Scientists are testing a new form of rocket technology that could lead to spaceplanes that launch satellites, carry passengers or fly anywhere in the world in four hours, all by taking off from a runway. Barring any regulatory or engineering hitches, the technology is being proposed for use with an aircraft named Skylon, which could be automated to fly into orbit.
Crucial to the technology being developed by the engineers at Reaction Engines Limited is their Sabre engine, which takes in air like a jet engine at lower speeds, but switches to rocket mode to get into orbit. The idea has been around since the 80s, but technology is only just getting to the point where it's commercially viable. The Sabre's hybrid jet and rocket engine uses both hydrogen and oxygen to provide thrust, avoiding the need for the throwaway rocket propellants, and also making flights into space cheaper.
Here is where Reaction Engines has the potential to be truly disruptive. The company estimates it would cost $12 billion to develop the Skylon, which sounds like a lot but is roughly comparable to the price of developing Airbus' A380 superjumbo or the Ariane 5 rocket, which is manufactured by Airbus' sister company, Astrium. Each launch of the Skylon would cost roughly $35 million, but, the company adds, that could fall to $10 million as the number of Skylons increase and $2 million if there's a rise in certain satellites that calls for more launches.
Some 85% of Reaction Engine's budget so far has come from private investment, and the company wants to raise another £250 million from investors if it can pass this current testing phase. Now it is testing its key innovation within the Sabre engine, details of which it keeps under wraps: a heat exchanger, which in just a fraction of a second can cool gasses from 1,000 degrees Celsius, to -140 degrees Celsius. All the while the Sabre's technology keeps a module of fine piping in the engine from freezing over.
The company is already on its way to a full Sabre engine -- it's already created that frost-controlling piping module -- but the 270-foot Skylon plane is still a concept. Shown in mock-ups as a sleek, black aircraft that almost looks like a stealth military bomber, it would be pilotless and able to carry 15 tons of cargo at a time, or 24 passengers. That, for now, is at least a decade away.
Reaction Engines was founded 1989 to make space propulsion systems and products aimed at the commercial exploitation of space. Since then, the company and its managing director, Alan Bond, have been working on technical designs for the Skylon spaceplane and Sabre engines.
Skylon was borne out of a project called HOTOL or Horizontal Take-Off and Landing, a collaboration between Rolls Royce and British Aerospace, which sought to create an "air-breathing" shuttle - a similar concept to the Sabre engine but one hindered by engineering problems. The program shut down in 1988 and Bond, who was a co-founder of HOTOL, steered its evolution into Skylon.
If the current tests on the Sabre engines go without a hitch, Reaction Engines also plans to exhibit at the annual Farnborough Air Show this July. The company is based in Culham, Oxfordshire and there's some excitement about how the technology could mark a comeback for British innovation and engineering.
More generally, if the Sabre engine manages to change the economics of how we get into space, it could also signal a revival of the same kind of global excitement we last saw for space exploration back in the late 50's and 60s, notwithstanding recent talk about billionaire asteroid mining. Fingers crossed for those tests.
Watch below for an animated demonstration of the Skylon spaceplane:
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