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British Spaceplane Skylon Could Revolutionize Space Travel (ieee.org)

Posted by samzenpus on from the to-the-stars dept.

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.

40 of 226 comments (clear)

  1. When I see "could" in a headline ... by Hognoxious · · Score: 2, Insightful

    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."
    1. Re:When I see "could" in a headline ... by turkeydance · · Score: 4, Funny

      "could" and "might" and "?" are standards in the click-bait tackle box.

    2. Re:When I see "could" in a headline ... by thinkwaitfast · · Score: 3, Insightful

      It could blow up and kill a lot of people. It could fail to make it to orbit and crash into NYC. It could make early investors billions. It could do a lot of things.

    3. Re:When I see "could" in a headline ... by Dereck1701 · · Score: 4, Insightful

      I believe there is a quote from Arthur C Clark regarding this

      "Every revolutionary idea seems to evoke three stages of reaction. They may be summed up by the phrases: 1- It's completely impossible. 2- It's possible, but it's not worth doing. 3- I said it was a good idea all along."

      That's not to say that one should buy into every idea that someone is trying to peddle, but many of the technologies we take for granted today (aircraft, cars, PCs, engineered lumber, etc) were seen as prohibitively expensive, unnecessary and/or dead ends before they became widespread. Air breathing rocket engines of some sort are very likely to be the future of spaceflight, whether or not Skylon will be that future we will have to see.

    4. Re:When I see "could" in a headline ... by KGIII · · Score: 2

      In the scale of things, it wasn't all that odd for the computer that I had in my house, counting all the peripherals, was more costly than my new car in the driveway. I think my first laptop was about $10,000 and had an external tape drive (that had an internal 40 MB HDD IIRC and used proprietary tapes), had a docking station, had an external modem, and I think it had an internal 40 GB drive as well as the ability to use an external monitor.

      The PC on my desk was only slightly less expensive and I think that's because I'd opted to upgrade some of the boards - I'd a whopping 33 MHz as I recall. I'm not able to recall if that was the same laptop that also required an external power supply or not. This would have been sometime around 1990. I'd bought an extra docking station so that I had one at home and one at work. I think it must have been just a bit after 1990, actually? I could be conflating two of them in my head.

      My car was probably about $10,000 or so and likely new at the time. The laptop, with the docking stations and the extras was about that same price. The desktop was less but made the total value certainly higher than my car. At one point, you could even buy insurance for your computer. There were some colorful insurance claims at the time.

      I guess the point is that they probably were prohibitively expensive for some. It used to be that you'd dress in your Sunday finest to go on a plane. It was an event and damned expensive. So, yeah, they were prohibitively expensive - it wasn't just people saying that. It just ended up being less expensive as the number grew. They moved from things for the upper-middle class, to the middle-class, to the working poor, and now even poor people probably have at least one working computer. Well, poor people in my country.

      --
      "So long and thanks for all the fish."
    5. Re:When I see "could" in a headline ... by Keith+Henson · · Score: 5, Interesting

      I have followed Skylon for several years now. The engines are very interesting, in fact, the whole design, including the wings is very cool. The wings take the gravity load off, which for something that takes that long to get to orbit is quite an advantage.

      They actually get more energy out of the hydrogen than they would get from just burning it. The reason is that they run the compressor on the temperature difference between ram air and the LH2 flowing to the engines. Burning hydrogen gives about 50 kWh/kg, it takes 20 kWh/kg to make it into a liquid.

      You might note that everyone who has been given the full inside information, including the USAF, agrees that it will work as a SSTO. If anyone wants to build power satellites, Skylon is the only thing that is likely to get the cost to where power satellites could undercut coal.

      --
      End MGM. Get prospective parents of boys to Google: Men do complain
    6. Re:When I see "could" in a headline ... by Keith+Henson · · Score: 2

      "and just for mach 5 seems a heavy cost'

      As important, Skylon is at 26 km, which is to say 96% or so of the atmosphere is below it. Also, you *start* with 150 untouched tons of LOX and enough hydrogen to burn all of it in about a 6 to one ratio. The 15 ton payload is only 5% of the 300 ton takeoff mass, but the design goal is to fly it every other day or perhaps every day with a low turn around cost. The heat exchangers are not that big a piece of the mass budget.

      To solve the carbon/energy problem in 7 or 8 years would take a construction rate of 400 five GW power sats a year. This takes around a million Skylon flights. That's a reasonable number considering that we get a million commercial aircraft flights in ten days.

      It's not even close to reasonable if you try to do it with rockets.

      --
      End MGM. Get prospective parents of boys to Google: Men do complain
  2. Stupid article by BradMajors · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

    1. Re:Stupid article by EdgePenguin · · Score: 5, Insightful

      If you think saving money on LOx is in any way the aim of Skylon, you have demonstrated your utter inability to grasp basic rocket science. Its about saving mass; and Skylon does a hell of a lot of that. So much so that (by the estimation of all the third parties who have looked at the design - including the UK government, ESA, DLR and recently the USAF) it can achieve SSTO operation. It takes off and lands like a plane, so no need to integrate it each time. That is an advance on even SpaceX - they have to manufacture a new second stage and attach it to the reusable first stage.

    2. Re:Stupid article by EdgePenguin · · Score: 3, Insightful

      So let me get this straight; you think you have spotted a major flaw in their design that was not spotted by various governments, space agencies and aerospace companies that have thoroughly analysed this project? Have you done the sums and found that the precoolers have more mass than the oxygen saved? Have you worked out the losses due to drag?

      I was talking about integrating stages, not payload. SpaceX still have to and always will have to do that. The TPS isn't magic either They are already talking to manufacturers about how to build it. Most importantly though is due to the aerodynamics of the vehicle it will have a much milder re-entry than the Space Shuttle, only needing the same kind of thermal protection it has in certain critical areas.

      And no, SpaceX does not have a reusable vehicle that actually exists. They haven't yet recovered a first stage, never mind reflown one.

      Please, could people actually investigate this project, its history and the major players who have invested in it before dismissing it out of hand based on intuition?

    3. Re:Stupid article by Rei · · Score: 2

      Skylon is reusable? So was the shuttle. Skylon saves propellant? Propellant is cheap. Reusable and low propellant consumption are not the key factors - maintenance costs are. And how Skylon will fare in that regard is very much an unknown at this point.

      Part of the problem with building these sorts of reusables is that they're such low volume that you never achieve economies of scales or significant stocks of parts, and have a lot more trouble refining the design with time. SpaceX's approach where the rockets are designed to be reusable but are still an affordable option as a disposal - and starting with the disposable route - works around this problem. They produce them in bulk while progressively refining the reusable aspects.

      That doesn't mean that SABRE/Skylon (which, by the way, is quite an old concept) shouldn't be pursued. It could be a quite useful concept. But it's really not answering the key question. That said, one nice thing about Skylon: being basically a giant hydrogen tank, it has a very low mass/surface area ratio when empty - namely because it has such a big bloated volume due to hydrogen's low density. This gives it a big advantage against craft like the shuttle on reentry - the energy you have to lose is proportional to your mass but the amount of surface you have to lose it from is proportional to your surface area. A reentering Skylon is a whole lot of... well, nothing. Just a big hollow shell for the most part.

      --
      The yellowcake is a lie.
    4. Re:Stupid article by EdgePenguin · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Once more, saving 250t of liquid oxygen is absolutely nothing to do with cost! Its to do with reducing the take off mass - which is what enables the performance required for SSTO.

      Oh, and the Space Shuttle wasn't reusable, it was rebuildable.

    5. Re:Stupid article by thinkwaitfast · · Score: 2
      There is a drawback in using atmospheric oxygen. The vehicle must stay low enough to have something to scoop up. Exactly how low is a messy calculus problem and also requires different structures and heat dissipation techniques.

      The two extremes are 1. shoot straight up out of the atmosphere, then straight tangential to the local surface (horizontal) and 2. Stay at sea level until you achieve orbital velocity, then head straight up. The space shuttle accent is closer to (1), popping out of the atmosphere then diving down toward Earth to pick up the horizontal component. And remember, every second you are not in orbit, you have to expend fuel to keep yourself off the ground. SpaceX did this analysis and concluded that while it was interesting and has merit that their current solution was better. Musk also said they might to back to revisit the problem in the future, but that it is a close trade off.

    6. Re:Stupid article by Panoptes · · Score: 3, Funny

      "They have a plan"

      Even better - they have a cunning plan.

    7. Re:Stupid article by Alioth · · Score: 2

      No, not at all. The Space Shuttle had to be substantially overhauled after *every single flight*. Airplanes don't. EasyJet for instance turns around a flight in under 30 minutes, which simply wouldn't be possible if it required more than a visual walk around by the crew between flights. I own an aircraft, and typically we only have to take things apart twice a year (and this is for an antique aircraft, too).

      The Space Shuttle was not like this at all. It needed a full engine overhaul after every flight. The turbines on modern widebody twin engine aircraft will go thousands of cycles and tens of thousands of hours before requiring an overhaul - not a single cycle and single flight like the Shuttle.

      --
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    8. Re: Stupid article by O('_')O_Bush · · Score: 2

      Drag is a function of velocity. Rockets have to go fast in the atmosphere to build V to keep from wasting fuel fighting gravity. Skylon doesn't have to fight gravity the same way (it uses the atmosphere to fight gravity for it) and therefore doesn't have high drag by needing to punch straight through the atmosphere as fast as possible and where drag is the highest .

      Your thinking is akin to two grave diggers. One uses a shovel to cut the earth and remove dirt (Skylon) making it an easy job to reach 6', while you are trying to suggest that is worse or equivalent to someone trying to dig a grave out of holes from someone pushing a 6' pole into the ground repeatedly.

      --
      while(1) attack(People.Sandy);
    9. Re:Stupid article by Chris+Mattern · · Score: 2

      Skylon saves propellant? Propellant is cheap.

      On the contrary, propellant is damn expensive. Its mass winds up being most of the mass of the rocket, which you then have to lift.

    10. Re:Stupid article by Rei · · Score: 2

      Skylon's payload is comparable to that of the Falcon 9 V.1.1, but its engines are nonetheless still 70% the thrust of Falcon 9 V1.1 first stage. And a LOT more complex.

      There's a number of other problematic things about Skylon. One is the very HTOL design itself. Rockets (including skylon) are cylinders under some degree of pressure - that's the natural shape for them due to wind resistance. This is a very strong design against loads along its length, not so much for loads applied by stubby wings in the middle. VTOL keeps the loads vertical the whole time, which is a big structural mass savings (it also allows for the use of landing struts rather than landing gear, which are lighter and simpler, and much smaller highly reinforced concrete pads - Skylon requires a whole highly-reinforced runway). VTHL is the next best - you still have to be able to bear lateral loads, but on landing your craft is a tiny fraction of its launch mass, so the lateral loads are a tiny fraction of what they would be with horizontal takeoff. But Skylon is HTOL - it must bear its whole loaded mass at takeoff. It has a takeoff weight like a jumbo jet, yet they want it to have an empty weight a tiny fraction of an unfurnished jumbo jet - yet have far more complicated, powerful engines, to be spaceworthy, to be hauling cryogenic propellants, etc. It's a tall order. Jumbo jets have such high empty weights in large party to withstand their takeoff loads.

      Takeoff is even worse that cruise at full mass, as there's higher pressure, and you have so much force concentrated on the tiny points of your landing gear. It's so much of an issue that some HTOL designs have even tried to work around it by having the craft empty on takeoff and be fueled midair (see "Black Horse" as an example). Some extant systems do this indirectly, for example Pegasus, by employing an airplane to get them off the ground. The airplane doesn't give the rocket much altitude or delta-V, so it's not immediately obvious what advantages it gives that justify the added expense and complexity, but it's a whole host of small side benefits: great flexibility of launch locations, ease of transportation of the rocket, allowing the first rocket stage to be optimized for thinner air, and yes, avoiding the mass penalty of having to withstand the forces of takeoff. The plane has to do that, not the rocket. Other variants that have been investigated have been tow-launch with midair refueling and launch out the back of a cargo plane.

      --
      The yellowcake is a lie.
    11. Re:Stupid article by Keith+Henson · · Score: 2

      Thanks for the compliment, AC. Perhaps I can do the same for you some day.

      But let's analyze the case (if any) for power satellites. Electricity is a commodity; like all commodities you have to be competitive on price if you want a significant market share. That means you want to undercut electricity from coal at around 4 cents per kWh. If you set 75% of coal (3 cents per kWh) as the target, then you can back calculate how much you can spend for a levelized cost of electricity of three cents. For generally accepted life and discount rates that's about $2400/kW.

      The mass for ground based solar power is around 500 kg/kW. This article, http://spacejournal.ohio.edu/i..., make a case for 6.5 kg/kW. Not having to support the collectors against gravity and wind, plus the near 24 hr sunlight cuts the mass to about 1%. Parts and the rectenna are currently estimated at around $1100/kW, leaving $1300/kW for transport cost. If we can't get the mass lower than 6.5 kg/kW, then the cost of lifting the power sats to GEO can't exceed $200/kg. At high flight rates, Reaction Engines thinks the cost will get to $120/kg. Electric propulsion from GEO to LEO powered by 25 GHz microwave beams in the hundreds of MW, looks like it will cost under $80/kg.

      This article goes into the transport cost analysis. http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl...

      It was peer reviewed.

      If you don't have easy library access, there is a preprint here:

      https://drive.google.com/file/...

      AC, if you would like to be anything but a blowhard, go through the documents and see if you can find fault with them.

      --
      End MGM. Get prospective parents of boys to Google: Men do complain
  3. Not so fast by tsotha · · Score: 3, Interesting

    But even if you manage to land the booster stage, it’s going to need a very expensive inspection before it can be flown again. Rockets tread a fine line between flying and exploding. It’s hard enough to get them to work just once, let alone tens or maybe hundreds of times.

    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.

    1. Re:Not so fast by EdgePenguin · · Score: 3, Insightful

      They have worked out their cost/kg and found it to be lower - and had their sums checked by third parties. I have the feeling this project is largely not being taken seriously because Americans don't pay attention to anything outside their borders (and generally refuse to believe any worthwhile advance comes from outside the US)

    2. Re:Not so fast by WolfWithoutAClause · · Score: 3, Informative

      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.

      --

      -WolfWithoutAClause

      "Gravity is only a theory, not a fact!"
  4. Ob. XKCD by zorro-z · · Score: 2

    https://xkcd.com/697/

    --
    -Z
  5. Re:So where's their spaceplane? by viperidaenz · · Score: 2

    LOX fueled rocket engines have been flying since 1926.

    You're comparing "Tweak existing technology" with "Invent new technology"

  6. Re:So where's their spaceplane? by ClickOnThis · · Score: 2

    SpaceX reached the ISS in 1012.

    Whoa, has Elon built a time machine?

    --
    If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
  7. Re:So where's their spaceplane? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Funny

    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

    You're forgetting that in 2024 Reaction Engines will steal SpaceX's time machine and use it to reach the ISS in 997 AD, beating SpaceX by 15 years. That will have, of course, triggered the time race between the two companies, which will have resulted in both going further and further back in time until they accidentally cause a mass extinction on Earth 66 million years ago.

  8. Re:So where's their spaceplane? by EdgePenguin · · Score: 5, Insightful

    SpaceX started with a lot of money behind it, the support of NASA, and they are doing something very conventional (multi-stage LOx-Kerosene rockets) albeit better than the competition. Reaction engines are aiming at what they claim (with good reason) to be the biggest advance in propulsion since the jet engine. Snarky crap on slashdot is quick enough to write; R&D takes a long time.

  9. Re:So where's their spaceplane? by EdgePenguin · · Score: 5, Insightful

    They have built something. A precooler that can cool incoming air from 1000C to -150C as it comes into an engine intake at Mach 5, and is light and small enough to fit into an aircraft engine. This is the main part of the vehicle that is a big unknown, and they have shown it works in view of experts from government and industry.

  10. Skylon Pros and Cons by Irate+Engineer · · Score: 2

    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!

    1. Re:Skylon Pros and Cons by EdgePenguin · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Wrong on multiple points

      It never becomes a scramjet. Not being a scramjet is in fact the entire point behind the last few decades of research. You can either try to burn fuel in a supersonic flow through your engine (scramjet) or you can slow the flow to subsonic and compress it so the fuel can burn properly (ramjets etc.) - problem is, this compression superheats the air. SABRE dumps the excess heat into the cryogenic hydrogen the vehicle carries so that you can operate an engine at high Mach number without its insides melting.

      As for too many moving parts; they precooler itself does not appear to have any moving parts. It needs a liquid helium cooling loop to connect it to the hydrogen supply, but that isn't overly complex. Everything behind that is well established jet/rocket engine technology. Even if you assume that each precooler + bypass is itself as complicated as enough engine, the spacecraft only has as many "moving parts" as an ordinary rocket with 4 engines. SpaceX happily flies a rocket with 9 engines and will likely be able to reuse its first stage in a cost effective way.

    2. Re:Skylon Pros and Cons by EdgePenguin · · Score: 2

      Your opinion is based in ignorance then. Costs cannot come down without re-usability and solid rockets are not reusable. The Shuttle SRBs had reusable casing - which had to be separated into segments, refilled with solid fuel, and then put back to together. Ever see an Airbus A320 get chopped into segments between flights?

    3. Re:Skylon Pros and Cons by EdgePenguin · · Score: 4, Informative

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

    4. Re:Skylon Pros and Cons by Rei · · Score: 3, Interesting

      I've sometimes pondered the concept of a self-consuming rocket engine - basically infinite-staging.

      Picture a spike (although the ideal shape would be different from an aerospike) comprised of small channels between aluminum - for example, assembled via fine aluminum wires or finely corrugated aluminum sheets, all the way through, thus leaving empty space between them. The wires or sheets would be joined together by having any surface oxide removed (or inhibited altogether by alloying agents), and heated enough in a non-oxidizing environment to braze them together. The channels would be filled with an oxidizer-rich polymer/ammonium perchlorate mixture (very mainstream as far as propellants go).

      The engine would need to be lit off across its entire surface, so all channels ignite (or be designed such that neighboring channels ignite neighbors who fail to ignite).

      The propellant mixture would burn down into the channels (as even fine aluminum wire/sheeting takes time to burn through) - lacking any area within the channels to expand into, it remains compressed and accelerates linearly as it moves through the channel (design parameters set such that the compression ratio achieved is the desired compression ratio for the engine). The angle of the channels would direct the stream largely along the spike, so that the gases expand along an ideal expansion profile for generating forward thrust. Since the entire spike would be comprised of channels, again, the ideal shape would be different form an aerospike; the exhaust gases don't simply come from the top.

      As the oxidizer-rich propellant burns down, it progressively erodes the aluminum making up its channels (again, alloying agents in the aluminum may be used to help or hinder this process). Since the exterior ends of the channels would be exposed to the oxidizer-rich exhaust for the longest, they'd progressively burn down from their ends. Since the exhaust burns further as it flows (and the oxidizer would be more liberated), again the erosive potential of the stream would be highest near the end of the channels. So like a wick keeping pace with a candle as it burns down, the channels would be expected to erode away at approximately the same rate that the propellant burns down.

      Aluminum metal is itself is a very energetic-burning compound - aluminum dust is often included in solid rocket mixes, so the erosion of the aluminum channels is a significant thrust contributor. Lithium-aluminum would be even better - lithium-aluminum is stronger than aluminum, and lithium is even more energetic than aluminum. It would also help neutralize the hydrochloric acid that occurs in most ammonium perchlorate-based solid propellants (although there are other techniques as well, such as burning magnesium and/or sodium nitrate with it).

      In a naive implementation, the spike would change from the ideal shape to a progressively suboptimal shape as it burned down. But the rate of propellant burn and aluminum erosion could be controlled by tweaking the parameters of the system such that the areas of the spike you want to last longer can burn down slower than the areas you want to burn down faster. Hence the ideal spike shape can be retained as the engine burns down, all the way to right before it burns out.

      Basically, your rocket would be... no rocket at all; just propellant. The entire thing is consumed. It'd be useless for orbital maneuvering**, but to get to orbit, the rocket equation likes nothing better than non-stop continuous staging with no tankage or engine mass at all (a caveat in this regard: your gimbaling system and interstage would still have to be sized for when it's at full size and max thrust). No complex systems at all. No exotic manufacturing techniques needed. No exotic, expensive materials. Just aluminum and a not-particularly-unusual solid rocket propellant. Getting the details of the mix right to ensure 1) even ignition, 2) even burndown, and 3) aluminum erosion at the proper rate would take research and experimentation, but I would e

      --
      The yellowcake is a lie.
  11. 50% more than LEO, TO BE EXACT by raymorris · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  12. Re:So where's their spaceplane? by quintessencesluglord · · Score: 4, Interesting

    If I remember correctly, Reaction Engines got severely dicked by the UK government (pulling funding declaring the engines covered by the Official Secrets Act), effectively ending private development.

    The design was promising but had teething issues, and has been carried on as a garage project all these years.

    That they've managed to get this far given the hurdles they've had to overcome is nothing short of astounding.

  13. Re:"Build something" is not "Build everything" by Ol+Olsoc · · Score: 2

    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?

    I thinnk the animation is the finished product. It indeed works pretty well.

    --
    The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
  14. Re:Horrible name, still 15-20 years out by Chrisq · · Score: 2

    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

  15. Re:So where's their spaceplane? by tsotha · · Score: 2

    If I remember correctly, Reaction Engines got severely dicked by the UK government (pulling funding declaring the engines covered by the Official Secrets Act), effectively ending private development.

    That's a BAE/Rolls Royce project called HOTOL, which was co-created by the same designer. After HOTOL was canceled he started REL.

  16. Re:So where's their spaceplane? by Maritz · · Score: 2

    So where is the flight hardware?

    The flying prototype?

    Parent is replying to a post that said they haven't made anything. "so where is the flight hardware" is a nonsensical response to that post.

    They haven't finished it yet, so it's a waste of time - is that your argument?

    --
    I do not want your cheap brainburning drugs. They are useless for work. And I am a working man today.
  17. Re:Skylon = SkyNet + Cylon? by Eunuchswear · · Score: 2

    Nope, it's a reference to the 1951 Festival of Britain.

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