I think it’s time to bet on the guys with 21st century rockets

In a first, the secretive Blue Origin rocket company invited the world to watch its Sunday launch, live. Blue Origin's New Shepard vehicle accelerated to 2,142mph, ascended into space, and returned to Earth 10 minutes later. Not that all that much of the world watched. It was Father’s Day, after all, and Blue Origin doesn’t have quite the cachet of SpaceX to draw in the masses. Moreover it’s easy enough to dismiss the achievements of Blue Origin—it’s just a small rocket, after all, and this only an unmanned suborbital flight.

Nevertheless, Sunday’s launch affirmed a singular, increasingly inescapable fact about the future of spaceflight: reusable rockets represent the future of the aerospace industry. SpaceX has proven that it can safely return large orbital rockets to Earth, both on land and at sea. With Sunday’s flight, Blue Origin has now definitively taken the next step, turning a rocket around and flying it again. Four times.

This fact won’t be easy to accept for Big Aerospace, which has built its business model around expendable launch vehicles and large government contracts. Moreover, this article is not intended to denigrate NASA, which continues to do some amazing, absolutely groundbreaking things. But our space agency does not appear to be the outfit that is going to radically rewrite the rules of launch, colonize space, and spread human settlements onto the Moon, perhaps asteroids, and eventually Mars.

NASA had its shot with reusable spaceflight when it flew the space shuttle. It was an astounding vehicle—both in its capabilities and its costs. The shuttle consisted of a spacecraft and solid rocket boosters, which were reusable, and a large external tank, which was not. It could fly multiple times a year, but the costs to refurbish the vehicle were immense. Whether the shuttle flew or not in a given year, NASA spent about $2.5 billion annually to keep a standing army of people ready to check heat-shield tiles, build external tanks, maintain launch facilities, and thousands of other tasks.

New Shepard, consisting of a small, single-engine rocket and a six-person capsule, is a much, much simpler and far less-powerful system. It does not even go into orbit. It cannot launch or service the Hubble Space Telescope. But it is dirt cheap to fly, costing in the “low thousands” of dollars to refurbish between flights. Every bit of it is reusable, except for the inexpensive liquid hydrogen and oxygen propellants. And New Shepard is just the beginning.

A new way

A few months ago, Ars had an opportunity to visit Blue Origin in Kent, Washington. While touring the facilities with Jeff Bezos and the company’s president, Rob Meyerson, we were struck by something Meyerson said as we surveyed long rows of computer terminals in an office overlooking the factory floor: “Nearly all of the work gets done here.”

The rockets Bezos is building were designed on computers long before any metal was cut. They died a thousand fiery deaths in sims. And when the New Shepard flew its first three missions, each time the engineers learned and modified the software to better control the vehicle in flight.

The advantage of a cheap, reusable, and autonomous vehicle is that its potential failures can be tested dozens of times before people fly in it. On Sunday, Blue Origin tested such a failure, intentionally not deploying one of the capsule’s three parachutes (the vehicle performed fine, as engineers predicted). By contrast, each of the space shuttle’s 135 flights was experimental. The vehicle never flew without humans on it.

The hard drives of those computers at Blue Origin's headquarters contain schematics for much more rocketry than just the New Shepard module. By the end of this year Blue Origin should begin full-scale tests of a much larger rocket engine, the BE-4, which will have more than enough thrust to power an orbital rocket. The company hasn’t released details about that rocket yet, but it is likely to fly before the end of this decade. And it will be based on the same principles of reusability and low cost that are being proven out by the New Shepard prototype.

The old way

NASA has given up on reusable rockets. This is not the decision many of its engineers would have made, but the last two administrators have been entranced by the idea of big, bad rockets like the Saturn V that flew 12 humans to the surface of the Moon nearly half a century ago. Some key leaders in Congress favor this brawny approach as well and directed NASA to build the mighty Space Launch System (SLS) rocket back in 2010.

Not a single component of the SLS rocket is reusable, and little of its development has been done with cost in mind. In fact, Congress told NASA it must use expensive components of the space shuttle in the rocket’s design, keeping many of the same shuttle contractors employed across dozens of US states. The SLS even takes some of the shuttle’s reusable components, most notably its engines, and flies them just once before they burn up in the atmosphere.

It is possible that NASA will succeed in reliving the glory days of its Apollo program and one day bring humans to Mars atop the SLS rocket. There is little question its engineers are up to the task. Congress will have to increase NASA's funding substantially, however, and presidents will have to go along with the plan—for decades to come. Big Aerospace will certainly lobby heavily for this approach. But such a program cannot escape its reliance on enormous government support, nor the fact that it is based on a technological and strategic model that predates the Internet and, indeed, the personal computer.

The guys who modernized other industries have eschewed this old model of spaceflight. Bezos, Musk, and others like Microsoft’s Paul Allen have decided the best way to disrupt the aerospace industry is with reusable launch systems that can be flown often and at a low cost. Before the last few months it was easy to dismiss these guys as naive optimists or rich, rocket boy pretenders. But then they started landing on boats and successfully reusing their rockets. There will undoubtedly be setbacks—if low-cost, reusable spaceflight were easy it would have been done before. But at this point it clearly is no longer theoretical.

It therefore stands to reason that if what we really want to do is send thousands or even millions of people to live and work in space, to extend the human species beyond a single, fragile planet, it’s probably time to bet on the guys with the 21st century rockets and business plans.