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Washington - United Launch Alliance (ULA), a joint venture of Lockheed Martin and Boeing, and Blue Origin, the aerospace company founded by Amazon chief executive Jeff Bezos, announced on Wednesday they will team up to fund and build a new liquid-fuel rocket engine.
The BE-4 rocket engine supplied by Blue Origin will eventually power ULA's Atlas and Delta rocket lines, according to a ULA statement.
Atlas V rockets are used by Nasa and the US military and currently have Russian RD-180 rocket engines.
The announcement comes a day after Nasa said aerospace giant Boeing and upstart SpaceX would fly US astronauts to space aboard the first commercial spacecraft beginning in 2017.
Nasa awarded $4.2bn to Boeing and $2.6bn to SpaceX to develop the commercial spacecraft and each are to conduct between two and six missions.
"The team at Blue Origin is methodically developing technologies to enable human access to space at dramatically lower cost and increased reliability, and the BE-4 is a big step forward," Bezos said in the statement.
Blue Origin plans to develop and test the BE-4 over the next four years and expects to start "full scale" testing by 2016. The first rocket flights are anticipated by 2019, the statement said.
