Blue Origin rocket engine gives a boost to Museum of Flight’s Simonyi Space Gallery

Seattle’s Museum of Flight has brought its collection of space artifacts up to the present day, thanks to a rocket engine that’s been donated by Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space venture.

The BE-3U rocket engine, which was used for on-the-ground development work that included hot-fire testing, was installed in the museum’s Charles Simonyi Space Gallery on Monday. Eventually, a 16-foot-tall model of Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket will take its place beside the engine.

Two BE-3U engines power the upper stage of the New Glenn orbital-class rocket, which was sent into orbit from the Kent, Wash.-based company’s Florida launch pad for the first time in January. That mission served to test not only the rocket, but also prototype components for Blue Origin’s Blue Ring spacecraft platform. The next New Glenn launch is expected in late spring.

This isn’t the first time Bezos has played a role in getting rocket artifacts into the Museum of Flight. A decade ago, the museum unveiled pieces from the F-1 rocket engines that sent NASA’s Apollo 12 and Apollo 16 missions to the moon. The components from the discarded Saturn V first-stage boosters were recovered from the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean with support from Bezos Expeditions.

The Simonyi Space Gallery — which is named after Charles Simonyi, a billionaire software pioneer and museum patron — highlights the recent history of spaceflight, including commercial space initiatives.

Other artifacts in the gallery include a full-scale mockup of a space shuttle fuselage that was used for training NASA astronauts; and a module from the Russian Soyuz spacecraft that Simonyi rode to the International Space Station for his second privately funded space trip in 2009.