ULA, Blue Origin Announce Partnership on U.S. Alternative to RD-180 Engine

The United Launch Alliance (ULA) and Blue Origin announced a partnership today to produce Blue Origin’s BE-4 rocket engine for use in future ULA rockets.

ULA currently launches the Delta IV and Atlas V rockets.  The Atlas V uses Russian RD-180 rocket engines and recent geopolitical tensions with Russia have galvanized interest in building an American-made alternative.

At a press conference today, ULA President Tory Bruno said BE-4 (Blue Engine 4) is not a “one-to-one replacement” for the RD-180 because two BE-4 engines are needed instead of one RD-180, but the BE-4 offers an opportunity to “jump into the 21st century to get more performance at lower cost.”  Bruno said the first flight of a ULA rocket with a BE-4 engine would take place in four years, followed by an “appropriate” certification period, after which use of ULA rockets with BE-4s would be “feathered in” with existing ULA rockets over time.  

Therefore this announcement has no impact on the block-buy of 36 engine cores for ULA’s existing rockets (called Evolved Expendable Launch Vehicles or EELVs) by the Air Force announced last year that is the subject of a lawsuit by SpaceX.

Blue Origin, created and owned by Amazon.com’s Jeff Bezos, has been working on the BE-4 for three years.  A less powerful version, BE-3, has completed development and is about to enter flight testing, Bezos said.   The BE-3 is for Blue Origin’s New Shepard suborbital rocket to take people to the edge of space.  The company’s overall goal is “reliable, cost-effective human access to space.”

Bruno said that ULA’s choice of Blue Origin resulted from a set of contracts it established in June with multiple U.S. companies to develop technical concepts and perform business case analyses for alternative engines.  Blue Origin won, he said, because it is so far ahead of other companies, having spent three years already on BE-4, and because its “innovative technology” will allow ULA to modernize and reduce recurring costs.   He declined to provide specifics on the degree of cost reduction, saying only that it would be “substantial.”

The BE-4 is a first stage engine and is designed to be reusable.  It uses liquid oxygen (LOX) and Liquified Natural Gas (LNG), a form of methane, as fuel.  It has 550,000 pounds of thrust.  Bezos said the company already had 10,000 seconds of test time, with hundreds of starts and relatively few failures, on the smaller BE-3.  Testing of the BE-4 is expected to begin in 2016.

At the press conference, Bruno and Bezos beamed about the new partnership, although they were not willing to disclose the financial aspects of their relationship.   Bezos exclaimed that one positive feature of the BE-4 is that it is “fully funded,” but when asked about the details of the financial arrangements, he said only that no equity investments are involved and ULA is contributing a “significant” amount to engine development “but we are not disclosing how much.”  For its part, Blue Origin is “committed to finishing the engine,” he said.

Bruno emphasized that ULA will continue to use the same upper stages as it does now with Delta IV and Atlas V, and has no plans to change the Delta IV RS-68 engine.  As for future vehicles, however, he said trade studies were still underway as to whether BE-4 would be the only engine or just one of several.   Bezos responded that Blue Origin’s goal is “to make the engine so operable, so low cost, so reliable that ULA would be crazy to use anything else.”

They emphasized that today’s announcement is not related to yesterday’s announcement of the winners of NASA’s Commercial Crew Transportation Capability (CCtCAP) contracts.  One of the two CCtCAP awardees, Boeing, plans to use ULA’s Atlas V as the launch vehicle for its CST-100 crew spacecraft, and Blue Origin is one of Boeing’s CCtCAP partners.  “Of course we’re a part of Boeing’s team,” Bezos said, “and we stand ready to help them in any way they want us to.”   He said earlier, however, that Blue Origin is still committed to building its own capability to send humans into space by the end of this decade.