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Spaceplane Concept Receives Euro Funding
draevil writes "BBC News reports that the novel "Skylon" spaceplane design of British firm Reaction Engines has received funding to proceed with its proof-of-concept design for an air-breathing rocket engine.
If successful, the Sabre rocket engine will be able to take the Skylon with 12 tonnes of cargo from a runway, to orbit and then back to that runway without the need for disposable components or a piggy-back ride on a larger aircraft.
Should the design prove viable, it could see first use within ten years."
I think the only ones who do this stuff successfully are the Americans.
As an American living in Britain I'm embarrassed that there is no British space program. Perhaps this can be the start of one - but more likely, the European financing will be half-ass or the British government will pull the plug on it somehow.
...to save a few hundred kilos of oxidiser. On the ground they won't be moving fast enough to scoop oxygen out of the air. In less than a minute they will be too high and fast to use anything from the atmosphere. Once effectively out of the atmosphere most of the work remains to be done so that will have to use stored oxygen.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
..That someone built a spaceplane. Too bad the US is busy cutting NASA budgets to fund a new welfare program.
Strat
Progressivism (aka US 'Liberalism'): Ideas so good they need a police/surveillance-state to enforce.
While the chances of this thing actually working is very slim, it is a very smart move to fund this sort of thing. At a million euros a pop, you can afford to fund a awful lot of projects that goes no where in order to find the diamond in the rough.
There has been some info about them on slashdot a while back http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/01/12/0135200
>"...the Sabre rocket engine will be able to take the Skylon with 12 tonnes of cargo..."
That should read "two Sabre rocket engines will be able to take a Skylon with 12 tonnes of cargo..."
That is 13.225 US Short Tons...or approximately 6 tons per engine, if the illustration is any indication.
Space Craft Blog feeds
Give the money to Noble. He'll use it to train the next generation of advanced engineers on a fun project that will actually go somewhere. Looking at the history to date of US efforts to develop scramjets (and this thing is basically an extended scramjet and therefore even more complex and expensive) a million Euros won't even pay for the project manager's office.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
The Sabre isn't taking anything into orbit, then, is it...
FTFA..."As the air density falls with altitude the engine eventually switches to a pure rocket propelling Skylon to orbital velocity..."
Ahhh No. The mach numbers become useless when there are a few molecules of air per Sq.Meter.
It switches to feet/second.
However, the what could be a limiting factor for rocket-powered spaceplane could be:
1) Gravity: Or lack of it in space. this will require a toothpaste kinda arrangement that can squeeze fuel into the rocket engines.
2) Fuel: Unlike Saturn or Proton rockets, this is a spaceplane. So the fuel tank cannot be meters long and meters wide. it must be compact like a gasoline tank, yet be able to contain ALL fuel for launch from high-altitudes and return. Compression matters a lot. Oxygen can be compressed but cannot be super-cooled. Probably made into a mushy liquid/gel formation which releases gas when de-compressed.
3) Re-Entry radar and guidance: Unlike the spaceshuttle, the spaceplane is much smaller in size, so it has to depend on both inertial guidance AND GPS. Why? GPS is screwed it needs inertial.
"Doing what i can, with what i have." ~ Burt Gummer
First of all, there is no such thing as an "air-breathing rocket engine"!!!
BY DEFINITION a "rocket engine" carries its own oxidizer!!
Something that "breathes" air is a "JET engine"!!!
Jesus Christ! Who thought this shit up? Obviously, somebody who does not even know the difference between a rocket and a jet! And somebody else, just as clueless, is going to fund them to try make a spaceship?
HOW DO I GET IN ON THIS DEAL??? I WANT TO KNOW. I have an inertial drive I can sell them, cheap. Only a couple of billion.
Okay. So in TFA, they later make it clear that this is a hybrid engine. But I am NOT nitpicking. That does not absolve them of guilt. It is still not an "air-breathing rocket engine". It is a hybrid: a jet part of the way, a rocket part of the way. They STILL are not the same things. It is not an "air-breathing rocket engine" any more than a hybrid automobile is an "electricity-eating gasoline engine". They are two different things, doing their different things at completely different times, in different ways.
Somebody teach this journalist something about science.
The article is light on details, but it sure sounds like it's using a rocket style combustion chamber even when it's pulling the oxidizer in from the atmosphere: I don't know any jet engine that requires you to liquefy the incoming air... not even a scramjet. High speed jet engines are generally all about simplifying the intake.
exactly like DC8s, without propellers
ahhahaha
reminds us of the time when the last band of greed/fear/ego based illuminazis went south with their country's resources. better days ahead. guaranteed.
The funding is primarily intended to enable them to build and test some of the more novel parts of their sabre engine. For example the pre-cooler design which is necessary to cool the air prior to its use as fuel will be tested in front of a jet engine.
From the press release - http://www.reactionengines.co.uk/pr_19_feb_09.html
"The demonstration programme will look at three key areas in the engine.
The first area, conducted by REL, concerns the revolutionary precooler that cools the incoming air as it enters the engine. During the programme a test precooler will be constructed using the actual module design for the flight engines. This will be tested on the companyâ(TM)s B9 jet engine experimental facility at Culham in Oxfordshire.
The second area is the cooling of the combustion chamber, where the propellants are mixed and burnt producing water vapour at around 3,000oC. The SABRE engine uses the air or liquid oxygen as the cooling fluid â" a key and unusual design feature as most rocket engines use the hydrogen fuel for cooling instead. EADS Astrium and DLR in Germany will be conducting this work using demonstration chambers fired at the DLR Lampoldhausen facility.
The third area, led by the University of Bristol, will explore advanced exhaust nozzles that can adapt to the ambient atmospheric pressure. This follows on from the successful STERN (Static Test of ED Rocket Nozzle) test rocket programme that was conducted last year. As part of the ESA contract a new water cooled chamber will be constructed and test fired."
You're correct, it's not much money for a space plane but it's a good step forward in establishing the viability of the engines.
You need to succeed worthwhile. So I are incompatible raise or lower the
http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/02/20/0149254
If it works, then maybe the power guys will have what they need to take their stuff up.
But it's a very big 'if' IMHO...the current shuttle show the tremendous problems associated with 'reusable' spacecraft, and even then they launch it conventionally.
Why the sarcasm? Don't get me wrong. I don't mind at all that you don't approve of killing people. But in the current situation, a more lethal US Marines as part of the US hegemony means less deaths in the long run. If the criteria is solely "killing people is bad", this is a win. And if a spaceplane turns out to be a boondoggle, the anti-US hegemony people get a win.
We already have a welfare system.We now have a new welfare system for rich bankers, investors, and politicians *plus* the effective cancellation of the widely-lauded Welfare Reform Act signed by former President Clinton for the welfare system we already had.Strat
College-Pages.com - Online Colleges, Degrees, and Programs
Thunderbirds are go!
This post is LAW where prohibited by VOID. Prosecutors will be violated.
Skylons were created by man
They evolved
There will be many copies
And they have a plane?
I don't think a liquid air collection engine (LACE) was ever successful, but there were preliminary designs for some (don't know about prototypes). Here's a short article on the subject:
http://www.astronautix.com/lvs/aerplane.htm
By keeping the air a gas, it simplifies the plumbing while still letting you use essentially a rocket engine design (liquid fuel is vapourised before burning anyway, usually by using it to cool the nozzle).
The downside to this is that water vapour will freeze on the cooling fins/surface of the intake, and cause ice buildup. For the length of time this engine is expected to operate that's not a big deal, but in humid air or for longer operation, ice could clog the air intake.
..that the black budget part of the defense department already has some operational models of such a plane. I seriously doubt they just stopped secret development and deployment of ultra high tech planes and craft, given their fixation on maintaining the "high ground" advantage. And we have had enough tantalizing leaks to even think they might have a variety of models, both atmospheric and exoatmospheric. The sr71 and 117 and so on are *very* old models and tech now, and the black budget has been huge over the years and decades since those were built. I'd say as a rough rule of thumb, they are always three generations ahead of what they admit to publicly.
The dictionary is VERY clear on the subject.
The people who write dictionaries are extremely competent etymologists... but they aren't, in general, "rocket scientists".
The people who designed the engine that we're discussing, however, are.
I would tend to believe the "rocket scientists". :)
And by the way: no, a common hybrid automobile does not have two engines. It has one engine, and an electric motor.
And you say I'm nitpicking?
The point is that the automobile engine that burns fuel is a separate "source of motive force thingy that might be called an engine or a motor depending on whether it burns fuel or not" than the electric motor powered by the battery. It is not a single "source of motive force thingy that might be called an engine or a motor depending on whether it burns fuel or not". If you want to try and devise something analogous to this device in the automotive field, you'd have to come up with something like a hydrogen burning hybrid that used electrolysis to generate hydrogen from the stored electricity.
BTW, while you've got the dictionary open, look up "motor car".
Yes. Seriously. Behold the Skylon
and its distant descendant, the Firefly class spacecraft.
Joss, you clever boy.
-S
Vaporware or not, this is the type of thing the US should still be doing as well - remember the old National Aerospace Plane (NASP) program in the 80s? Kudos to the British for at least attempting to push the frontiers of aerospace science and technology.
"BTW I don't think this space plane thing will work but I do think the engines would be great for a high speed military vehicle. Something to get a payload to the target really fast. It could do unpowered semi ballistic lobs as well."
In Soviet Russia we had it done by the end of 1950s: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burya
Alan Bond and crew have been talking about Skylon/HOTOL for decades with nothing to show. They've had funding in the past and produced nothing. Compare to SpaceX who have taken a fairly conservative concept and run with it from idea to orbit in well under a decade.
The main problem with Skylon and the Sabre engine is that both engine and airframe need unobtainium to work. Active-cooled sharp aerosurfaces are a nightmare problem for reentry - plus the engine gets exposed to reentry-like conditions throughout flight profile.
Second major problem is the combined-cycle engine concept as a whole and the horizontal-launch nature of Skylon. The craft is supposed to launch, compress it's oxidizer on the way up through the worst part of atmosphere and then fly into space. All while storing 70%+ deadweight in oxidizer as only 23% of it is oxygen - it'll be contaminating it's fuel-flow w/ tons of useless N2. Look at any real rocket's ascent profile and it is apparent that this does not work. It might work for point-to-point but not for orbital ascent.
There is a reason that all ground-launched rockets use vertical ascent - it gets you out of the worst part of the atmosphere as fast as possible.
The Skylon concept should be (-1 Snakeoil)
Generally compare this vapourware to American vaporware: Skylon is in same class as Kelleyspace's Griffin, Pioneer's XP, the K1 and the various other hangar queens that never made it.
gigantino.tv - Heavy but weighs nothing.
I'm sorry, you are in fact trolling.
Not quite an ad-hominem attack, but close. It's certainly a genetic fallacy.
Skynet meets the Cylons?
Totally screwed.
...was disappointed
*** ***
Troll!?!?
C'mon, mods! "I disagree"!=="troll".
That was an honest evaluation and opinion, delivered calmly and rationally.
I guess it's pretty typical for /. though, sadly. If you're unable to debate and discuss on the merits, just use mod points instead of using a brain.
[Sigh]
Progressivism (aka US 'Liberalism'): Ideas so good they need a police/surveillance-state to enforce.
Other people are mistaking authorities on Engineering for authorities on the English language. There is a rather large difference.
Which was the whole of my point: when English-speaking engineers do not even properly understand the English that pertains to their craft, their credibility suffers.
I had to try a couple of times to get the movie to come up.
It is a terrific design, I only wonder if they can get the same thrust out of 20% O2 (air) as they could out of 100% O2
The movie clip indicated they expect to get 50% more thrust on LOX.
It's also theoretical. It looks like they have some prototype cooler elements, and a 20% cutaway scale model, but I don't know if they have more than that.
I suspect it's curved because it looks cooler.
The US has a long history of failed shuttle replacement programs including NASP, VentureStar and a couple of others. It seems that Europe wants a taste of failure, too.
Airbreathing just doesn't work for getting to space. Most of the effort is not spent on climbing a couple of hundred kilometers - it's accelerating to orbital velocity in order to stay up there. Acceleration is best done in vacuum. Airbreathing is best done, well, in air. Do the math.
Stop worrying about the risks of nuclear power and start worrying about the risks of not using nuclear power.
The shuttle still uses 70's era computers for guidance. They have more modern equipment too, but the core computers (5 of them) are ancient. Why? Reliability. Wire-wrap equipment can take a beating and will keep working.