Blue Origin is one of the largest and most well funded aerospace companies in the
world, and so far they've managed to establish a solid reputation as the laughing
stock of the online space community. We love taking the piss out of Jeff
Bezos and Blue Origin. It's a lot of fun. And while Blue might
get the most attention for launching rich folks into space on a Penis rocket,
they've also been quietly developing one of the most important rocket engines of the twenty
first century. The BEE four is an engine that the United States desperately needs
right now to maintain their presence in low Earth orbit. So the question remains,
can Blue Origin finally deliver? This is the space race? Okay,
So instead of jumping straight into a bunch of technical specifications that I only pretend
to understand, let's first talk about why this rocket engine is so important.
Because this is no exaggeration on our part. The B four is critical to
the future of American rocketry. This thing has to work. The BEE four
willpower Blue origins own new Glenn rocket, the company's first orbital class vehicle,
which also happens to be one of the largest rockets ever designed, featuring a
seven meters diameter, cargo faring, and having the added bonus of a fully
reusable booster stage. But this is not the reason that the BEE four is
important. As far as anyone can tell, the only missions that are critical
to the specific capabilities of New Glen are going to be Blue Origins own orbital
Reef space station deployment, and also their undeveloped Blue moon Lander for the Artemis
five lunar mission. Now, those are both really cool, we're stoked to
see them happen, but they're not immediately critical. What is important right now
is getting a new American rocket into service that can handle medium to heavy lifting
duties for NASA Space Force and the private telecommunications industry. The United Launch Alliance
Atlas five has been a workhorse rocket for the US space program since two thousand
and two. This vehicle flew ninety seven successful missions over twenty years, delivering
important payloads to low Earth orbit, geosynchronous orbit, the ISS. It landed
rovers on Mars, sent probes to orbit Jupiter, out to Pluto, and
even into the Sun. It's just a spectacularly versatile and reliable rocket, but
it's suffered from one fatal flaw at the heart of the first stage booster on
the Atlas five is an RD one eighty engine, an incredibly powerful dual combustion
chamber, dual nozzle kerosene burning rocket engine. It's a fantastic piece of Russian
engineering. And there is the problem a Russian engine powering an American rocket.
I don't need to explain why that's problematic right now. And operating alongside the
Atlas five for the past two decades has been the ULA Delta four Heavy.
This is a vehicle specifically designed for getting very heavy objects into very high altitude
orbits, so it did a job that Atlas five couldn't, but overall lack
the versatility. Delta four has only flown fifteen missions since two thousand and four,
most of them being top secret military payloads. Delta four made a name
for itself as the most badass heavy metal rocket ever because it literally lights itself
on fire in the seconds before launched to burn off excess hydrogen, and then
this trio of charred black boosters emerge from the fireball. It does look awesome
anyway. The Delta four Heavy has one more launch remaining before it is permanently
retired by ULA. The company's plan has long been to consolidate the Atlas five
and Delta four into one single rocket that can match the capabilities of both,
and this is the Vulcan Centaur. Vulcan Centaur pairs the size and payload capacity
of the Delta four with the versatile form factor and efficiency of the Atlas five.
The biggest change from the Atlas five being the replacement of the dual chamber
r D one eighty Russian engine with a pair of Blue Origin B E four
engines. So we have two of the most important rockets in the United States
that have already been discontinued, and those are both set to be replaced by
one single new rocket design. And that new rocket is going to be powered
by a Blue Origin engine that is also brand new and has never even been
flight tested before. Oh and one of the B fours that was on its
way to be fitted into a future Vulcan booster just exploded on the Blue Origin
test and a couple of weeks ago, casting some pretty serious doubt on Blue's
ability to manufacture a consistent product. The stakes are very high on this one,
so we ask again, can Blue Origin deliver? On June thirtieth,
Blue Origin experienced the rapid, unscheduled disassembly of ABE four engine at their testing
facility in West Texas. According to the company, the engine failure occurred ten
seconds into the test burn. No video has been released to the public,
but according to the people who have seen the film, the explosion was dramatic
and caused heavy damage to the testing infrastructure. Now, obviously some amount of
explosion is going to be natural to the testing process of a rocket engine.
It is a good thing to find the physical limitations for this kind of hardware
so that you know exactly what it can and can't handle. Elon Musk had
no problem admitting that SpaceX has blown up a bunch of their Raptor engines on
the testing stand and will likely continue blowing them up as they push forward with
the development of Raptor version three. Where things start to get troubling, though,
is when we see Raptors blowing up in midflight, like what happened with
the first test flight of the Starship. Failing in a test stand is expected,
but failing in a vehicle is dangerous at the least and catastrophic at the
worst. The B four engine that exploded in June was on its way to
become flight engine number three in the second build of the Vulcan Center first stage
Booster. One complete Vulcan booster fitted with two B fours has already been flight
certified and is awaiting launch. So what happened to engine number three? Then?
If the product was already sold to a customer, then Blue Origin shouldn't
have been doing any kind of experimental stress testing to push it towards failure.
Intentionally, you would think that the test in question was simply to confirm that
the engine was operating with spec before going out to ULA, which it clearly
was not. So either there is some fundamental flaw in the Bee four that
affects the reliability of the architecture, or this particular engine was just a victim
of poor workmanship. Basically, it wasn't put together properly. Now, obviously
an error on the production line would be a lot more simple to correct than
a baked in design flaw, but neither outcome is good, and we don't
know the full story yet. The biggest problem here for Blue Origin is that,
according to their own description of the Bee four and its performance characteristics,
there really is no good reason for it to have failed at standard operating spec
So let's elaborate on that. The line that Blue Origin loves to use when
describing their engine is the BEE four was designed from the beginning to be a
medium performing version of a high performance architecture. So the SpaceX Raptor is an
ultra high pressure, full flow staged combustion cycle engine that is designed to push
the limits of what is physically possible with a chemical rocket. It is a
high performance version of a high performance architecture, and that's why SpaceX has had
so many different iterations of the Raptor design and why they are still having trouble
with harnessing the power of this engine. While the philosophy at Blue has been
to make an engine that would be capable of raptorlike performance, but to never
actually push it anywhere near that edge that SpaceX is riding. So, for
example, the combustion chamber pressure on a SpaceX Raptor two is four thousand,
four hundred psi, and with Raptor three they are now pushing that to five
thousand, one hundred psi. Over at Blue Origin, the chamber pressure of
B four is one thousand, nine hundred and forty psi, which is obviously
going to be much easier to contain and control. Makes sense right, Blue
says this is a conscious design choice made to lower development risk while meeting performance,
schedule and reusability requirements, which is all fine and good, except the
engines are blowing up under a standard pre flight certification test, which doesn't really
support Blue Origins design theory, does it. We draw so many comparisons between
the B four and the Raptor because these are two of the first rocket engines
to utilize a new type of chemical fuel, which is liquefied natural gas,
also known as methane. Obviously, methane is nothing new, it's been around
since the birth of the universe, but the process of cooling it down to
a cryogenic temperature to make liquid rocket fuel is a very recent development, and
so far, no one has been able to get a rocket all the way
into low Earth orbit using a methane powered engine. There have been attempts.
Dealing with liquefied natural gas or LNG is a lot more complicated than your typical
rocket fuel, which is just a purified version of kerosene, but LANG does
have some major benefits. For one, LANG can be used to self pressurize
its own fuel tank. This is known as autogenous pressurization. So the way
that rockets are designed, they need to have a certain amount of internal pressure
inside their tanks in order to stop them from collapsing in on themselves. And
because methane has such a low boiling point of negative one hundred and sixty one
degrees celsius, it's to start evaporating into a gas pretty much as soon as
it gets pumped into the fuel tank, and it's going to continue to boil
off throughout the launch process. That gas is going to create enough pressure to
maintain the integrity of the fuel tank, so even as the liquid is burned
away during flight, the gas will keep the tank full and keep the rocket
body strong. If you look at the SpaceX Starship as it's being prepped for
launch, there is a big white cloud shooting out from the side of the
rocket. That is excess methane gas being vented from the fuel tank to regulate
the internal pressure. With a rocket fuel like kerosene that stays liquid at ambient
temperature, you still need something to fill the void and maintain tank pressure,
so rockets will use big canisters of helium gas. Helium is currently in short
supply on Earth, so we should be conserving it as much as possible.
So that's neat. But the real advantage of methane fuel is that it is
clean burning. Now that's not to say a methane burning rocket is environmentally friendly.
It still releases a bunch of carbon and greenhouse gases into the atmosphere,
which is bad. But the burning of methane and oxygen doesn't leave behind a
solid carbon residue on the internal components the way that a long chain hydrocarbon like
kerosene does. In order to reuse a kerosene burning engine like a SpaceX Merlin,
you have to go in and scrub out all of the leftover carbon deposits
from inside the engine. Obviously, this doesn't stop SpaceX from reusing Merlin engines
on the Falconine booster, but it's not ideal. So in theory, a
methane engine should be capable of rapid reuse, meaning that you could land a
booster, return it to the launchpad, refuel, and fly again, all
within a couple of hours. Elon Musk talks about launching the same super heavy
booster up to three times in one day. This is going to be critical
for the new Glen, which is supposed to have a fully reusable first stage
booster, and the capability is also going to be taken advantage of by ULA
with the Vulcan Centaur. They don't have any plans on trying to land the
entire booster core, but ULA has developed a system where the thrust section of
the booster will separate following main engine cutoff, and it's going to deploy an
inflatable heat shield that will allow the two engines to safely fall back to Earth
and land in the ocean where they can be recovered and reinstalled in a new
Vulcan booster. So even though the idea of reusing an entire rocket booster is
still out of reach for most rocket builders, the B four opens up the
capability for them to at least reuse the engines, which is still a massive
improvement over the old system. So Blue Origins first orbital rocket engine is a
very important piece of hardware, not just for themselves but for the entire spaceflight
industry. But in true Blue Origin style, the B four is also a
bit problem matic and unpredictable, which is about as much as you can expect
from an aerospace company that has yet to actually get a product into outer space,
but it's definitely going to make for an interesting story to follow in the
months and years to come.