The BE-3 (''Blue Engine 3'') is a LH2/ LOX

rocket engine A rocket engine uses stored rocket propellants as the reaction mass for forming a high-speed propulsive jet of fluid, usually high-temperature gas. Rocket engines are reaction engines, producing thrust by ejecting mass rearward, in accorda ...

developed by

Blue Origin Blue Origin, LLC is an American private spaceflight, privately funded aerospace manufacturer and sub-orbital spaceflight services company headquartered in Kent, Washington. Founded in 2000 by Jeff Bezos, the founder and executive chairman of Am ...

. The engine began development in the early 2010s, and completed

acceptance testing In engineering and its various subdisciplines, acceptance testing is a test conducted to determine if the requirements of a specification or contract are met. It may involve chemical tests, physical tests, or performance tests. In systems ...

in early 2015. The engine is being used on the

New Shepard New Shepard is a fully reusable suborbital launch vehicle developed by Blue Origin for space tourism. The vehicle is named after Alan Shepard, the first American astronaut in space. The vehicle is capable of vertical takeoff and vertical lan ...

suborbital A sub-orbital spaceflight is a spaceflight in which the spacecraft reaches outer space, but its trajectory intersects the atmosphere or surface of the gravitating body from which it was launched, so that it will not complete one orbital ...

rocket, for which test flights began in 2015 and a first crewed flight occurred in 2021. The engine was under consideration by

United Launch Alliance United Launch Alliance (ULA), legally United Launch Alliance, LLC, is an American spacecraft launch service provider that manufactures and operates a number of rocket vehicles that are capable of launching spacecraft into orbits around Earth, a ...

(ULA) for use in a new second stage, the

Advanced Cryogenic Evolved Stage The Advanced Cryogenic Evolved Stage (ACES) was a proposed liquid oxygen/liquid hydrogen upper-stage from 2005 to 2020 for use on a number of different launch vehicles produced by Boeing, Lockheed Martin, and after a late-2006 merger, United La ...

, in ULA's Vulcan orbital launch vehicle with first flight in the 2020s.

History

Following Aerojet’s acquisition of Pratt & Whitney Rocketdyne in 2012, Blue Origin president

Rob Meyerson Robert E. "Rob" Meyerson is an American aerospace engineer and executive known for his role in the development of reusable rocket launch systems. Meyerson is the founder of Delalune Space, a management consulting firm providing advisory services ...

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. Meyerson announced the selection of Huntsville, AL as the location of Blue Origin’s rocket production factory in June 2017. The BE-3 follows the earliest

development efforts at Blue Origin in the 2000s. Blue Origin's first engine was a "simple, single-propellant engine" called the Blue Engine-1 (BE-1) which used

peroxide In chemistry, peroxides are a group of compounds with the structure , where R = any element. The group in a peroxide is called the peroxide group or peroxo group. The nomenclature is somewhat variable. The most common peroxide is hydrogen p ...

propellant and generated only of

thrust Thrust is a reaction force described quantitatively by Newton's third law. When a system expels or accelerates mass in one direction, the accelerated mass will cause a force of equal magnitude but opposite direction to be applied to that ...

, and their second, the Blue Engine-2 (BE-2) which was a bipropellant engine using

kerosene Kerosene, paraffin, or lamp oil is a combustible hydrocarbon liquid which is derived from petroleum. It is widely used as a fuel in aviation as well as households. Its name derives from el, κηρός (''keros'') meaning " wax", and was re ...

and peroxide, producing thrust. In January 2013, the company announced the development of the Blue Engine-3 BE-3, a new

liquid hydrogen Liquid hydrogen (LH2 or LH2) is the liquid state of the element hydrogen. Hydrogen is found naturally in the molecular H2 form. To exist as a liquid, H2 must be cooled below its critical point of 33 K. However, for it to be in a fully l ...

liquid oxygen Liquid oxygen—abbreviated LOx, LOX or Lox in the aerospace, submarine and gas industries—is the liquid form of molecular oxygen. It was used as the oxidizer in the first liquid-fueled rocket invented in 1926 by Robert H. Goddard, an app ...

(LH2/LOX)

cryogenic In physics, cryogenics is the production and behaviour of materials at very low temperatures. The 13th IIR International Congress of Refrigeration (held in Washington DC in 1971) endorsed a universal definition of “cryogenics” and “cr ...

engine. The engine was originally announced to produce thrust, with initial thrust chamber tests planned for mid-February 2013 at NASA Stennis. The thrust chamber tests were run sometime in 2013. The BE-3 was successfully tested in late 2013 on a full-duration simulated suborbital burn, with coast phases and engine relights, "demonstrating deep throttle, full power, long-duration and reliable restart all in a single-test sequence." NASA has released a video of the test. By December 2013, Blue Origin updated engine specifications following engine tests conducted on test stands at ground level, near sea level. This demonstrated that the engine could produce of thrust at full power, and could successfully throttle down to as low as for use in controlled vertical landings if needed for that purpose on particular launch vehicles. The final engine specifications, released in April 2015 following the full test phase, included a minimum thrust of , an even wider throttling capability by 20 percent than the preliminary numbers, while maintaining the previously released full power thrust spec. , the engine had "demonstrated more than 160 starts and of operation at Blue Origin's test facility near Van Horn, Texas."Blue Origin Tests New Engine
''Aviation Week'', Guy Norris, 2013-12-09, accessed 2014-09-16. Additional testing of the BE-3 was completed in 2014, with the engine "simulating a sub-scale booster

mission duty cycle." Test stand testing of the engine was completed by April 2015, with over 450 engine firings and a cumulative engine test time of over 500 minutes. Blue Origin stated it would make the first test flight of its ''New Shepard'' vehicle later in 2015, with the BE-3PM engine. In the event, Blue Origin made the first

flight test Flight testing is a branch of aeronautical engineering that develops specialist equipment required for testing aircraft behaviour and systems. Instrumentation systems are developed using proprietary transducers and data acquisition systems. D ...

of the BE-3PM engine on the ''

'' suborbital vehicle before the month was out, flying a boost profile to altitude on 29 April 2015. In April 2015,

(ULA) was considering the BE-3 for use in a new second stage, the

(ACES), which was planned to become the primary upper stage for ULA's Vulcan orbital launch vehicle in the 2020s. The Vulcan was planned to begin orbital flights in 2019 with an existing Centaur upper stage, and was considering three engines from various manufacturers for the ACES stage which would putatively begin flight in 2023, with selection expected before 2019. While development of a sea-level version of the engine, BE-3PM, was completed and fully qualified by early 2015, Blue Origin said then that they intend to develop a

vacuum A vacuum is a space devoid of matter. The word is derived from the Latin adjective ''vacuus'' for "vacant" or " void". An approximation to such vacuum is a region with a gaseous pressure much less than atmospheric pressure. Physicists often ...

version of the engine to operate in space. In January 2016, the

US Air Force The United States Air Force (USAF) is the air service branch of the United States Armed Forces, and is one of the eight uniformed services of the United States. Originally created on 1 August 1907, as a part of the United States Army Sig ...

provided partial development funding to

Orbital ATK Northrop Grumman Innovation Systems (NGIS) was a sector (business segment) of Northrop Grumman from 2018 through 2019. It was formed from Orbital ATK Inc. a company which resulted from the merger of Orbital Sciences Corporation and parts of Alli ...

to develop an extendable

nozzle A nozzle is a device designed to control the direction or characteristics of a fluid flow (specially to increase velocity) as it exits (or enters) an enclosed chamber or pipe. A nozzle is often a pipe or tube of varying cross sectional area, ...

for the Blue Origin BE-3U. On 20 July, 2021, the engine design was used in its first crewed flight of the

. On September 12, 2022, New Shepard 3 with RSS H.G. Wells capsule suffered an un-contained engine failure that resulted in the triggering of a launch abort and the loss of the vehicle.

Engine design

BE-3PM

The first stage variant of the BE-3, the BE-3PM, uses a pump-fed engine design, with a

combustion tap-off cycle The combustion tap-off cycle is a power cycle of a bipropellant rocket engine. The cycle takes a small portion of hot exhaust gas from the rocket engine's combustion chamber and routes it through turbopump turbines to pump fuel before being exhaus ...

to take a small amount of combustion gases from the main

combustion chamber A combustion chamber is part of an internal combustion engine in which the fuel/air mix is burned. For steam engines, the term has also been used for an extension of the firebox which is used to allow a more complete combustion process. Intern ...

in order to power the engine

turbopump A turbopump is a propellant pump with two main components: a rotodynamic pump and a driving gas turbine, usually both mounted on the same shaft, or sometimes geared together. They were initially developed in Germany in the early 1940s. The purpo ...

BE-3U

For Blue Origin's orbital launch vehicle—

New Glenn New Glenn is a heavy-lift orbital launch vehicle in development by Blue Origin. Named after NASA astronaut John Glenn, design work on the vehicle began in 2012. Illustrations of the vehicle, and the high-level specifications, were initial ...

—Blue has developed an open

expander cycle The expander cycle is a power cycle of a bipropellant rocket engine. In this cycle, the fuel is used to cool the engine's combustion chamber, picking up heat and changing phase. The now heated and gaseous fuel then powers the turbine that drives ...

variant of the BE-3, the BE-3U, for use in upper stages. Two of these engines will be used to power New Glenn second stage. In November 2015, the engine was projected to have a vacuum thrust of . Development had begun on the extendable nozzle for BE-3U by early 2016. By August 2018, BE-3U engine development had proceeded, test engines built, and had accumulated over 700 seconds of

test Test(s), testing, or TEST may refer to: * Test (assessment), an educational assessment intended to measure the respondents' knowledge or other abilities Arts and entertainment * ''Test'' (2013 film), an American film * ''Test'' (2014 film), ...

time, confirming performance assumptions in the design.BE-3 test update
Blue Origin, 10 August 2018, accessed 15 August 2018]. In February 2019, Blue Origin updated the thrust of BE-3U as used on New Glenn to . In February 2020, Blue Origin opened up a factory in Huntsville, Alabama, to produce BE-3U and BE-4 engines.

Technical specifications

The performance of the sea-level version of the BE-3, the BE-3PM, include: *Thrust: at full power * Rocket engine throttling, Throttle reduction capability:

References

External links

* {{Rocket engines Blue Origin rocket engines Rocket engines using hydrogen propellant Rocket engines using the tap-off cycle Rocket engines of the United States New Shepard