Blue Origin, Jeff Bezos' Private Spaceflight Firm, Bets On Reusable Rockets

Artist's illustration of the orbital crew-carrying spaceship planned by the private company Blue Origin

By: Mike Wall
Published: 04/30/2012 06:26 AM EDT on SPACE.com

Blue Origin wants to fly under the radar all the way into space.

The secretive private spaceflight firm, which was established in 2000 by Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos, is developing systems to launch astronauts to both suborbital and orbital space. While Blue Origin releases details about its plans and progress sparingly, the company's basic business model has come out.

It all revolves around reusable rockets and spacecraft, developed in incremental steps.

"It's really about developing and using vertical powered landing to drive reusable systems that can increase reliability and lower cost," Rob Meyerson, the company's president and program manager, said in a rare public presentation last September at a conference in Long Beach, Calif.

"We believe our incremental, long-term approach is going to develop the systems and technologies and vehicles that'll result in safe and affordable human spaceflight," added Meyerson, who spoke at Space 2011, a meeting organized by the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics. [Photos: Blue Origin's Secretive Spaceship]

Working with NASA

Blue Origin is one of four companies that have received funding through NASA's Commercial Crew Development (CCDev) program, which seeks to spur the advancement of American private spaceflight capabilities. The other three firms are Boeing, SpaceX and Sierra Nevada Corp.

CCDev's goal is to help get a handful of companies up and running as soon as safely possible, so the United States has its own way to send astronauts to the International Space Station and other destinations in low-Earth orbit. Since NASA's space shuttle fleet was grounded in 2011, the nation has relied on Russia's Soyuz vehicles to perform this taxi service.

Blue Origin got $3.7 million in 2010 in the first round of grants, called CCDev-1, and another $22 million last year under CCDev-2. The company is  designing, developing and testing systems for both suborbital and orbital human spaceflight. [Blue Origin's Secretive Space Vehicle Explained (Infographic)]

Suborbital comes first.

"We're beginning with suborbital as a means to gain that experience, gain that practice that'll lead on to orbital human spaceflight," Meyerson said.

Suborbital: New Shepard

Blue Origin's suborbital vehicle is called New Shepard. The name is a nod to NASA astronaut Alan Shepard, who became the first American in space when he launched on a brief suborbital flight on May 5, 1961.

New Shepard consists of two reusable parts: a crew capsule and a propulsion module. A few minutes after liftoff, the propulsion module separates and heads back to Earth, eventually making a vertical, rocket-powered landing near the launch site (Blue Origin's private spaceport about 25 miles north of tiny Van Horn, Texas).

The crew module, which is designed to carry three or more people, coasts on to the edge of space before returning to Earth as well, its descent slowed by parachutes.

Blue Origin envisions multiple uses for New Shepard. It could carry tourists interested in experiencing microgravity and seeing the curvature of Earth against the blackness of space. The company also hopes scientists will book flights on the vehicle to take experiments up to space.

When it's fully developed, New Shepard should allow people to get to space relatively quickly and efficiently, according to company officials.

"The system design is optimized for rapid turnaround with a very small ground crew," Meyerson said. "We're talking tens of people, as opposed to thousands in previous reusable vehicles."

Blue Origin has conducted a handful of flights with suborbital test vehicles since 2006, including two in 2011. The second of last year's flights, which took place on Aug. 24, resulted in failure; the "PM2" vehicle crashed after reaching an altitude of about 45,000 feet (14,000 meters).

Orbital: The Space Vehicle

Blue Origin is also working on a manned vessel for orbital flight, a biconic craft called the Space Vehicle (SV).

"This development builds on our suborbital New Shepard crew capsule development," Meyerson said. "The lessons we learn in that program roll directly into the SV, the orbital system development."

The Space Vehicle is designed to transport up to seven astronauts to low-Earth orbit, though it can also carry a mix of cargo and crew, Meyerson said. When the spaceship comes back to Earth, Blue Origin wants it to touch down on land, with water landings as a backup.

Blue Origin is designing a reusable first-stage booster to help get the Space Vehicle to orbit. Like New Shepard's Propulsion Module, this rocket will return to Earth and make a vertical, powered landing.

"Then the orbital booster can be refueled and launched again, allowing improved reliability and lowering the cost of human access to space," Blue Origin officials write on the company's website.

Blue Origin doesn't release schedules or timelines of its projected progress. But Meyerson said the Space Vehicle might be ferrying astronauts to and from the space station in less than five years if all goes well.

"In our proposal with the government funding that we laid out, we believe [operations could begin] between 2016 and 2018," he said.

NASA dominated American human spaceflight for more than 50 years, but in the 21st century, private spaceflight companies are building new space taxis to launch more people into orbit. SPACE.com looks at the major players in the commercial spaceflight race in our weeklong series: The Private Space Taxi Race. This is Part 4 in that series.

You can follow SPACE.com senior writer Mike Wall on Twitter: @michaeldwall. Follow SPACE.com for the latest in space science and exploration news on Twitter @Spacedotcom and on Facebook.

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Comments

[White Raven]

06:16 AM on 05/03/2012

Someone tell me where I can buy stock in Blue Origin.

[LaoShur]

04:33 AM on 05/02/2012

I knew the world would come to this. Corporate cowboys using the technology given to them by taxpayers to better their OWN "secretive" plans and MOST assuredly use what ever info they gain for bettering their OWN lot and NOT humanities!!
To paraphrase Ted Nugent, if Americans don't gain control of democracy in the next four years, then I will either be dead or in prison!

[brians898]

03:55 PM on 05/02/2012

Here is what Ted Nugent actually said; "If Barack Obama becomes the president in November, again, I will either be dead or in jail by this time next year." Does Nugent say anything about "gaining control of democracy" or it taking "four years?"
Next time you write a sentence like that one, simply leave out "To paraphrase Ted Nugent" and just start the sentence with "If Americans don't....." This is the part where I point out how college helped but I know that it will fall on deaf ears, right Lao?

[Kodes100]

08:39 AM on 05/01/2012

This is exciting!
Our species maybe not be very wise as witnessed by a lot of the political discussions let alone a host of other areas that we don't excel - but - we sure are intriguing when it comes to turning science fiction into reality.

[erhuh]

03:11 AM on 05/01/2012

Andy Griffith already did this.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-mR-gz9EFO8

[Edwin Keever Jr]

10:18 AM on 05/01/2012

Nip it in the bud!

[Michael K Martin]

09:42 PM on 04/30/2012

I think it's great! There needs to be a lot of commercial rocket companies. SpaceX's GM needs a Ford to compete with.

[rikster]

09:04 PM on 04/30/2012

they should build a space craft that looks like the Titanic....

[Deleuzian Nomad]

11:56 PM on 04/30/2012

reminds me of a Doctor Who Christmas special.....lol....

[Howard Scott Pearlman 59]

03:37 PM on 04/30/2012

This is a joke ... it's good enough and safe enough for the passengers to land by parachute but the lifting rockets needs a vertical return with the hugh cost in building a bigger rocket to hold the fuel capacity to do so.

[jsarets]

04:05 PM on 04/30/2012

It takes much more thrust to launch a fully-fueled rocket than it does to land a nearly-empty rocket, so they already have the power they need. My understanding is they have three engines which can throttle down to a certain fraction of full power, and they shut down the center engine for landing. The tricky part is achieving a low enough thrust for landing: maintaining combustion stability when throttled down deeply below rated thrust.

[ceekreewd]

03:12 PM on 04/30/2012

O.K. -- to reach leo, the spacecraft must have a velocity around 17,500 mph. Just to simplify, lets say the booster section of this system accelerates the payload section to just 10,000 mph and separates ---- how do they plan on slowing AND controlling this booster from 10,000 mph to a precise vertical position over a 'dot' in the desert descending at less then supersonic velocities.....

[jsarets]

03:43 PM on 04/30/2012

Typical staging velocities for TSTO are in the 4,500-6,500 mph range (2000-3000 m/s). The upper stage does most of the horizontal acceleration. The main job of the booster stage is to lift the upper stage out of the sensible atmosphere where its rocket nozzle is designed to operate. Upper stage rocket nozzles expand the exhaust gases all the way down to near-zero pressure, whereas booster stage nozzles can't expand much below sea-level ambient pressure.

The booster will likely flip retrograde after separation and restart its engines to null the horizontal velocity, then it's just a matter of precision vertical landing, which is pretty well understood in the aerospace industry. Blue Origin hired a lot of engineers who used to work for McDonnell Douglas on the DC-X project. They know what they're doing.

[expat50]

01:52 PM on 04/30/2012

Build the Space Elevator http://spaceelevator.com/

After it is built, everything else - travel to Mars and beyond - gets easier

[authorized-user]

01:06 PM on 04/30/2012

Why doesn't Amazon start it's own wireless network to service it's Kindle marketing and cloud service?
I don't see any ROI on manned space flight. Robots are less expensive and more efficient.

Aren't the Chinese starting their own GPS network?

[cosmicdart]

12:46 PM on 04/30/2012

Vertical, powered landing of propulsion modules could not have been accomplished before the advent of high speed microprocessors. I wish them well. This should lead to spaceships that land vertically on asteroids, moons, and other planets just as they have done in all those 1950's science fiction movies. Someone should make a remote controlled vertical landing rocket toy for sending mail quickly from place to place, or for making aerial photos of landscapes. Someday reusable robo-rockets will be seen in the skies by the tens of thousands automatically landing and taking off from home addresses as they deliver "goodies" at ten times the speed of sound.

[Howard Scott Pearlman 59]

12:49 PM on 04/30/2012

And all of the Sonic Booms and damage to Humans the OZONE layer will be great won't it ?

[Howard Scott Pearlman 59]

12:29 PM on 04/30/2012

Private Sector Building of Reusable Space Craft is a Terrible Idea !

In order to ensure maximum profits these Space Craft will be used way more than they should and corners for safety will be cut !

Do we really need more Space Junk and Debris ending up in orbit ?

[jsarets]

12:50 PM on 04/30/2012

The quality control on expendable space vehicles is extraordinarily difficult. Everything has to work at the same time, the first time, right off the production line, without any flight tests. Expendable launch vehicles are probably the most difficult of all manufacturing challenges.

A reusable vehicle can be flight-tested before entering operational service. Its performance can be characterized over its flight history. The components have to be designed for higher endurance, and the expense of more durable parts can be justified by the number of flights they support.

Losing a reusable vehicle is a more significant financial risk than losing an expendable vehicle. With an expendable, you're really only risking the payload, because the launch vehicle is going to wind up on the bottom of the ocean in any case. With a reusable, the business model depends on the safe return of the launch vehicle, so the reliability has to be very high.

Finally, reusable launch vehicles minimize space junk. Expendables often leave their upper stages on orbit, hopefully in designated graveyard orbits but not always. For reusables, the goal is for the upper stage to reenter and land, and the worst-case is that it burns up on reentry.

[Howard Scott Pearlman 59]

02:11 PM on 04/30/2012

NASA used hundreds of people to retrofit it's reusable rockets and passenger shuttles with a hugh budget.

The handful of people that private industry will use to keep profits high will not be up to the task of doing the job right !

And with lives of people at stake .... this is nothing short of Criminal Negligence !

[Howard Scott Pearlman 59]

12:12 PM on 04/30/2012

NASA would be better off Paying for massive research in Robot and Nano Robot Technology so we can put millions of robot workers in Space.

Massive subsidizing of joy rides for millionaires is a waste of Tax Payers Money !

And, Robots don't need sleeping quarters, food , air and waste disposal systems.

And best of all you don't have to pay to ferry the Robots back to planet earth.

One way rides is all the robots need .

Howard Scott Pearlman

[Howard Scott Pearlman 59]

11:59 AM on 04/30/2012

What a giant leap backward.

Doing suborbital 51 year out of date flights !

And it looks like this is just a Giant Venture to rip off MONEY from NASA !

Why should NASA subsidize PRIVATE Space Flight for Profit ?

[ThinkCreeps]

12:24 PM on 04/30/2012

Why should NASA pay for the development of new orbital and suborbital flights?
Because it needs them.

Why redo Shepherd? Because there's good money in it.

[erhuh]

03:15 AM on 05/01/2012

NASA needs a cheap domestic way to get to the ISS and do orbital stuff. The rocket it's building is too expensive and large for that kind of work. NASA cannot afford to own and operate two systems.