Disaster! BE-4 Failure...

The billionaire Jeff Bezos is no stranger to success. He controls Amazon, the biggest online commerce store ever known to man, which he founded. Of course, he stepped down from the role of CEO late last year, but he's been doing so as the third richest man on earth. Bezos also has a media empire with ownership of the Washington Post. Coming down to Blue Origin, a commercial spaceflight company the billionaire founded in Success is not completely unheard of there either. The company is on record to have successfully landed its New Shepard rocket vertically after it returned from space. That is, the rocket landed upright on its legs. The boosters were even reused. A pretty cool achievement. But sadly, that's all Blue Origin can boast of despite the backing of its billionaire founder. The most remarkable is the rocket engine BE-4. It's a horrendous failure compared to the Raptor. Welcome back to Alpha Tech. Don't forget, hit that like button and subscribe to the channel. Following Aerojet's acquisition of Pratt & Whitney Rocketdyne in 2012, Blue Origin President Rob Meyerson saw an opportunity to fill a gap in the defense industrial base. Blue Origin publicly entered the liquid rocket engine business by partnering with ULA on the development of the BE-4 and working with other companies to replace Russia's RD-180. Unfortunately, it turns out this opportunity was not easily achieved, and on the contrary, it's become the grave for Blue Origin. The company began work on the BE-4 back in 2011, although no public announcement was made until September 2014. This was their first engine to combust liquid oxygen and liquefied natural gas propellants. In September of 2014, in a choice labeled as a stunner by Space News, the large launch vehicle manufacturer and launch service provider ULA selected the BE-4 as the main engine for a new primary launch vehicle. Blue Origin said the BE-4 would be ready for flight by 2017. However, until now, you can see, Blue Origin still has not delivered the engine to ULA. Yeah, the rocket industry is really a difficult thing, but it can't be justified because of this. To clarify, let's take a look at the SpaceX Raptor, a methane-liquid-oxygen engine with design indicators similar to the BE-4. The development process of SpaceX's Raptor engine itself can be regarded as an engineering miracle within the industry. Its speed and frequent iterations are beyond the reach of competitors. Relative to almost any other large-scale engine development program in the last half-century, Raptor's 29-month, 100-engine milestone is an extraordinary achievement. The company now is even developing the next generation of Raptor. Not only are they far behind in terms of production speed, but even when compared to terms of specs, Blue Origin's engine is completely incomparable to SpaceX. Blue Origin engineers have been tossing and turning day and night to solve the BE-4 problems for almost half a decade. Meanwhile, SpaceX has not only ramped up production to dizzying speed but also built many other upgraded versions. On its very first static fire last year, it appears that SpaceX's first finished Raptor 2 prototype had narrowly stolen BE-4's crown, briefly generating main combustion chamber pressure of 321 bar and as much as 245 tons of thrust. And now, the design is even more stable. SpaceX has been able to remove many flanges on the engine, going as far as hoping to remove all flanges on Raptor 2.5, which would increase thrust to 250 tons and debut on Booster 12. What a great development! On the other side, BE-4 delays have been accruing in the program for five years, including turbo pump problems, combustion instability, overheating, and shorter than planned engine life. In addition, it can be traced to an at times distracted founder, Jeff Bezos, some to the CEO Bezos hired to run Blue Origin in 2017, Bob Smith, and some to the COVID-19 pandemic. One of the most persistent problems, sources say, is that BE-4 engine testing and development programs have been relatively hardware poor in recent years. Effectively, this means the factory in Washington has not had enough components to build development engines, and that's led to extended periods which no testing had occurred on the stands in Texas. It's surprising to hear this because back in the spring of 2017, Blue Origin stated publicly its development program was hardware rich. After arriving as CEO in late 2017, however, Smith appears to have focused more on a substantial reorganization of Blue Origin's leadership rather than hardware development. Other programs were prioritized, too, so the BE-4 team did not get all the resources and freedom it needed to proceed at full throttle. Being hardware rich costs more, but it typically allows a program to move quickly and much more quickly. A program that's hardware rich, for example, might purchase 10 components from a supplier when it might only need two. The idea is to have spares when things go wrong, as they always do in technical development programs like those for rockets and engines. The most recent public example of this is SpaceX's Starship development program. As it worked to demonstrate the capability to land its massive Starship prototypes, SpaceX churned them out in rapid manner at the South Texas factory one after another. After the company finally succeeded in landing its SN15 prototype, the next-in-line, fully-completed SN16 vehicle was simply scrapped. SpaceX has built about as many 50-meter Starship prototypes in the last two years, as Blue Origin has built BE-4 development engines in five years. Starship's development has been cost-intensive, but it's also been rapid, and this is a properly run, hardware-rich program. In addition to hardware issues, there's other development struggles, as well. Blue Origin spent much of 2019 redesigning turbo machinery within the BE-4 engine and then testing those fixes late that year into 2020. This issue now appears to be largely behind the company, and COVID-19 also impacted development and testing, with engineers largely working remotely in 2020. That made it more difficult to be hands-on with the engines alongside the technician in the factory. Blue Origin has also had to deal with the stringent requirements from ULA for aspects like combustion instability. This potential problem has plagued U.S. rocket engines since the massive F-1 engine built for the Saturn V rocket back in the 1960s. Combustion instability involves rapid, unexpected pressure change inside the thrust chamber during the ignition of fuel and oxidizer. If this instability propagates, it can destroy an engine. The challenge for Blue Origin is that in working for ULA, it's essentially dealing with the U.S. military, which has exacting standards for the performance of rocket engines launching its most valuable payloads. And since the BE-4 will be called upon to launch high-value satellites for the Department of Defense nearly from the beginning, it must meet those standards up front rather than after a number of test flights. The paperwork and testing required for such certification is quite lengthy. It is insanely hard to pass U.S. Space Force requirements in testing, one aerospace executive familiar with the process stated. The paperwork mass would exceed engine mass. Luckily, after so many years, Blue Origin is finally nearing the finish line. According to Eric Beeger, senior space editor at Ars Technica, who follows closely the BE-4, he quotes, The second BE-4 flight engine has arrived in Texas for testing. Now both engines for Vulcan's debut flight are in work. Assuming tests go well, the engines could ship to the ULA during the first half of September. After all, even though it's late, Blue Origin will have to fulfill its responsibility not only to ULA but to the American taxpayers. And that's all for today's video. What do you think about BE-4? Let us know in the comments below and if you enjoyed today's video, please leave us with a like and consider subscribing for more content just like this. Thanks and we'll see you tomorrow.