I have been posting lately about private space companies. The exploration and exploitation of space has caught the imagination of some extremely wealthy people who appear to be engaging in a sort of "billionaire's space race." This post is about the space enterprise of Jeff Bezos, the entrepreneur behind Amazon, the hugely successful online retail company.
Bezos founded his new company named Blue Origin in 2000 with headquarters in Kent, Washington, but it was only revealed publicly in 2003 when Bezos acquired a series of lots in Culberson County Texas for a test facility. The goal of Blue Origin is to develop and manufacture new aerospace technologies which will permit private access to space at a much lower cost than current space missions as well as increasing the reliability of space craft. As Bezos put it, he wants to allow "anyone to go into space." Bezos said that Blue Origin was going to start with suborbital flights and then move on to orbital flights and beyond in an incremental process. Blue Origin wants to develop space craft that can take off and land vertically.
Blue Origin launched the Charon test vehicle powered by Rolls Royce jet engines in 2005. In 2006, the Goddard test vehicle was launched in November. It flew successfully and was test flown two more times. Blue Origin is currently developing the New Shepart space craft which consists of a launch vehicle powered by the BE-3 engine and a space capsule that is intended to carry up to three astronauts.
Until last Wednesday, not much was known about his plans for testing the New Shepard space vehicle. In mid-April of 2015, Bezos announced that testing of his BE-3 engine was complete. Initially planned for launch in 2010, the New Shepard was launched on its first test flight on April 29, 2015 with little advanced publicity. Blue Origin reported that the new launch vehicle engine worked "flawlessly." Although the craft's "propulsion module" was designed to be recovered and reused, a problem in the hydraulic system prevented recovery. The unmanned crew capsule parachuted safely back to the launch site in West Texas following the launch.
Blue Origin is currently working on the BE-4 engine that will be able to carry up to forty thousand pound payloads into orbit. Bezos claims that the BE-4 will be "the highest-performing, most cost-efficient rocket on the market." The fuel for the new engine will be liquid natural gas which is less expensive than fuel now used to supply power for missions in space. The engine is intended to be used for weeks in space as opposed to the current engines which are used for hours. Blue Origin is developing the engine for use by the Boeing-Lockheed Martin new Vulcan space capsule being developed for their United Launch Alliance (ULA).
Blue Origin is investigating a number of different possible launch sites on the East Coast of the U.S. The new site(s) will be used to manufacture and launch large space vehicles. This effort is called Project Panther. Blue Origin had been negotiating with NASA for use of a mothballed launch pad at the Kennedy Space Center but dropped out of such talks after a disagreement with NASA about Elon Musk's SpaceX company possible acquisition of the launch pad. Now Blue Origin would prefer to have a private launch site not under control of NASA or the U.S. government.
New Shepard spacecraft:
