Blue Origin Completes the Delivery of Flight Engines to ULA for Vulcan’s Initial Launch
Blue Origin has delivered a set of BE-4 engines for the maiden launch of United Launch Alliance’s (ULA) new Vulcan Centaur booster next year. The engines were delivered to ULA’s manufacturing facility in Decatur, Ala., after final acceptance testing.
“We are very pleased to receive the first two engines for Vulcan’s inaugural flight,” said Tory Bruno, ULA president and CEO. “Development of this new engine is complete, and the performance of the engine is outstanding. It has been a great team effort working together with our partners at Blue Origin and we can’t wait to see Vulcan fly.”
Each Blue Origin’s liquid oxygen/methane BE-4 engines provides 550,000 pounds of thrust. The engines are manufactured in Kent, Wash., and Huntsville, Ala. They are tested in West Texas and at the historic 4670 Test Stand at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville.
“We’re excited to see ULA’s Vulcan fly,” said Bob Smith, CEO, Blue Origin. “The BE-4 is a great engine, and we’re proud of Team Blue for achieving this milestone as part of ULA’s team. It’s been a wonderful partnership, and this shipset is the first of many more to come.”
The Vulcan Centaur will be able to launch as much as 27.2 metric tons into low Earth orbit. The booster is designed to replace the Delta IV Heavy and Atlas V rockets that ULA currently launches.
27 responses to “Blue Origin Completes the Delivery of Flight Engines to ULA for Vulcan’s Initial Launch”
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There are my engines, Jeff!
Glad they delivered them
Tory too.
Not to mention the DoD who will always want (at least) two possible providers for their big stuff…
Now where’s New Glenn?
Where, indeed?
Maybe they could sell them as hyperloop liners?
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It’s right here:
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Finally! Only about 5 years late.
Now to see when ULA plan to launch Vulcan, and how the wet dress rehearsal or static fire go.
Static fire, not a WDR. A series of WDRs was all done by the pathfinder core over a year ago with the two dev engines installed on it.
Nice mach cones…
This is great news. The BE-4 engine is a significant new rocket engine that will add to US launch capability. Looking forward to the first Vulcan launch.
The BE-4 is interesting in cycle and performance. It’s a non-trivial achievement and the team should be very proud.
Both Raptor and BE-4 are going to be forces to be reckoned with in the coming years for the launch market. It’s a fantastic time to see almost completely privately funded, R&Ded, and produced engines on this scale.
Now that the first 2 are delivered, how long until the next set arrives ? Is that factory in Huntsville operational yet ?
Huntsville has been online over a year. But to keep the Kent factory going, they’ve had to build and send them a lot of parts before starting on their own complete engines.
Still, the next pair of BE-4s better appear a lot more quickly than this first pair or the fertilizer will really hit the ventilator.
There are at least three known sets in build at Kent.
But It won’t matter much if the payloads aren’t ready. Word has it Peregrine is likely not going to be ready in Q1 of next year and Dream Chaser is not going to be ready, even by Q3.
It’s why the Kuiper satellites were added to flight 1, and that mass simulator is waiting in the wings.
I’ll be awaiting word on the shipment timing of those “three known sets.” By way of comparison, those six engines wouldn’t even constitute a single week’s production of Raptors, which are being cranked out one per day.
And I’ll wait to see how many of those “week’s production of Raptors” actually work.
Available evidence suggests that they work better than the BE-4.
I doubt that, child. We’ve seen some very interesting videos from Tory Bruno and Blue Origin showing things like these:
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Gee Dad, I’ll take delivered engines over promised engines. And Pop, in the 21st century, production hardware tends higher quality than prototype hardware.
More seriously. BE-4 taking this long is a warning marker. Anything that takes an excessive time to bring to operations tends to develop problems if not scrutinized constantly in detail. Like those six month road construction jobs that stretch to five years that finish just in time to be obsolescent..
Well, boy. SpaceX can afford to have lots and lots of engines that don’t work. Why? They aren’t delivering to anyone. But Blue Origin is delivering engines that have to work, even if only for one important time. And with SpaceX it’s happened before, that’s one of the reasons the Raptor 1 line got cancelled, even though just a few months prior to that, Elon had been bragging on Twitter how many engines were being chucked out. What’s the story now with Raptor 2s? Why are is SpaceX and Elon so secretive about them, accept a few cases? Another hundred pieces of junk again? Raptor it seems has a longer way to go yet than we’re being lead to believe.
But here Blue Origin has demonstrated working engines time and time again. I’ve even showed you the evidence with just a couple videos. There’s more.
And the first supposedly flight-capable BE-4 couldn’t be delivered at first try because of some unspecified manufacturing defect. That’s the one that just finally showed up in Decatur after several weeks of re-work and re-testing.
I wouldn’t say Elon has been exactly “secretive” about Raptor 2s. He put one up on stage for a presentation then put one on a float in a local parade. Individual Raptors and groups of two or three are seen all the time moving along Hwy. 4. Elon has shown them in close-up in ranks on Tim Dodd’s videos and answered a lot of questions about them. The specs are very public.
So is the testing at McGregor. NSF has a 24/7/365 live feed of the test stands and cells at McGregor. BE-4 development has been a lot more publicly invisible.
I’ll chime in.
Yeah, Elon’s good with trolling and PR. But I’d also have to ask what information have actually been given about how the the R2s have performed in any capacity? What about defects? We know just as well that a good number of them have been pulled and returned or scrapped, even.
Do have accurate numbers matching the alleged number of engines built with ATPs versus dev testing or qual testing?
Anything? Bueller?
Myself, I’d like to see something concrete other than PR, fanboi videos and speculations.
At least with Blue and ULA we’re seeing real results and they’re finally starting to really show it all off instead of hide under a cloak of secrecy.
Lets see when one of them actually flies. Timely manner is an important factor in deliveries. The flown Raptors have been superseded by upgraded models.
They all work. Acceptance testing is part of production.