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.

Comments

Re:Skylon Pros and Cons

[EdgePenguin]

The existence of failure modes is not a sufficient reason to predict high failure rates.

Re:Not so fast

[WolfWithoutAClause]

Actually, the Skylon group predicted that the X--33 wouldn't work. They said that the X-33 was too tail heavy. And fixing it would mess up the payload fraction. And they were right.

It's difficult to get your head around just how far ahead these guys have been for about 20 years.

The ultimate reason is that they built a computer model of launch vehicles, which they fiddled with until they got a plausible vehicle. Then they did a back-back comparison with a pure-rocket vehicle, and found that there was no big advantage. Then they fiddled around more, and out popped Skylon, and then they found it *seriously* beats pure-rocket vehicles; it's not even close.

Skylon is looking at costs starting around $500/kg and then going lower. SpaceX won't be able to get down to that.