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

Oswaldtwistle said:
OK. But are we going to see more launches as a result of the reduced cost, offsetting any savings?



OK, but there is still the noise issue. Maybe we can find somewhere remote enough....



Sure. By junk I meant *disused* satellites. The cheaper they are to launch and hence to replace, the more likely firms are to abandon them at the drop of a hat...
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It's not going to necessarily be any nosier than a normal aeroplane as it will take off using normal jet engines and will only use rockets when in the upper atmosphere and space.
 
FaradayCaged said:
It's not going to necessarily be any nosier than a normal aeroplane as it will take off using normal jet engines and will only use rockets when in the upper atmosphere and space.
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Nope. It is all rocket engine, it's just that it takes its oxidiser from the atmosphere while it can. It's quite simple, look:

800px-Sabre_cycle_m.jpg

Ok, it's not that simple :D
 
I asked Alan Bond about noise during a public lecture he gave. His response was basically that the noise would be epic (but not yet modelled in detail - 2011), and the runway needs to be far far away from human habitation. As Crispy says, Skylon operates as a rocket throughout its flight cycle. Takeoff thrust is about 270 tons, so the noise would be presumably be similar to a current conventional rocket of similar thrust, that is actually dangerous close up.
 
Mark Hempsell (until very recently, Future Programmes director at Reaction Engines) is giving a lecture at the British Interplanetary Society on the future of Skylon. I'm going, and will report the juicy details back here :)
 
I'd love to go to this but I'm working. If there is any time for questions, it would be interesting to hear his views on the viability of the European launch industry. The Ariane 6 could be a too-little, too-late response to Space-X, which should have achieved at least partial (1st stage) reusability by the time Ariane 6 enters service. Might ESA/EU consider continuing with the Ariane 5 upgrade and then leapfrogging straight to Skylon, as a pan-European project ? Germany has long been interested in spaceplanes, the Airbus structure is a good model for a Sklyon consortium.
 
Crispy said:
Mark Hempsell (until very recently, Future Programmes director at Reaction Engines) is giving a lecture at the British Interplanetary Society on the future of Skylon. I'm going, and will report the juicy details back here :)
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Did this happen yet/did you go?
 
editor said:
_52910634_52910633.jpg


Hotol lives on!



UK Skylon spaceplane passes key review - BBC News

Sadly, this thing won't be taking off any time soon - it's going to need $9-12bn for that - but it has the potential to offer far cheaper satellite launches.

It would be awesome to have Britain back in the space launching game too.
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Looks like this one might be going forward at last:

BAE Systems and Reaction Engines to develop hypersonic space engine
 
£20m for a 20% stake, ie a company valuation of £100m is incredibly cheap, given the potential payoff. BAe must consider the risk to be extremely high to offer such a low amount. The new white paint job looks lovely mind.

RS31809_SABRE Concept White Flight 5-scr.jpg
 
Not that this Gerry Anderson wank off was ever going to amount to anything anyway but the BAES involvement will be the final nail in the coffin. The last whole aircraft design produced by BAES or its progenitor companies was the BAe 146 (1981) and the last propulsion unit would have been (I think) the Pegasus. They have absolutely no pedigree at this type of caper and will crush any spark of innovation or creativity.
 
I think this is more for REL's benefit that BAe's. It gives them access to expensive facilities like the supersonic wind tunnels at Warton. From BAe's POV, it's a high risk low stakes bet that the propulsion tech will find a market (not neccesarily the Skylon, which I doubt they'd want to build; as you say, they don't have the experience).
 
Fuck the haters, nothing new, interesting and worthwhile will come about without taking risks. Here's hoping Skylon does well.

I think it looked better in black, though.
 
This thread could have maybe gone in the films forum but the article is more about the science of this lovely looking fictional spacecraft:

orion-engines-rear-view.jpg


Featured in this view of the Orion replica are the mouths of the twin main rocket engines, powered by liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen. Secondary and tertiary rocket engine nozzles also point toward the tail of the ship. Just aft of the large "Pan Am" logo is a ring of emergency explosive bolts and retrorocket jets, which would be fired to separate the tail section should something go wrong with the main engines.

Rectangular outlets are visible on the top surface of the wings, presumably for atmospheric flight. The raised fins along the rear edge of the wings are "wing fences" that control airflow when Orion travels faster than Mach 1 (the speed of sound).
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underside-orion-spacecraft-model.jpg

The underside of the Orion replica. At the wing tips are clear parts representing the anti-collision strobe lights. The ridged trapezoid-shaped plate between the wings is a hypersonic airflow correction plate. Forward and rear landing-gear doors are also visible. The underside of Orion features a titanium heat shield for heat dissipation when returning through Earth's atmosphere
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Some inspiration:
silverbird-german-concept-sketch.jpg

Concept sketch of the German Silverbird suborbital bomber from World War II. Austrian-German engineer Eugen Sänger's concept of a plane that could travel around the world was developed for the Nazi war effort. The plane, called "Silverbird," would have been propelled by a rocket sled, taking off from a 2-mile-long (3.2 kilometers) inclined ramp. Silverbird would pass above the United States to drop its bomb, and then skip around the world to a landing site in Japan.
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And maybe we'll be getting something like it soon!

skylon-space-plane.jpg


Space: 2025. The British rocket-powered Skylon space plane would ascend from a runway on air-breathing rocket boosters. When the air becomes too thin, Skylon switches to onboard tanks of liquid oxygen. The craft could carry 30 passengers to a space station in Earth orbit, fulfilling the dream of routine access to space depicted in "2001."
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More: Fantastic Flight: The Orion III Spaceplane from "2001: A Space Odyssey"
 
DownwardDog said:
The HOTOL/Skylon project has been around for 35 years in various forms without ever producing anything so don't hold your breath.
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HOTOL never got out of the design phase. Didn't REL do a SABRE engine test in 2012? So the idea is making slow progress, which isn't the same thing as producing nothing.
 
Testing the engines this year, according to this:
When air comes into the SABRE, it gets cooled down with liquid helium. The helium has itself been cooled via an exchanger that uses the liquid hydrogen fuel. Once the helium is done pre-cooling the air, it gets heated again by the combustion of the hydrogen and oxygen, and that energy drives the turbines in the engine. The combined mechanism saves weight and allows the engine to work from a resting start.

The company plans to test the engines this year; the tests will be on the ground, essentially firing them to see if they work as planned.

Mark Ford, head of propulsion engineering at the European Space Agency, says there’s no reason the SABRE shouldn’t work."We saw no technological or engineering showstoppers," Ford says. A 2011 report from ESA said the idea is feasible.

While engines are the most important part of the craft, other challenges still give experts pause. Heat is one. The Space Shuttle had to be covered with tiles because most metals wouldn’t handle the heat generated by re-entry. "We called it the crockery-covered spacecraft," said Ivan Bekey, a former head of the Advanced Concepts Office at NASA and now a private design consultant. "If you’re flying at 25 times the speed of sound then for a spaceplane the heat becomes a problem for the ascent as well."
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REL’s Skylon spaceplane aims to take on SpaceX with a reusable rocket design
 
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