After Blue Origin completed the third flight of its New Shepard launch system on Saturday, the spaceflight community applauded the effort. And on Sunday, after video emerged showing the dramatic firing of its engines just before the rocket would have struck the ground, the response was again approbation. This third test in a little more than four months demonstrated that Blue Origin has continued to progress toward its goal of launch, land, and repeat—the holy grail of low-cost spaceflight.

But among the cheers were also a few mutterings. What does it matter if all Jeff Bezos is going to do is take rich people on joy rides, some said. Or, if researchers want to do suborbital experiments, can't they get those done in conventional aircraft flying parabolas? Others have complained that New Shepard's propulsion module is relatively small and has only a single engine, and flying to suborbital space requires a fraction of the energy that getting into orbit does. In short, some critics say Bezos is just dabbling at the edges of space, not doing the hard stuff of going all the way.

This may all be true, but it misses the point. Much like Mercury represented America's first tentative steps into outer space, so does New Shepard represent only a beginning for the company. New Shepard, after all, is named after Alan Shepard, the first American in space who rode inside a Mercury capsule. It may or may not succeed, but Blue Origin aspires to be much more. It's trying to build a scalable, reusable architecture from the ground up, and that takes time.

Reusability is the thing

Earlier this year, Ars visited Blue Origin's rocket factory, and we had a chance to discuss the company's ambitions with Bezos on Blue Origin's factory floor. Bezos explained that he has built his company, from the beginning, around lowering the cost of access to space. Initially, he hoped to find a better way than chemical rockets to blast people off the surface of the Earth, but as yet no technology exists. And so Blue Origin has focused on making chemical rockets cost as little as possible, and that means reusing them.

"Reusability will change everything," Bezos explained. "Right now, the things you do in space have to be incredibly important, and because space access is so expensive, if you can do it another way, you will. That’s why you get very few launches. That changes if you can dramatically lower the cost of access, and the only way to do that is reusability."

In this, Bezos is both a competitor and kindred spirit with Elon Musk, whose SpaceX had a much higher profile during the last decade as it has aggressively competed with rocket companies around the world for satellite business and NASA contracts. Musk is also investing heavily in reusable rocket technology. In one sense Musk is well ahead because he has landed a much larger rocket after it delivered a payload to orbit, a more dynamically challenging energy regime to return from. But Bezos is ahead in another important step, demonstrating the ability to reuse a flown rocket in a matter of weeks, as he did most recently with Saturday's launch.

When it comes to launching rockets, the hardware drives costs, not propellants. Liquid oxygen costs about 10 cents a pound. If you have a big launch vehicle with 1 million pounds of liquid oxygen propellant, that’s $100,000. Liquid hydrogen costs a bit more, but still, more than 90 percent of a launch costs are in the hardware.

Nevertheless, the dot-com billionaires have faced skeptics when it comes to reusable rockets. NASA, officially at least, isn't interested. When Congress told the agency to build the massive Space Launch System in 2011, it directed NASA to power that expendable rocket with space shuttle main engines. In other words, NASA was told to throw away expensive, reusable engines after a single flight. Other government-backed launch ventures, including the French Arianespace and Russian Roscomos programs, have likewise been reticent to embrace reusable rockets.

Normally in spaceflight, government is on the bleeding edge of technology pushing the limits. For example, NASA says it is leaving transport to low-Earth orbit to private companies so that it can focus on deep space exploration. But that does not seem to be the case with reusable rockets, where smaller, private companies are pushing the technology forward.

"I think it's partly because a lot of people still perceive it as a very risky approach," Bezos said of the concept. "I think it’s good that the private enterprise is stepping in, and I think we’re going to see the rewards of that in the next 10 to 15 years."

Some people have also questioned whether it's safe to reuse rockets, but Bezos thinks that perception will flip 180 degrees. "That is an argument that’s been made, but I have a different opinion," he said. "I would much rather fly in a used 787 than on that 787’s first flight. Let somebody else take that first flight. Look, the fact that you just flew it yesterday means that it's probably really good to fly right now. And that’s going to be true of rocket vehicles, too. In the future, because of reusability, nobody with a really expensive satellite is going to want to put it on an unused rocket. They’re going to decide that’s too risky. Now that will take a while, but that’s what’s going to happen."

It must scale

Blue Origin has also been designed with scale in mind, ultimately aiming to bring thousands if not millions of people into space. That's why the company opted to go with a propulsive vertical landing system. Some aerospace engineers like wings, such those used by the space shuttle, which allowed the vehicle to glide back to the Earth through the atmosphere. Other designers like parachutes. None of these are bad, Bezos said.

"The reason I like vertical landing is because it scales so well," he explained. "New Shepard is about 80 feet tall. It’s the shortest vehicle we will ever make. It gets easier to land the vehicles the bigger they get. It’s the inverted pendulum problem. It's easier to balance bigger things. I like those architectures. Parachutes have the opposite problem; as things get bigger, it's very difficult. You can’t build a parachute 1,000 feet in diameter. Even wings, they scale pretty well to a certain size, but they end up being a lot of dead weight to carry."

Bezos and Blue Origin are not yet ready to disclose the specifics of their orbital rocket, which for now is called "Very Big Brother." He hopes to release those details later this year. However, we can glean some insight from the engines. New Shepard is powered by a single BE-3 engine, which has 110,000 pounds of thrust (lbf). This is less that the 170,000lbf of a single upgraded Merlin engine, nine of which power SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket to orbit.

However, Blue Origin is well into the design of its BE-4 engine, and it plans to begin full engine testing by the end of this year. The BE-4 engine will produce a thrust of 550,000lbf, making it more than three times as powerful as the Merlin engine and more powerful even than one of the space shuttle's main engines. It is not clear whether the company's planned orbital vehicle will be powered by one, two, or more BE-4 engines.

None of this is to say Blue Origin will succeed, of course, But it has already scaled from a small, 31,000lbf BE-2 engine to the BE-3. And it's already well on its way to mastering the landing of its New Shepard propulsion module, which in theory should scale to a larger orbital vehicle. Initially that technology will launch satellites, but Bezos said it will be rated for human travel, as well. And the Very Big Brother, too, is just a stepping stone.

"Our first orbital vehicle will not be our last, and it will be the smallest orbital vehicle we will ever build," Bezos said. And to make it all affordable, says the man who has upended online retailing with Amazon.com, rockets must launch, land, and then fly again. When he's asked about plans by government agencies and others to build large, expendable rockets, Bezos seems unable to understand that kind of business practice in the 21st century.

"What I know you cannot afford is throwing the hardware away," he said. "Hardware is so expensive. Look around at the precision you see here. The turbopumps with beautifully machined propellers. It’s just a tragedy to throw all of that away. You can never make a step function change in cost if you’re throwing the hardware away."