
British technology company to 'transform' air and space travel - charlieirish
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/industry/engineering/12023867/British-technology-company-to-transform-air-and-space-travel-with-pioneering-new-engine-design.html
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avmich
The company, which has 75 employees, is valued at about 100 millions.

For software company in California, this level of valuation aproximately
corresponds to "aqui-hire" \- when the technology is uninteresting, but people
can be used.

For aerospace company like Reaction Engines with track record of their
founders and results which are being discussed, with all potential
opportunities...

It looks strange.

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m-i-l
This has quite a long heritage, with Reaction Engines Limited being co-founded
by one of the designers of HOTOL[0], which was a similar design for an air-
breathing rocket engine which got a lot of press in the UK in the 1980s.

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HOTOL](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HOTOL)

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nsxwolf
How is this company getting in the news so much lately? They have nothing to
show besides poorly rendered CGI films.

And 10-15 years? Cessna would be lucky to be able to certify a new single
engine piston airplane in that amount of time.

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strictnein
Yeah, I saw that picture of the test rocket firing and was surprised. Then I
saw the caption:

> "An artist's impression of how the new engine would look in ground tests"

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Gravityloss
There's at least one very large drawback with the Skylon design for orbital
flight. You drag those air breathing engines with huge inlets and heat
exchangers all the way to orbit, plus all that extra hydrogen tankage, large
landing gear etc.

As a first stage it would make a lot more sense. Then launch a much smaller
pure rocket second stage from there. Staging at high altitude with low dynamic
pressure should be relatively easy, probably easier than high speed
atmospheric flight or re-entry from orbital velocities with Skylon.

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mikeash
Weight inefficiency basically doesn't matter if you can achieve reuse.

On an expendable rocket, every bit of inefficiency is more engine, tank, and
structure that you have to rebuild for each launch. You want to minimize that.
It's also extra fuel, but relative to the total cost of a launch, fuel is
essentially free.

If you can reuse the rocket, then that becomes much less important. Maybe you
spend 10-100x more building engines and tanks and structures than you would if
you had a more efficient design, but you get to amortize that cost across many
launches, so it's much less important.

Reuse is, of course, a big if. A gigantic if. The gigantic-est of all ifs. The
big question is, "will it work?" If the technology simply doesn't work, or if
it "works" to get to orbit but requires so much refurbishment that it's
basically like building a whole new rocket each time (see: Space Shuttle),
then it's not practical. But if it _does_ work, then who cares if you drag 10x
more mass to orbit than you strictly need to?

I am very much in a "I'll believe it when I see it" mode with Skylon, but to
me the objections center around the the hard work of going from theory to
practice, and the lack of visible progress with same.

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7952
But all that extra mass does eat into the payload capacity.

A craft that is 100 tonnes dry mass and delivers 20 tonnes payload needs
enough fuel to boost 120 tonnes in the last part of the flight. A centaur
upper stage by comparison has a mass of just 2.2 tonnes. So for most of the
flight you need much more fuel to boost the same payload.

~~~
mikeash
Who cares about needing more fuel? As I said in the original comment, fuel is
basically free. If you manage to build a craft where the cost of extra fuel
(even using an order of magnitude more) even becomes noticeable, you've
already managed to make launches vastly cheaper than anything out there today.

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gadders
This story about hypersonic jetliners seems to come round every 6 months to a
year, and is perennially 15 years away.

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giarc
Seems to be on the same timelines as batteries that charge in 30 seconds and
fusion power.

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bite_my_shiny_m
It's the Telegraph, this is just a "jolly good show chaps, we Englishmen can
really achieve marvellous things can't we, it's not all about those chaps
across The Pond, tallyho tallyho" puff piece. Skylon PR bits come out all the
time.

Not to belittle their accomplishments, but the press releases after they
successfully put some serious flows through the pre-chiller made it seem like
there was a guaranteed outcome of a working powerplant within a decade, and a
vehicle within 15 years. Despite the exotic fuels, powerplant, and mission
profiles.

The F-22 was conceived in the middle of the 80s, had an effectively bottomless
pit of funding from DoD after winning the contract in the early 90s, and look
when those first came online (2005). And that was just burning JP-8.

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Animats
_" An artist's impression of how the new engine would look in ground tests"_

A render of a _test stand firing_? Now that's a bit much. Now that they have
$21 million, they had better do that for real on a test stand.

They've been working on this for over a decade. I'd expect at least a small
scale demo by now.

