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British Spaceplane Skylon Could Revolutionize Space Travel (ieee.org)
MarkWhittington writes: The problem of lowering the cost of sending people and cargo into low Earth orbit has vexed engineers since the dawn of the space age. Currently, the only way to go into space is on top of multistage rockets which toss off pieces of themselves as they ascend higher into the heavens. The Conversation touted a British project, called Skylon, which many believe will help to address the problem of costly space travel. According to IEEE Spectrum, both BAE Systems and the British government have infused Skylon with $120 million in investment.
When I see "could" in a headline, I add "but it probably won't/doesn't" to the end.
I think fundamentally this is closely related to Betteridge's law.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Skylon's idea is to use oxygen from the air, rather than taking the oxygen as fuel for the initial part of the ascent. A well known idea that is being worked on elsewhere.
Only $240M in funding? Last I checked, REL had specced the program as costing $12,000M.
This isn't even the first time they've gotten funding. They've gotten about $450M in several previous rounds. Did they pass some milestone to earn more funding or did they just get paid for the sake of not canceling the project? As far as I can tell the only component that's been tested is the intake air precooler.
SpaceX started in 2002; Reaction Engines Ltd started in 1989; SpaceX reached the ISS in 1012. Looks like Reaction Engines Ltd is 21 years behind, unless you count only their Skylon project, in which case it's almost 2 years behind.
Sorry. I'm massively unimpressed. Build something, already.
Ultimately jet engines are just complex rocket engines that use outside air for the oxidizer. The reason commercial jet engines are more reliable, generally, is they aren't pushed to the very edge of what's possible, performance-wise, and they're produced in large quantities. But neither will be true for the Skylon SABRE engines. I don't see any reason to think they'll be any cheaper to maintain than the Space Shuttle Main Engines.
https://xkcd.com/697/
-Z
Why not just fit it with a turbo-jet *and* a rocket engine--each optimized for their own roles and just switch from one to the other rather than combining them?
Pros:
A single engine that can transition from air breathing jet to scramjet to rocket, all the way from runway to orbit and back!
Cons:
A single ungodly complex engine that might transition from air breathing jet to scramjet to rocket, all the way from runway to orbit. Or not.
Cool idea on paper, but I see way too many moving parts over a huge performance envelope for me to believe this will ever be a robust engine. It just seems too complex to be a "fuel-up-and-go" engine. Looks more like a engine that would need to be torn down and inspected after every flight, assuming it works once. But best of luck to them all the same.
Left MS Windows for Linux Mint and never looked back!
Vote for Bernie in 2016!
To get to low earth orbit, a vehicle needs to be travelling at 17,400 MPH (7.7 km/s). If it travels just bit faster, 25,000 MPH, you can head off wherever you want to go in space. Orbit is 2/3rds of the way to anywhere.
It should read "leaving this planet is the only way of saving ourselves". I'm pretty sure the Earth will be here long after any sign of us has vanished.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
Building the hardest individual part and asking for more funding to make the full device, having shown that it works is a perfectly respectable strategy, unless you have a budget larger than most governments or can pull the whole thing of at once using magic, is that what you are asking for?
When "all" you have done is the most risky and difficult part then why should you not at least be taken a little seriously..
Seems like a company we can trust with people's lives.
Paul Moller has been announcing that his "Skycar" would give us all a George Jetson flying car future in the near future for something like 50 years. Every few years he gets a bunch of publications to write breathless articles about his flying car tech, which in-turn probably leads a new wave of gullible investors to pour money into one of his businesses. Could the Skycar fly? Possibly, but that does not appear to be the business model. I started my professional life working for a guy like this - an engineer with a small company and an idea. He paid his small staff to keep developing his idea year after year but when you worked for him for a while you realized he had no plan to actually take his project through the regulatory process and into production; it was actually a hobby for him, that was just there to make enough money to stay in business and interesting enough to keep him busy and fiddling until he could retire. My old boss could attract young workers to join (and work cheap) for a while and then get new ones as each figured out the hobby angle.
The people behind the Skylon have been hyping it for something like a decade, and stories about how it can/could/will revolutionize space travel keep getting written and passed around the net (probably trying to whip-up more investors and even more-probably trying to hit the modern investor jackpot: government subsidy). If you dig through the Slashdot archives, you'll find a bunch of Skylon stories. Do they have something new? Not really. People have talked about flying to space trying to avoid hauling the mass of an oxidizer by using the air for a very long time (it was in some of the proposals for the Reagan-era "National Aerospace Plane" project which failed to get congressional support). In this case, Skylon has a particular air-chilling idea as part of their engine design and BAE is making a relatively small investment in the company. Since Skylon is playing with a particular somewhat interesting engine technolog, it's a low-risk investment for BAE that will probably not help the Skylon people get 1cm closer to space but will get BAE test data on, and some rights to, a narrow bit of engine tech which might someday feed into a future airliner engine and which they then will not need to have any BAE people try.
It's the web equivalent of an infomercial, completele with the "Everything now sucks, SUCKS SUCKS!
"But we here at Skylon, we have the improvement needed to transform those sucky rocket based systems into a awesome never look back Skylon System!"
Which by the way, in no way eliminates those rockets they go way out of their way to tell us - suck.
Come back when your web page wasn't designed and populated by the Marketing department and some ad agency.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
1. Skylon? Terrible name, sounds stupid
2. Great idea and hope they get it off the ground, but it's going to take another 15-20 years before this thing is doing anything but R&D and test flights. Getting the funding is going to take them half that time.
link .. now would be a good time for slashdot to have a discussion on the balkanization of the Internet. Where the media companies are trying to turn Internet media back into television.
I see the potential but this particular project has been popping in newspapers in one form or another for the last 30 years.
That is why you could never launch a satellite without von Braun: You would not be able to perform honest calculations.
According to
echo "scale=12;sqrt((6.7*(10^-11)*5.97*(10^24))/(6500*1000))"|bc .128205128205
7834.833462468451
$ echo "scale=12;1000/7800"|bc
That is 12% of satellite speed, 6 times more than you claimed.
Your desire to badmouth stands in the way of achieving Newtonian physics success.
I wonder why it is different in electronics, though.
Crypto-communist scaremongering. We never had better life on the globe and we now have the technology to live almost indefinitely in a bunker, should a nuclear war break out. We can clone "good" humans in case of too much atrophy due to application of medicine. We can repair defective DNA. We can grow food in reactors. We have almost infinite sources of energy from Uranium, Thorium and soon H2 fusion.
We currently enjoy the luxury of badmouthing nuclear energy so that the Oil+Gas Scammers from BP to Gazprom have their nice business protected. But there is no rational reason we cannot again use fission. China does it on a large scale.
Population growth levels off except in countries ruled by Mohammedism and in Africa. They need to level off too. With war or without.
I am not a proponent of the bunker scenario, but I hate being sheep-i-fied by communist propaganda. Humanity can continue to exist here indefinitely and will do so. Our massive brain can fix ANY obstacle to our specie's existence.
We do not need your rotten ideology. Stop the B.S.
Captach: Incest. That can be fixed using gene editing. And it WILL be used. Too many horrible genetic deseases around. Why do we need to suffer it, if it can be fixed using technology ???
British Rocket plane sparks Flame War on Slash Dot!
Build a Man a Fire, and He'll Be Warm for a Day. Set a Man on Fire, and He'll Be Warm for the Rest of His Life.
they go with round windows this time.
...the planet the Blancmanges come from? They mean to win Wimbledon!
Read this and think: "Cylon?" Oh *$&^#!
It won't revolutionize anything. It will come to nothing. In a few months time, a few years, at best, it will be thoroughly forgotten, dead and buried, for all practical purposes. I wish this post could be put forth as an example of short-sightedness in a couple of decades - but it won't.
If going slower puts you further away, try walking at 4MPH and see how far into space you get. I said:
>> If it travels just bit faster, 25,000 MPH, you can head off wherever you want to go in space.
At escape velocity, you CAN head off into space. If you WANT to orbit at say, a geostationary altitude, you can slow down - at that lower speed you WILL orbit - you cannot leave that orbit without applying more power.
In other words, if you want to orbit at a distance, you can go slower. If you want to escape earth's gravity, in order to have complete freedom, you have to achieve escape velocity of 25,000 MPH (or continue to burn your engines for at least an hour which isn't possible due to fuel mass).
Seriously, Orbital math is hard (for you).
Skylon will supposedly be cheaper to operate than currently existing expendable multi-stage rockets or future reusable ones. The problem is that Skylon will have a massive sunk cost: estimates from more than a decade ago put the total sunk costs at $12 billion USD, a figure that is sure to be much higher in reality.
Skylon has a similar payload capacity to a Falcon 9 rocket, which costs $61.2M per launch. Skylon is predicted to have a $14.7M USD launch cost (assuming the prediction is remotely accurate). Skylon would have to launch more than 800 times just to break even compared to Falcon 9. If SpaceX or any other company is successful in bringing the cost of launch down via reusability, then Skylon could take even longer to pay off.
In short, considering the enormous costs, Skylon is unlikely to ever be cheaper than alternatives.
Sam, stop posting links to these fucking web sites that insist on running a bunch of popups and advertisement scripts. Nobody can read the story because of that bullshit.
If it doesn't stop, some posters will get banned.
ARTHUR: What happens now?
BEDEMIR: Well, now, uh, Launcelot, Galahad, and I wait until nightfall,
and then leap out of the rabbit, taking the French by surprise --
not only by surprise, but totally unarmed!
ARTHUR: Who leaps out?
BEDEMIR: Uh, Launcelot, Galahad, and I. Uh, leap out of the rabbit, uh
and uh....
ARTHUR: Oh....
BEDEMIR: Oh.... Um, l-look, if we built this large wooden badger--
[twong]
ALL: Run away! Run away! Run away! Run away!
[splat]
GUARDS: Oh, haw haw haw.
We need Lofstrom loops and skyhooks.
This is small stuff. OK for getting people to LEO but not much more than that.
Like launching rockets from about as close to sea level as they can get. We have real estate that is at least a mile higher with no problem. Denver for example.
Why launch from the surface in the first place. Could use something like a 1950s B52 or an old 1960s era C5 galaxy... even the european copy of the C5 - the A380 to haul a rocket way up there to begin with, they go right up to the tropopause. Then they don't need anywhere near as large of vehicle nor fuel.
In the mid-80s I was involved in the HOTOL project - a "space plane" with dual function engines for atmospheric and orbital capability. It petered out quietly. 30 years on we start again...
What the heck do we need cheaper space travel? I want to cheaper transatlantic flights so that I do not have to get a second mortgage on the house just to visit my family in Europe. Fix that, engineers!
...declaring with their infinite wisdom that this project wont work is embarrassing. Especially when 2 governments and 3 leading space agencies have closely looked at the project with positivity.