It may seem odd for competing rockets to use the same engine, but as Bruno has explained, it was less expensive for ULA to procure its main engines from Blue Origin than Aerojet Rocketdyne. The engine will power both Vulcan-Centaur and also the company's New Glenn rocket, which is unlikely to debut before at least 2022. "That is always a good moment in time in the development program, because that means your big technical stuff is behind you," he said during Friday's interview.īlue Origin has spent the better part of the past decade developing the BE-4, which is a staged-combustion design running on methane and liquid oxygen.
Bruno said the focus at Blue Origin is shifting from development of the engine to ramping up production. Further Reading Blue Origin just sent a jolt. The Forest works to the title page but starting the game proper causes an instant crash), on both my desktop and laptop systems. Two of these large engineseach providing about 25-percent more thrust than the RS-25s used on the Space Shuttlewill power each Vulcan rocket. Now, those problems have evidently been sorted out. I'm receiving instant crashes on startup on most of my Unity games (including Wasteland 2, Shadowrun Returns, and Gone Home, but not Endless Space, strangely enough. "It isn’t easy, but we know we can do it," he told the Denver Business Journal in August. Bruno himself confirmed during an interview two months ago that the turbopumps, which feed propellant at high pressure into the BE-4 combustion chamber, still required some troubleshooting.
Further Reading Blue Origin just sent a jolt through the aerospace industryīlue Origin has been hotfire-testing the BE-4 engine for about three years, but there have been rumors of development challenges.