the early 2000s, and so there's some DCX heritage in the Blue Origin family of vehicles. Famously, the DCX project came to an end after the DCX-A, on its fourth flight, had a landing leg fail to deploy, top-lover explode, and that led to, you know, not directly, but you

factor in everything, that led to the cancellation of that project after all. So, knowing the DCX heritage that has seeped its way into Blue Origin, I don't know how many of those members are still around, but it's not surprising that there is landing leg redundancy when at least some of the heritage can be traced back to the DCX project, which ended with a failed landing leg. There was four landing struts, one of them didn't come out, and that led to the vehicle being destroyed. And there's a pretty fun video that I will put into the show notes if you want to watch that. If you've never seen any DCX flights, head over to mainenginecutoff.com, check out the show notes, and I'll put some links to the DCX videos in there, including the failure of the DCX-A Flight 4

back in 1996. I recommend checking them out. They're pretty fun to watch, knowing where we are today, 20 years later, 21 years later, seeing what's happening with SpaceX, with Blue Origin, with Mastin, it's fun to see where all that came from, you know, 20 years ago when that DCX project was underway. Now, before we dive into some additional details on New Glenn and customers that have signed on, I want to say a big thank you to all of those out there supporting Main Engine Cutoff on Patreon. There are 42 of you supporting Main Engine Cutoff on Patreon, and that includes six executive producers, Pat, Matt, George, Brad, and two anonymous. They produced this episode of Main Engine Cutoff, and I could not do it without their support and the 36 others on Patreon. Thank you so much for making this possible, for helping me out every single

week, every single month. I highly, highly, highly appreciate your support. If you want to help support the show, head over to patreon.com slash Miko and give as little as $1 a month. All of your support really helps me do the blog, the podcast, everything that I do month to month. And I'm hugely, hugely thankful for your support. So thank you very much, and head over to Patreon today and help out. Now there's two other components about NewGlan that I wanted to break down that are important to think about when you think about customers signing on to use NewGlan, what Blue Origin themselves might use NewGlan for, etc. The two things are fairing size and vertical versus horizontal integration. As far as fairing sizes

go, the two-stage variant on the New Glenn Booster has a five-meter fairing. The core is seven meters, the second stage is seven meters, and then the fairing size drops down to five meters, which is about the standard size for a large fairing in the industry. The Atlas and Delta families have four and five- meter fairings. The Falcon family has five meter fairings. Notably, though, the Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy have very short fairings for their five meter width. They actually have the widest effective fairing in the industry. The internal volume is the widest of any fairing, but it's very short. So that limits what payloads can go on top of it. Notably, the Bigelow

announcement last year with ULA that they'll be flying the B-330 on an Atlas V 500 class. That's because that's the only fairing that the B-330 can fit under, not because of its width, but because of its length. And the Falcon family of rockets don't have long enough fairings to fit a payload the size of a B-330. The New Glenn 5 meter fairing looks longer than the Falcon family of fairings that we've seen so far. We haven't gotten specific specifications on the internal volume or space that could be used in there, but from the outside, from the renderings that we've seen, the fairing looks longer than the Falcon fairings. So we can assume that it has a similar, you know, volume that can

be used to support longer payloads and all that kind of stuff. So that could be a big advantage for the two-stage variant of New Glenn. Now the three-stage variant, which again, we don't have that many specs on, that has a seven meter fairing. So the third stage is also seven meters, as are the first and second stages. And the fairing is right alongside that seven meters all the way up. So that's a huge fairing. It's seven meters, a lot longer than the five meter fairing is. Again, we don't know what the usable space is like inside of there, but it's a huge fairing that can fit pretty amazing things. Like, as I said, a big space station module like the B330, like maybe something that will be homegrown by Blue Origin if they're really thinking about

orbital tourism. Who knows what will go in there, but that's a big fairing, and that would be a big competitive advantage for some payloads that are on the larger end that we haven't even seen yet. You know, the giant fairings of SLS have been talked about to enable a certain class of payloads that just weren't possible before, because that cargo variant of SLS has huge fairings, and the new Glenn 3stage is the only thing that comes close to that size of fairing. So, you know, once we get to the 2020s, I don't know when the three-stage will fly.

Maybe the mid-2020s, we'll talk about that in a bit. But that seven-meter fairing could do some pretty interesting things, especially when you look at, you know, why do we need a cargo SLS? It's because of its giant payload capacity and the size of payloads that it can fit under its fairings. Maybe a three-stage Nuclan could really give that, you know, Block 1B or whatever SLS cargo variant a run for its

money once we get there. And both are about 10 years away right now, so it's not like I'm comparing something that's far away to something else that's flying today. These are both vehicles that are far away. Their payloads even are still theoretical, but just looking at these two pieces of rocketry on paper, the fairings are huge, the payload capacities are huge, and that is something that could give the future blocks of SLS a run for its money. Now the other thing I said was vertical integration. In the animation that Blue Origin released to go along with this new Glenn introduction, they show it being erected very much like the Falcon 9 is erected today. So SpaceX integrates

the Falcon family of rockets horizontally on the transporter erector that is rolled out to the pad and lifted vertical. That's not a SpaceX specific thing. A lot of other people do it. Soyuz and the Russian counterparts do the same thing. But that is how SpaceX does it, and it looks like Blue Origin will be doing the same thing. So they'll be doing horizontal integration and then rolling it out to Launch Complex 36 and flipping itself to vertical and then lifting off from there. Importantly, there are some payloads that require vertical integration. So some DoD payloads require vertical integration. Even Juno, I think it was, that it required vertical integration because when it was fueled, it could not be on its side. And this is due to the structural design of payloads.

In DoD's case, I can't even imagine some of the things that are going on on those payloads, especially when you talk about optical imagery and all that kind of stuff that goes into a DoD payload. There are things that require vertical integration. A while back, SpaceX made the decision to not pursue vertical integration, and it looks like Blue Origin is following suit. Now, from the outside, if we look at what their potential cost benefit analysis is like, it could have been decided in both SpaceX and Blue Origin's case that the potential market that requires vertical integration was not worth the cost it would take to support it. And that's because of additional infrastructure that's needed, different processes

that are needed, and a very small number of payloads actually need it. So if it makes everything cost more, take longer, and is a hindrance to most of your daily business, is it really worth it in the end? Do you get enough customers from supporting vertical integration that need vertical integration that can pay for the cost, the overhead that it is to support vertical integration across the board. ULA does vertical integration for the Delta family of rockets and the Atlas family of rockets, but they have a lot of heritage flying those kind of payloads that need vertical integration. SpaceX and Blue Origin, if they're going to make their money in spaces that don't often need vertical integration, then they can stick with horizontal, save money, streamline their process, and go on about their business. Now that said, Blue Origin has a lot of infrastructure down at Launch Complex 36 that, at least from the animation that we saw, that could support vertical integration

into the future. They have a big launch tower, they've got a lot of other stuff around the pad area, and that goes for SpaceX as well at Pad 39A. They've got the existing structures there from the Apollo and Shuttle era. The Shuttle era stuff is getting taken down, but there's obviously going to be a crew access arm at 39A. There's going to be some stuff going on up high on that pad. So at Pad 36 and Pad 39A, there could be future support for vertical integration for SpaceX or or blue origin that doesn't seem to be in the cards yet um it just doesn't seem like they're going to go after that market as strong and and that could change that could be something that they realize that there

is a bigger market for but i highly highly doubt that either one of them are going to pursue vertical integration unless there's a big change in the industry and the number of payloads that require vertical integration goes higher than the amount of payloads that currently do. And the percentage of payloads that need it compared to the percentage of payloads that Blue Origin and SpaceX are launching day to day, the numbers just don't work out yet to make it worth it for either one of them to pursue. On the topic of customers, Blue Origin has announced two partnerships at this point, two agreements for launches. UTEL SAT signed on. They were actually there at Jeff Bezos' talk at Satellite 2017 this week, and they came

out and talked about the fact that they've agreed to fly in the 2021 to 2022 timeframe. Reading from their press release about it, they say, the agreement with Blue Origin covers the launch of a geostationary satellite in the 2021 to 2022 timeframe. The New Glenn launcher will be compatible with virtually all UTEL satellites, giving flexibility to allocate the mission 12 months ahead of launch. So from what it sounds like, they've agreed to fly in that time frame. Once Blue Origin gets to the place where they can say, hey, we're going to be flying operationally on X date, then UTLSAT will assign a given satellite to that flight. But as of right now, they just have a launch slot reserved with Blue Origin for an early flight on New Glenn.

And then Wednesday morning, we heard that OneWeb booked five flights on New Glenn again. Not a very hard specific date or anything, obviously, but just an agreement that they are going to fly five flights with Blue Origin in the early days of New Glenn. So two days into New Glenn being available and bookable, Blue Origin has two customers signed on, six flights. So they're in a really good spot for the early days of New Glenn. We also heard that New Glenn is going to launch first in 2020-ish. That seems to be the target date right now is to have the first launch in 2020. And I guess, you know, then there's going to be a few demo flights. We didn't really get any details on this, but if you tell SATA is looking at 2021 to 2022 timeframe, we, then there's going to be a few demo flights. We didn't really get any details on this, but if UTELSAT is looking at 2021 to 2022

timeframe, we can assume there's going to be a demo flight or two in 2020 before they start operational service. Or maybe UTELSAT just said, hey, get a couple of flights under your belt and then hook us up with a launch. I don't know. They've always, UTELSAT has been an early customer on a lot of early launch vehicles. So you never know where they've determined that they're going to fly, but Blue Origin I could see wanting to do at least a demo

flight or two before they fly a commercial mission. So 2020 puts them about where Vulcan is going to have its first launch, Vulcan Centaur that is. So 2020 seems to be shaping up to be the year of the BE-4, which is, it's very exciting to see that we're only a few years out from this first launch. And until then, you know, they've got a factory well underway in Florida just outside the gates of Kennedy Space Center. That is supposed to be completed this year. I assume that means general construction and then they'll move in and outfit it as they need it, build their tooling, bring in their tooling, make some Pathfinder articles, build some structural test articles,

do a lot of testing and setup down there to get their operations ready. They've got to do a whole launchpad infrastructure build out. There's a lot of work to be done on the ground, but they are really, really in a good spot for New Glenn right now. They've got a fully built engine on the way to the test site. They've got two more following behind it.

They've got two customers signed on for six launches. They've got a factory underway. They've got launch sites leased already. So we should start to see a flurry of activity in Florida specifically and in Texas as well from Blue Origin. So it's a very exciting spot in time for Blue Origin. We didn't get a lot of other details on New Shepard. We found out that they've got about $10,000 worth of refurbishment between New Shepard flights to be done.

So that gives you an idea of what the operational costs of New Shepard are going to be. But they didn't give us too many details on when the next flight should be, what they're going to do this year. They're obviously going to focus a lot on the crew capsule this year. You know, last year was the test program that they've got underway for New Shepard. This year, they're going to start flying with an actual crew capsule. And I would not at all be surprised if there was a test pilot or two stepping foot inside a New Shepard capsule and heading up over the Carmen line this year. I would very much not be surprised by that.

So, exciting year for Blue Origin, exciting few years for them coming up, and I expect to be talking about them more and more now that these new Glenn details are out there, they're signing customers, they've got a hot fire coming up soon. So much activity in the Blue Origin world that I think they're going to start to become a recurring topic on this show. So with that, that's about it for this week. Thank you so much again to the 42 of you out there supporting Main Engine Cutoff on Patreon. Don't forget to follow me on Twitter at WeHaveMiko and check out what I'm doing on the blog during the week to keep up between shows and hold you

over till the next one. But until then, thank you very much for listening and I'll talk to you next week.