The success of New Shepard: reusable media and suborbital tourism

A truly historic event took place last week - Blue Origin, led by Jeff Bezos, made the first successful soft landing of the first stage of the rocket. It is curious that Bezos bypassed this success not only Elon Musk, whose attempts to put the first step on the barge two times already failed, but Richard Branson with his suborbital SpaceShipTwo, which crashed in the fall of 2014 and still has not returned to flying. Blue Origin does not pursue PR, so it’s more interesting to look at what technologies it turns out to have and what it can please us in the near future.

First successful

On November 23, a test unmanned launch of the New Shepard complex, a one-stage launch vehicle and spacecraft for suborbital space tourism, took place. The capsule reached a height of 100.5 km and successfully landed by parachute. For the first time, a booster rocket made a successful landing on engines:

Success did not come right away - during the first test launch on April 29, 2015, an altitude of 93.5 km was reached, but the rocket crashed due to pressure loss in the hydraulic system.

Sudden engine

If you dig a little deeper, the main surprise of New Shepard will be the engine. In fact, the startup by 2015 managed to create a restartable throttle engine BE-3 on a pair of "hydrogen-oxygen" with a thrust of 1 to 50 tons. The engine did not appear immediately - the engineers trained on cats, developing the BE-1 and BE-2 engines using hydrogen peroxide, but the result is still impressive.


Testing the BE-3 engine on a bench The

ability to restart and throttle over a wide range means that this engine will be very useful on the upper stages of space rockets. And the use of a hydrogen-oxygen fuel pair with a maximum specific impulse means that BE-3 will be very effective in this role. Yes, the fact that an open circuit with a phase transition is used, means that the specific impulse will be below the maximum possible 450 seconds (the exact value of the specific impulse BE-3 has not been published in open sources), but open circuit engines are simpler and cheaper, which is important for a private space company.
Theoretically, on the basis of the first stage of New Shepard, it is already possible to create a light launch vehicle that would launch several hundred kilograms into low orbit. But Blue Origin’s plans are bolder - the BE-4 engine is currently being developed with a methane-oxygen fuel pair with a thrust of 250 tons. With such an engine, it will be possible to create a medium-class launch vehicle with a carrying capacity in the region of 8 tons in low Earth orbit. It is assumed that the first stage of this rocket will also be reusable.

Comparison with Mask

Almost successful landing of the first stage of Falcon 9. Alas, “almost” is not considered ...

There was material at Geektimes that claimed that it was incorrect to compare New Shepard and Falcon 9, saying that what Bezos had achieved, Mask had already done at Grasshopper . I disagree. Yes, New Shepard is smaller, shorter, and lighter than the first stage of the Falcon 9 and does not put the payload into orbit. But both steps return from a suborbital flight and make an exact landing on a limited area, and Grasshopper was a test bench that did not restart the engine and did not rise above a kilometer. If we talk about the complexity of the task, then no one forced Musk to experiment with landing the carrier rocket immediately of the middle class, especially since he started with the Falcon 1 light rocket.
Also, both missiles must test in practice the economic benefits (or lack thereof) of reusable launch vehicles, so comparing them, despite the difference in objectives, is correct. Knowledge of negative experiencesof humanity with the Space Shuttle has made me skeptical of reusable launch vehicles. But now that we have two potentially reusable launch vehicles, especially in different classes, looking at their test of time is very interesting. I remind you that we can learn about the economic efficiency (or lack thereof) of reusable rockets years after the start of their serial operation, which neither SpaceX nor Blue Origin have been able to achieve so far. But we are witnessing an interesting experiment - the fact that Falcon 9 is a middle-class rocket, and New Shepard - a geophysical (suborbital) rocket allows us to look at the possibility of scalability of a reusable circuit. It may turn out that the complexity and cost of servicing a reusable system will fall sharply with decreasing size,

Comparison with Branson

Comparing the success of Blue Origin with SpaceX, the fact that Bezos became a very dangerous competitor in the field of suborbital space tourism, where previous years everyone was talking about Richard Branson with the SpaceShipTwo ship, was invisible. And the success of Blue Origin clearly showed that in several respects the design of New Shepard is better.
First, Blue Origin is able to experience a new stage six months after the launch vehicle accident. After the crash of SpaceShipTwo, the second flying instance, built since 2012, still does not fly. SpaceShipTwo flight tests have not been completed - the suborbital apparatus has never climbed to 100 km, and engine problems that have been detected may not have been resolved. New Shepard has already outstripped SpaceShipTwo in readiness.
Secondly, New Shepard is safer than SpaceShipTwo. Back in 2012, the emergency rescue system was tested, which, together with the standard landing system, ensures the rescue of passengers at all stages of the flight:

On SpaceShipTwo, there are no rescue systems that would be able to help passengers with the destruction of the device, as the 2014 catastrophe clearly showed. If the flight to New Shepard will be carried out in high-altitude suits that can protect against depressurization, then flight safety will reach the level that in Unions. But now, if I had an extra hundred thousand dollars and a desire to make a suborbital flight, then I would definitely choose New Shepard.

Conclusion

There is a certain irony of fate that a company that does not really pursue PR has managed to develop a very promising design and, in fact, has bypassed two companies that do not leave news feeds. The Blue Origin motto “step by step, mercilessly” is surprisingly realized.