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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...
Is the strobing red light on the front. Seriously, what the frak?
Fuel is cheap: rocket designers dream of a future where fuel will be the primary cost of launching things into space. Developing a space plane is not, and you have to invest all that money before you even know if it will work.
SpaceX estimates for launches on a reusable Falcon are similar to the estimates for Skylon, and they can build up to it, starting with expendable versions that are proving the technology and making money. Skylon has the tricky 'give us ten billion and it will probably work' hurdle to jump over.
Good show, old chaps, but change the name. Sooner or later, a Skylon will turn on you.
No worries. The UK Ministry of Defense communication satellites are already called "SkyNet".
No sig. Move along - nothing to see here.
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?
Covered here. It's actually an interesting read. Put succinctly, as speed increases, the temperature of the air increases, reducing efficiency.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
The US "legal troubles" were a stalling tactic* back when Boeing was trying to build their own SST. The original grass roots "ban the bang" campaign was British.
*Do you really think Congress wouldn't have lifted the landing ban had the US version made it off the drafting board?
Have gnu, will travel.
The propulsion system is completely different. The space shuttle was designed in the 70s and used the materials and design techniques of 40 years ago. There is no comparison.
How's that going for disposable cars and airplanes?
Things are disposable _because_ they can be made very cheaply. Not the other way, generally.
Because of the low ballistic coefficient, Skylon would be slowed at higher altitudes where the air is thinner. As a result, the skin of the vehicle would only reach 1100 Kelvin (K). In contrast, the smaller Space Shuttle is heated to 2000 K on its leading edge, and so employs an extremely heat-resistant but extremely fragile silica thermal protection system. The Skylon design need not use such a system, instead opting for using a far thinner yet durable reinforced ceramic skin
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?
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!
Actually, the precise military design requirement that borked it was that the shuttle craft had to be capable of re-entry and landing entirely over the US continental area. They didn't want to overfly Russia, China or Europe.
That meant that it needed to have a steep descent profile, which in turn meant a hot flight, which meant expensive and sophisticated heat protection which ended up not working very well.
The Skylon is entirely commercial, and will have a much more sensible re-entry profile. It will be able to slow gradually in the upper atmosphere and even, with it's unique engines, start up again and fly back into orbit should it wish....
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