ESA is considering Skylon for it's new launcher!

[Drunkrobot]

ESA (European Space Agency) has recently begun a €1,000,000 study on how Skylon, a design for a SSTO launch vehicle from the folks at Reaction Engines Ltd, might be able to service Europe's space activity in the early 2020s.

ThalesAlenia Space in Italy will design the Skylon upper stage (a fuel tank with an engine that will be fitted to a satellite to push it into a higher orbit.), Qinectiq Space in Belgium will be studying what forms of payload carriers (space crates) to put in the payload bay, London Economics in... London, will prepare the business model for Skylon (it's hard to assess the economic impact of a vehicle straight from Thunderbirds.), and Grafton Technology will be seeing how Skylon can fit into the Spaceport in Kourou. The study should be finished by the end of the year.

This by no measure means that ESA is completely on-board with using Skylon, but spending a million euro studying how to use it is a good sign.

I wish Reaction Engines the best of luck. They'll go through with flying colours!

http://www.reactionengines.co.uk/news_updates.html

[astropapi1]

Awwwwwwwwww yis!

[Vaebn]

^ What he said.

[jwenting]

yeah, right...

A whole million Euro is pocket change, probably someone on the appropriations board has a particularly tasty lunch with a friend who likes Skylon and decided to do him a favour.

[sojourner]

Bleeding edge technology under heavy development. Hoping for the best, but not a good recipe for success.

[Nuke]

yeah, right...

A whole million Euro is pocket change, probably someone on the appropriations board has a particularly tasty lunch with a friend who likes Skylon and decided to do him a favour.

its actually a pretty good sign that they think it will work well enough to dump a million on the development of its accessories. this is penuts compaired to the funding that reaction engines has already received, which is still not enough to build a working engine, let alone a launch system. if it all goes south we still get a space crate system.

[DerekL1963]

its actually a pretty good sign that they think it will work well enough to dump a million on the development of its accessories.

They're developing any accessories. They're paying a million Euros to Reaction (and several other companies) for a bureaucratic report. jwenting probably has it right, it's just a bit of pork to help pad the ESA's spending in the UK for FY13. (The various countries that make up the ESA contribute money and 'in-kind' to the ESA, and get rather testy if they don't get their "fair share" back.)

[Tommygun]

The early 2020's is only about 10 years away, that seems much too optimistic to me.

I'd be surprised if they could get it's first flight in by then let alone in service.

I hope it leads to something, but twenty years or more seems more realistic when you look at how long it take a new fighter plane to get into service.

These new space technologies are more complex than ever and it takes longer to get it all integrated and tested.

[Nibb31]

In the space industry, a million euro report is the price of some back of the envelope calculations and a very basic feasibility study.

This news means that Skylon is on ESA's radar, that's it. Depending on the results of this million euro report, they will decide whether it's worth investing in a 10 million euro paper study. These sort of things take years, so we will not see ESA funding Skylon development in this decade, and then it will take at least 10 years to actually develop and flight test it.

So no way is Skylon being considered as a replacement for Ariane 5 instead of Ariane 6.