Slashdot Mirror
British Skylon Engine Passes Its Tests
An anonymous reader writes "The BBC reports that the SABRE hybrid (part air-breathing jet, part rocket) that is intended to power the Skylon single-stage-to-orbit space plane has passed its final technical demonstration test, and is now looking for money (only £250m!) to prepare for manufacturing. If this goes ahead, travel into orbit from local airports (ideally, those close to the equator) will be possible. And quite cheaply. But might it have the same legal difficulties flying from U.S. airports as the Concorde did?"
I sense a Kickstarter in the offing...
Last I read, developing Skylon was going to cost about ten billion pounds (or maybe dollars, though it's a big number either way). So there's a big jump from having an engine to being able to fly into space from your local airport.
Is the strobing red light on the front. Seriously, what the frak?
Several years ago I heard that India was working on a similar engine. Never heard anything more on it, I guess it didn't work. I hope the ESA has better luck.
And their legal (read: environmental) difficulties.
Launch from somewhere accessible to the market via other modes, but with sane local regulations.
Problem solved.
Scruting the inscrutable for over 50 years.
If this goes ahead, travel into orbit from local airports (ideally, those close to the equator) will be possible. And quite cheaply.
Misdirection. Ballistic aka spacex and competitors is always going to be cheaper. This only has .mil purposes. Excellent PR work, guys!
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
But might it have the same legal difficulties flying from U.S. airports as the Concorde did?"
No. For orbital trips, the folks who can afford it will fly their private jets to the piss poor Equatorial country and then fly into orbit from there. They governments will have been bought and paid for and as far as the people, well no one will dare say anything. And if it doesn't work out for whatever reason, why you just move! All you need is a standard strip and those are easy to come by.
It's good to be super rich!
That's the score these days.
travel into orbit from local airports (ideally, those close to the equator) will be possible
Shucks, none of my local airports seem to be near the equator. And I don't fly since the TSA started assaulting and irritating travelers.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
Good show, old chaps, but change the name. Sooner or later, a Skylon will turn on you.
The engine doesn't exist yet. This was a test of the pre-cooler. It is a critical component and it was important.
I love Jesus, except for his foreign policy.
Why does the input air need to be chilled? Does this have something to do with using hydrogen in a turbine engine?
love is just extroverted narcissism
My SkyActiv beats your Skylon HA!
Hmm. Looks like kinda a mash-up of Serenity and the Pan Am Space Clipper.
(Is it too late to say "geek alert"?)
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Skylon been around long time, this is lasted version. I'm glad their making progress building the thing, getting most critical part of it done.
I think it will be challenge though to get completed, specially with fiancial difficulties everyone having including the goverment.
Maybe Kickstart would help, but that bit too much for Aerospace effort like a single-stage-to-orbit Space Plane.
As for airports, i wasn't under the impression this will be airline/Sub-Orbital Liner, this was suppose to be a space shuttle/plane type. Hope it works out.
...Getting the oil stains out of the concrete hangar floor.
Richard Branson
Why should we care about it being able to fly at US airports if it needs to launch from the equator?
This is a very neat concept, and it has implications in regular jet travel as well as space travel. The ability to cool air and compress it that much in a regular jet engine could increase efficiency astronomically! The fact that this concept works could mean we see more economical jets before we see this in space travel.
... for use in global warming summers to get cool air. -140C sounds terrific.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
Way Cool!! In indeed.
250 million just to design it according to the article. then a bucket load more. About 10 billion to build it.
And whats the chance it works. Elon Musk poo poo ed in his last interview 1 day ago on video.
My understanding of this issue is that the liquid hydrogen fuel will be used to carry away the excess heat, on it's way to the engine to be burnt (obviously they're not going to be wanting to suddenly start pouring heat into a tank of superchilled liquid hydrogen).
This craft will certainly NOT fly from normal aviation facilities due to the fack that having tens of tons of cryogenic hydrogen about could turn out to be rather dangerous in a busy airport...
See right here.
Far from advising xenophobia, I'd still like to point out that US is a fucking big country. Most people in Europe, for example, have no idea what a "fucking big country" is.
You mean like Russia that is actually in Europe (at least the part that fits given that it is so large it spreads over two continents), contains 10 time zones, and has a land area almost twice that of the US?
Well you wouldn't launch from just *any* airport... you always launch eastward to gain speed from earth's rotation.
That depends on what the purpose of your flight is. If you want to get into orbit you are correct but if you just want a sub-orbital hop between two points on the Earth's surface it doesn't really matter and given the current lack of large passenger destinations in orbit I would guess that this is the most likely initial application.
Many years ago in high school I think, I wrote a report on the X-15 rocket plane. The impression I got was that, while vertical rocket technology got us further faster in the short term, a more gradual development of hypersonic planes would've been better in the long run. We might have had a whole generation of space planes lobbing satellites and even space tourists capsules cheaper, more safely, and with faster turn-around time. I'm not an engineer, so I could be completely full of crap, too.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
Didn't they start building these into F-302s back in 2002?
we have the technology to go nowhere! How exciting, maybe we can visit that tree fort for adults, the ISS. Yay!
Nah, those used a hyperspace window generator
They had a hybrid propulsion system with 4 distinct subsystems employing different technologies. Traditional jets, aerospikes, traditional booster rocket, and a hyperspace window generator.
Nobody posted "....oops I thought it said 'Cylon' ..." yet.
fooey
https://app.box.com/WitthoftResume Code: https://github.com/cellocgw
The FAA won't certify airplane engines to run on unleaded fuel because of the potential hesitation and reliability problems. They're not going to certify this. Oh maybe in a hundred years.
Skyfall 2012 TS XViD UNiQUE http://thepiratebay.se/torrent/7818787/Skyfall_2012_TS_XViD_UNiQUE [thepiratebay.se] magnet:?xt=urn:btih:6d7882c59d6555283745f31e0492ac8d041132a1
An aerospike isn't a propulsion system, it's an expansion nozzle. The Lockheed X-33 was the new hotness when this episode was written and the writers didn't do the research.
re: But might it have the same legal difficulties flying from U.S. airports as the Concorde did?"
Yes, international laws and laws of physics. Consider, "travel into orbit from local airports (ideally, those close to the equator)..." It would violate international laws to extend the borders of the USA to the vicinity of the equator. In the absence of that, the laws of physics make it harder to launch from the USA's latitude closest to the equator, namely Hawaii for a state, maybe the US Virgin Islands for a territory.
On another list someone asked me to explain the press release. Here is my try.
Hypersonic engines are up against hard physics. The ram air heats so much in the inlet that it's hard for combustion to add much energy to make it go faster out the back.
The idea behind the SABRE engines is to cool the ram air before it is compressed. The heat exchanger to do this is what the press release is all about. With not much more than a ton of mass, it sucks 400 MW of heat out of the incoming air, dropping the temperature from 1500 C to -150 C in a few inches of heat exchanger that looks much like fabric because the tubes are so tiny.
The engine cycle also uses the temperature difference between the ram air and the LH2 to run the compressor. It takes close to 2/5th of the energy from burning hydrogen to liquefy it. The engines recover much of this by running a helium turbine on the temperature difference between the ram air and the liquid hydrogen flow to the engines. The turbine powers the compressor stage that raises the pressure of the -150 C air to rocket chamber pressure.
The design is extremely clever thermodynamics which also avoids most of the metallurgical problems of high temperature. Fabricating the air to helium heat exchanger was a very hard task. They have miles of tiny tubing, tens of thousands of brazed joints and they don't leak!
Using these engines and breathing air, the vehicle reaches 26 km and about a quarter of the velocity to orbit giving an equivalent exhaust velocity (back calculate from hydrogen consumption) of 9 km/s. That's twice as good as the space shuttle main engines. It is expected to go into orbit with 15 tons of payload out of 300 or 5% even though the rest of the acceleration is on internal oxygen that only gives 4.5 km/s exhaust velocity.
Leaving out the oxygen and using big propulsion lasers to heat hydrogen reaction mass, such a vehicle would get 25% of takeoff mass to LEO, reducing the already low cost by a factor of 5. That's enough to change the economics of power satellites from being too expensive to consider to a cost substantially less expensive than any fossil fuel.
But try explaining any of this in a press release.
End MGM. Get prospective parents of boys to Google: Men do complain
Many Europeans are terrible at geography.....Russia is whole different issue. Calling Russia 'part of Europe' is, at best, a half-truth.
This is probably the most unintentionally ironic post I've every seen on on Slashdot. Since I am guessing that you won't understand why anyone is saying that have a look at this. Now I'll grant you that the boundary between the Asian and European continents is not well defined but even allowing for sizeable error bars on the boundary you will notice that actually quite a large part of the European continent belongs to Russia. So saying that "Russia is part of Europe" is not a half truth but the complete truth: literally a part of Europe is Russian. Oh, and just in case your geography knowledge exceeds your English ability you might also want to look up irony.