Blue Origin cut the ribbon on its new rocket engine plant in Huntsville Monday and will start moving workers in Wednesday, top managers said. It’s more of the fast pace the company showed in building the giant plant in just over a year.
"You can see we can get some things done really quickly,” CEO Bob Smith said. “Twelve months to actually build this kind of facility is an amazing accomplishment for our team.”
“The construction phase is behind us, and we are going to rapidly move into the equipment installation and process qualification phase,” Huntsville site leader Eric Pacheco said. “All of that is pointing to production start in the June-July time frame.”
The first engine through the plant with be a “pathfinder” BE-4. The BE-4 or Blue Engine 4 is the larger of two engines that will be built in Huntsville, and it will be live-fire tested after completion at Blue Origin’s test stands in west Texas.
Texas is “ready and available,” Pacheco said when asked why not in Huntsville, where Blue Origin is renovating a Saturn V test stand on Redstone Arsenal for engine testing in Alabama. The Saturn stand needs more work, Pacheco said. And it is not expected to be ready until “late next year,” Blue Origin Senior Vice President John Vilja said.
While testing is under way in Texas, Blue Origin will begin producing BE-4 engines at its Kent, Washington plant, for customer United Launch Alliance. Engine production will ultimately be done mainly in Huntsville with Kent becoming an engine development laboratory and reserve production facility.
“You don’t get much of an opportunity to do what we’re doing,” Pacheco said of the almost 400,000 square foot Huntsville plant. "A new facility, two new product lines, an internal customer and an external customer. Its a once in a lifetime career opportunity,” he said.
The internal customer is Blue Origin itself, which will use and reuse seven of the BE-4 engines on each launch of its big New Glenn rocket. The external customer is United Launch Alliance, which is building a new rocket to compete for military satellite launches at its factory in Decatur, Ala., about 20 miles west of Huntsville.
The new Blue Origin plant will have capacity to produce 42 engines a year roughly split between the BE-4 and smaller BE-3, Smith said. It will be 2022 or 2023 before it hits that full production rate.
The plant will be able to machine parts parts, weld and join parts and perform additive manufacturing, Pacheco said. And it will have a precision clean room, where turbo fuel pumps are assembled, and a large area for final assembly.