As NASA discards reusable engines, Blue Origin and SpaceX push new frontiers

On the Monday before Thanksgiving NASA made what it deemed a momentous announcement: the space agency had awarded $1.16 billion to Aerojet Rocketdyne for rocket engines that would power its “Journey to Mars.” By contrast, a few hours earlier, the private space company Blue Origin secretly launched a rocket into space and safely landed it. The contrast between the deal struck in corridors of Washington D.C. and what had happened in the desert of West Texas could not have been more stark.

The engines that will power NASA’s new rocket, the Space Launch System, were first developed in 1970. These RS-25 engines that gave the space shuttle its thrust were engineering marvels; with some refurbishment NASA could use them over and over again. But now NASA is funding a contract to restart production of those old engines because they would no longer be reused. Like the rest of the massive SLS rocket, its engines will be used once and then burn up in the atmosphere.

In contrast to the billions of dollars NASA spends on legacy hardware, Blue Origin has received about $25 million from the agency during its 15-year existence. That’s less than the cost of a single RS-25 engine. With the launch of its New Shepard vehicle, Blue Origin has gone not only for reusable engines but a reusable booster and a reusable spacecraft. Why? Because this approach is much, much cheaper than throwing flight-quality hardware away after every launch.

In a call with reporters after New Shepard’s launch, Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos was almost incredulous when asked about NASA’s vision for the future of rocketry with its completely expendable SLS launcher. “The holy grail of rocketry is full reusability,” Bezos explained.

Bezos then spoke of Wernher von Braun, the German rocket scientist who built the deadly V-2 rocket for Hitler before defecting to the United States at the end of World War II. Later von Braun would help popularize the exploration of space in his adopted country, and he designed the Saturn V rocket that blasted Neil and Buzz to the Moon. The German would be shocked, Bezos said, that NASA is still flying essentially the same hardware he designed in the 1960s.

“If von Braun came back from the dead and looked around at our current fleet of rockets he would recognize them all,” Bezos said. “He’d say ‘Oh, you’re still throwing them in the ocean. I thought by now you’d be reusing them.’”

NASA, of course, has aimed for low-cost, reusable vehicles in the past. Just three months after the flight of Apollo 11, in 1969, NASA’s chief of manned spaceflight said as much. At NASA’s space shuttle symposium that year George Mueller set an ambitious goal for the vehicle: slash the cost of flying stuff to orbit all the way down to $25 a pound. Regular folks could buy tickets into space. “We can open up a whole new era of space exploration,” Mueller said at the meeting.

But the shuttle, although a technical wonder and the world’s first reusable orbital spacecraft, did not come close to this lofty goal. Over the course of three decades and 135 flights, the shuttle’s costs were much closer to $25,000 a pound. The space shuttle had two accidents, first in 1986 and then in 2003. It also wasn’t as easy to reuse the vehicle as hoped. And with traditional NASA contracting processes, the shuttle proved very expensive to fly.

Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk ,and other dotcom billionaires now getting into the spaceflight business were kids when NASA developed the space shuttle. They watched Star Trek and dreamed of living in a universe like that one day. Then they went on to make their fortunes with Amazon, Paypal, and other ventures, always figuring that NASA and its reusable space shuttle would increase access to space—and ultimately jumpstart the colonization of other worlds.

But it never happened. Instead of thousands or millions of people living in space today, six do, on the International Space Station. Instead of NASA pushing humans deeper into the solar system, astronauts haven't left low-Earth orbit since the Apollo program.

Following the space shuttle’s retirement, NASA has gone the other direction when it comes to reusability. Congress directed the space agency to build the SLS rocket, which is an expensive way to explore space. This powerful rocket could one day get humans to Mars if Congress adds $5 billion or $10 billion a year to NASA’s budget, but there’s little evidence that will happen. Instead NASA seems likely to have enough money to build the rocket, but not to fund the payloads to fly on it that would enable exploration of the Moon, Mars or elsewhere. In the parlance of numerous outside reviews of the agency's plans, the SLS program lacks "sustainability."

In the shadow of the multibillion-dollar SLS rocket program, Blue Origin, as well as SpaceX and a small constellation of other like-minded companies, have continued to develop reusable spacecraft and launch vehicles. They have sought to modernize the launch industry by trying to bring spaceflight much closer to the regular operation of the airline industry. “That has to be the vision, and that has to be the goal,” Bezos said during the media call.

Much was made of the Twitter tiff last Tuesday between Musk and Bezos over the magnitude of Blue Origin’s achievement. What SpaceX is trying to do, land its larger Falcon 9 booster on a barge after it propels a payload into space, is technically more difficult. But both ambitious men are after the same prize. They realize that the government is not going to democratize space or solve the problem of getting people out there. Only cheap access will do that.

Aerospace engineer Jeff Greason, a founder XCOR, a company trying to build a reusable, ultra-low-cost spaceplane, explained it to Ars this way: “There are so many economic uses of space that aren’t being made only because the cost of transportation is too high, and the reliability of that transportation is too low. When we solve that problem, instead arguing over what one thing we will do as a nation in space, we will be talking about all of the things that are being done in space. Then there won’t be the space program, there will be the space economy.”

Bezos, Musk and the others aren't there yet. They have a long way to go. But after Blue Origin's Thanksgiving week treat in West Texas, they're considerably closer.