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British made SABRE jet engine looks to power planes at 5x the speed of sound

urbanspaceman said:
With some extension and strengthening work the Vulcan bomber runway at RAF Lossiemouth would be a good UK location.
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Lossie was never a Vulcan base. After the RAF got it from the fish heads in '72 it housed Buccaneers, Jaguars and Shackletons (for a bit) then Tornado GR.1/1A/1B/4/4A.

09/27 at Leuchars is only a few hundred metres shorter than 05/23 at Lossiemouth and Leuchars will be vacated by the RAF in a few years.
 
You wouldn't launch from the uk anyway. You want as close to the equator as possible, to take advantage of the earth's rotation.
 
DownwardDog said:
Lossie was never a Vulcan base. After the RAF got it from the fish heads in '72 it housed Buccaneers, Jaguars and Shackletons (for a bit) then Tornado GR.1/1A/1B/4/4A.

09/27 at Leuchars is only a few hundred metres shorter than 05/23 at Lossiemouth and Leuchars will be vacated by the RAF in a few years.
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I didn't say that Lossiemouth was a Vulcan base. I said Lossiemouth has a suitable runway. Lossiemouth was a dispersal base, and so possesses a runway long and strong enough to allow loaded strategic bombers to land.

I did not mention Leuchars, because its closure has been announced, and so the future of its runway is unclear. But if it could be safeguarded, the runway at Leuchars (also a V-bomber dispersal base) is also a candidate.
 
Crispy said:
You wouldn't launch from the uk anyway. You want as close to the equator as possible, to take advantage of the earth's rotation.
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An equatorial launch site has its advantages, but really only for putting payloads into an equatorial orbit: you get a free 1000mph headstart. But there is more to it than that:

1) If you are launching to an inclined orbit, as long as the latitude of the launch site is less than the inclination of the orbit, then there is little impact on performance. This is because the magnitude of the "headstart" advantage depends on the intended orbital inclination, not the latitude of the launch site.

2) The orbit of International Space Station is 52 degrees. So launching from anywhere within the region 52N to 52S does not impose any particular payload penalties.

3) The ISS is the presumed destination for a lot of payloads. And it seems plausible that future space stations/hotels/factories/whatnot will be located in this 52 degree orbital plane, to allow easy (ie low fuel burn) transfers and assistance in emergencies. So many payloads might be delivered to this inclined orbit, which incidentally is quite an attractive one, as it allows much better coverage of the Earth below (for remote sensing, communications links, or just sightseeing) than an equatorial orbit. Thus the attractions of equatorial launch/equatorial orbit are further diminished.

4) A spaceplane can fly a "dogleg" course during the phase of the mission during which it is flying like an aeroplane, and so transfer over to a desired latitude On reentry a spaceplane such as Skylon has considerable "crossrange" maneouverability. So spaceplane operations decouple the location of the launch/landing site and the desired orbital inclination.

For these reasons an equatorial launch site is not essential.
 
Go the same way as Hotol ...perhaps
fusees_hotol.png
 
DownwardDog said:
Lossie was never a Vulcan base. After the RAF got it from the fish heads in '72 it housed Buccaneers, Jaguars and Shackletons (for a bit) then Tornado GR.1/1A/1B/4/4A.

09/27 at Leuchars is only a few hundred metres shorter than 05/23 at Lossiemouth and Leuchars will be vacated by the RAF in a few years.
Click to expand...

Vulcans and Victors did operate on pretty steady rotation from Lossie throughout the RN/V-Bomber years however and Virgin have already given the place a fairly positive once-over as a possible base for their space operations.

Rumour around the area is that it may not be a fully operational RAF base for much longer - esp as the Tornado is getting towards the end of its life. The local authority are already putting out the feelers for new commercial uses of the base area.

And the extremely long and isolated runway at Macrihanish is now totally out of Military hands but with its facilities maintained in good order by the local council FTM.
 
Tankus said:
Go the same way as Hotol ...perhaps
fusees_hotol.png
Click to expand...

Hotol was Alan Bond's first attempt at designing a resusable spaceplane. Initially British Aerospace, Rolls Royce and the Goverbment were quite keen, releasing enough funds to carry out some detailed design work. But Hotol was killed stone dead by Kenneth Clarke, who absolutely hated the idea of Britain doing anything in space. Funnily enough, a few years he was quite happy to be remunerated as an advisor by an American satellite company in Seattle.

As it turns out, Hotol was a non-starter. Rear-mounted engines would have caused centre-of-gravity imbalance as the fuel tanks emptied, with the vehicle becoming progressively and uncontrollably tail-heavy. Skylon avoids this problem by mounting its engines midships, with fuel/oxygen tanks in front and behind, allowing better C-of-G control by modulating fuel/oxygen flow.
 
pogofish said:
Funding for a proper feasability study into space operations out of Lossiemouth is to be announced today! :)
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i quite like the idea of the Bristol channel as well mostly because I live in Cardiff I suppose. I suspect it's fairly unlikely though, especially going up against places that have some of the necessary infrastructure already.
 
BBC 4 10pm Wednesday 12th September

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01mqv45

For his entire life, one man has nursed the dream of putting mankind into space. Inspired by the Dan Dare comic strip, Alan Bond first started building rockets as a teenager in his back garden. He started his career working on Britain's Blue Streak rocket, then HOTOL - the world's first attempt to build a 'single-stage-to-orbit' spacecraft. Each time, he was thwarted by lack of funding from the UK government, so, together with two colleagues, Richard Varvill and John Scott-Scott, he decided to go it alone. This documentary tells the story of how the three rocketeers defeated the Official Secrets Act, shrugged off government intransigence and defied all conventional wisdom to build a revolutionary new spacecraft - Skylon
 
Crispy said:
BBC 4 10pm Wednesday 12th September

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01mqv45

For his entire life, one man has nursed the dream of putting mankind into space. Inspired by the Dan Dare comic strip, Alan Bond first started building rockets as a teenager in his back garden. He started his career working on Britain's Blue Streak rocket, then HOTOL - the world's first attempt to build a 'single-stage-to-orbit' spacecraft. Each time, he was thwarted by lack of funding from the UK government, so, together with two colleagues, Richard Varvill and John Scott-Scott, he decided to go it alone. This documentary tells the story of how the three rocketeers defeated the Official Secrets Act, shrugged off government intransigence and defied all conventional wisdom to build a revolutionary new spacecraft - Skylon
Click to expand...

Bunp - tonight :)
 
Skylon spaceplane engine concept achieves key milestone

The UK company developing an engine for a new type of spaceplane says it has successfully demonstrated the power unit's enabling technology.

Reaction Engines Ltd (REL) of Culham, Oxfordshire, ran a series of tests on key elements of its Sabre propulsion system under the independent eye of the European Space Agency (Esa).

Esa's experts have confirmed that all the demonstration objectives were met.

REL claims the major technical obstacle to its ideas has now been removed.

"This is a big moment; it really is quite a big step forward in propulsion," said Alan Bond, the driving force behind the Sabre engine concept....
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:cool:
 
Excellent news :)

Speculation on the frost elimination system:

The pre-cooler is made of interleaved spiraling planes of parallel tubes, carrying the chilled helium. Maybe they alternate between plates, feeding cold, then hot helium through the pipes, so that any frost that builds up is melted off in each cycle.
 
Hahaha, well that bit will be beyond me though I have enough basic engineering knowledge to recognise that frosting was going to be the major hurdle that they would have to surmount. I just hope that they now get the investment they need to go on to the next stage.
 
likesfish said:
It would be fucking cool produce jobs and cash.
cheapish means to LEO and beyond and able to launch form scotland fuck off big runway in the middle of nowhere up there perfect for this.
cost less than trident and if we really need to justify spending the cash claim its military and launch satallites other stuff to offset the cost jobs a good un.
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I think that to achieve orbit you need to launce closer to the equator than scotland, though I'm prepared to be wrong on this.
 
tendril said:
I think that to achieve orbit you need to launce closer to the equator than scotland, though I'm prepared to be wrong on this.
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Launching from the equator gives you an extra 463m/s, which is useful if you're launching into any orbit that near equatorial, but not much compared to the 28,000m/s you need for low earth orbit. Polar orbits can be launched from any latitude, but that market is much smaller.
 
Yes. The intake needs to point directly into the incoming airflow, but the wings need an angle of attack of 7 degrees to maintain lift, which means the intakes point downwards. Also, the rocket engines need to be pointing their thrust vector through the centre of mass, which is higher than the wings, so the other end also bends downward, coincidentally by the same amount.
 
So this is all quite promising, right? And if it burns hydrogen and oxygen does that mean it's comparatively eco-friendly?
 
Stigmata said:
So this is all quite promising, right? And if it burns hydrogen and oxygen does that mean it's comparatively eco-friendly?
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Compared to most other space rockets, yes. It's still a LOT of H and O, mind and you have to make that somehow.
 
About the only eco-friendly way of getting into orbit is via space elevator - especially if the carbon for the fullerene cables can be extracted from the atmosphere. Barring that, Skylon is as good as it gets. At the moment, Hydrogen is usually made by decomposing natural gas, with only a little produced by directly splitting water through electrolysis.

One might speculate about a future integrated renewable power grid, through which spare power is diverted to interruptible/baseload Hydrogen/Oxygen electrolysis. So a Skylon fuel farm would improve the economics of a mostly-renewables grid, smoothing out intermittency problems by absorbing excess power as and when available, and perhaps even operating fuel cells to return electricity during demand peaks.
 
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