The curtain of secrecy is being raised by Blue Origin, a private entrepreneurial space group designing both suborbital and orbital vehicles.

Backed by Amazon.com mogul Jeff Bezos, the Kent, Wash.-based Blue Origin group has completed wind tunnel testing of its next-generation craft, simply called the "Space Vehicle." It would transport up to seven astronauts to low-Earth orbit and the International Space Station. Though the company has been stingy on public information in the past, new details of the recent work have been released.

Blue Origin's spacecraft sports a biconic shape, with its design refined by more than 180 wind tunnel tests and extensive computational fluid dynamics analysis. To help validate the spacecraft's shape and body flap configuration, tests were recently carried out over several weeks at Lockheed Martin's High Speed Wind Tunnel Facility in Dallas.

The testing was conducted as part of Blue Origin's partnership with NASA, under the agency's Commercial Crew Development (CCDev) program, which awarded the company $22 million in 2011 to develop the vehicle. [Photos: Blue Origin's Secretive Spaceship

"Our Space Vehicle's innovative biconic shape provides greater cross-range and interior volume than traditional capsules without the weight penalty of winged spacecraft," said Rob Meyerson, president and program manager of Blue Origin.

"This is just one of the vehicle's many features that enhance the safety and affordability of human spaceflight, a goal we share with NASA," Meyerson said in a statement.

Test stand testing
Also under CCDev, Blue Origin is ready to start conducting tests of its BE-3 engine thrust chamber assembly — the engine's combustion chamber and nozzle — for the BE-3's 100,000 pounds of thrust, liquid oxygen/liquid hydrogen-fueled rocket motor.

The BE-3 will be used on Blue Origin's reusable launch vehicle.

"It's on the E-1 test stand now," at NASA's Stennis Space Center in Mississippi, "and we're close to conducting the first firings," said Brett Alexander, director of business development and strategy for Blue Origin, who is based in Washington, D.C.

Rocket motor testing at Stennis is scheduled to start in May, Alexander told SPACE.com.

Also, the company's "pusher" launch abort system is headed for testing later this summer. Those appraisals will spotlight an ability to control the flight path of a subscale crew capsule using a thrust vector control system. [Blue Origin's Secretive Space Vehicle Explained (Infographic)]

"The pusher escape system for our suborbital system [called New Shepard] means you can get the capsule and the people away at anytime, for any reason," Alexander said.

Tight-lipped
Blue Origin is a private company developing vehicles and technologies to enable commercial human space transportation.

Founded in 2000, the company explains that it has a long-term vision of greatly increasing the number of people that fly into space through low-cost, highly reliable commercial space transportation.

But why so tight-lipped about its enterprising work?

"There are really two reasons," Alexander said. "One is we like to talk about things we've done — not things we're planning to do. So it's more about accomplishments. After all, the space business is hard. Things always take longer than you'd expect. I think that's true for newer space companies, as well as established space companies."

1 Comments

1. 1. jimfromcanada 08:59 PM 5/8/12

   Well, the privatization of low orbital space access looks like it is bearing fruit. Privatization of moon and interplanetary colonization hopefully will do the same. It will be interesting to see what the commercial targets for such enterprises will be.

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