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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
Weight.
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?
Seems like a company we can trust with people's lives.
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.
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 met Paul Moller at Yolo County airport in late 1980s. There was a small airshow of sorts, he had a Skycar mockup on display. I asked him why this VTOL will be so much cheaper than what typically be from aerospace companies. Moller said these large companies have only one customer, the government, so there is no reason to make any VTOL vehicle lowcost. He is (was or still is?) for the "average." Earlier in 1980s I found a AIAA paper he wrote and had a set of equations dealing with power and diameter of ducted engines (I cannot find it anywhere now). It outlined for a given amount of powered lift the total ducted area needs to be of a certain value. Moller also wrote his equations showed the Canadian Avro-Car in late 1950s was doomed to never get out of ground effect because total ducted area was too small regardless how powerful the engines may have been. I also remembered the slick brocheres, I looked up the company in the phone book and also (what's that publication that was real popular back in the days?) that lists companies, Moller Corp. business that earned money was selling mufflers that were flow efficient. Moller was also a professor at UC Davis.
mfwright@batnet.com
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.
It's even older than that
I see the potential but this particular project has been popping in newspapers in one form or another for the last 30 years.
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!
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.
We need Lofstrom loops and skyhooks.
This is small stuff. OK for getting people to LEO but not much more than that.
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.
You idealism is inspiring, if misguided.
We currently enjoy the luxury of badmouthing nuclear energy so that the Oil+Gas Scammers from BP to Gazprom have their nice business protected.
Agreed. Nuclear still needs to sort it's issues out.
But there is no rational reason we cannot again use fission.
The question is if human systems can acquire the required discipline to run them without blowing them up.
China does it on a large scale.
So in one breath you praise and criticize communism, an interesting dichotomy.
Population growth levels off except in countries ruled by Mohammedism and in Africa. They need to level off too. With war or without.
Well, you didn't give a fuck when they were committing human right violations before, so why would you now.
I am not a proponent of the bunker scenario, but I hate being sheep-i-fied by communist propaganda.
Riiiight, so advocating going to the stars is communist propaganda. You've probably heard this before, your a moron.
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.
So solving the problem of getting mass into orbit cheaply shouldn't be too much of an issue then. Oh, but you think only communists can do it.
[sic]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 ???
Well, let's make a start by spelling the things we need to fix properly. Maybe the genetic diseases came from growing food in the reactor.
Stop the B.S.
From the authority of BS.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
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.
You have confused speed with kinetic energy. All terms for this scale with v^2 not v. Lift, drag, skin heating, and orbital "lift" are all to v^2. So yea it is the Newtonian physics. 1000m/s is a really really long way from 7800.
The Grey Goo disaster happened 3 billion years ago. This rock is covered in self replicating machines!
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!
From Wikipedia:
.
The yellowcake is a lie.
...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.