ESA states Saber engine is viable.

[boolybooly]

The ESA has approved Reaction Engines' Saber engine. Development will go ahead once they have raised £250m, expected to take 10 years.

Thought some people would be interested

google

[Dkmdlb]

The company has not disclosed how the engine works

Actually, they have. It's on their website under the heading "SABRE - How it works." But I can see how a journalist could easily miss that.

Also this:

Because the engine uses atmospheric air, rather than putting carrying oxygen in tanks like a rocket does, it could use much less fuel and help it go faster.

[Newt]

Very exciting. I have been following the Skylon project for two years, and it is always nice to see progress. There are some fairly detailed explanations that I have found (not really technical, but enough to know what is going on in principle).

[Frozen_Heart]

Not that I'm trying to do a Nibb here but I really don't think that this proposal is viable.

Building one engine in 10 years for £250million strikes me as the very definition of inefficiency. They've already spent that much just getting the precooler tested.

[Mazon Del]

Strictly speaking that 250 is the development costs. Just because they have a design doesn't mean they won't run into bumps on the way. As a result, they'll probably end up making 4-5 engines for that same price, only they will stress-test and intentionally initiate failure modes in several of them in order to have a final design that meets their requirements.

The US government is considering sending AT LEAST as much money to the ULA to replace the Russian engines.

[AngelLestat]

These is for all dumb people who was saying all kind of crap about this project.. Of course this is only the engine, it saids nothing about skylon.

But that study is not over, maybe in the next year we would know if they gives green line for that too.

I always could understand the technologic dubts that people may have.. it is perfectly normal and show some real concerns. But the thing I never could understand, was all the economic critics about this project and how useless will be.

That is when all the logic is lost, and I have to leave the topic or hit them in the head with the common sense book.

[xenomorph555]

Sigh why does the UK never fund decent things well, their spending £80 billion+ on a train set no one wants...

[Iskierka]

Not that I'm trying to do a Nibb here but I really don't think that this proposal is viable.

Building one engine in 10 years for £250million strikes me as the very definition of inefficiency. They've already spent that much just getting the precooler tested.

Thus far they've barely spent a few millions, it's been a very cheap project so far, and £250 million for the next stage of engine development is very good value. I can't quote it for certain, but I'm at least 50% certain it's £250 million to get together engine technologies and manufacturers to get into testing phases, not full engine development costs, though it's a good fraction of them.

I'm not sure if this actually news, since the ESA has been approving at various stages and giving funding grants, and this doesn't make entirely clear the current situation, but it's good to get word of it about.

And slightly off-topic, while £80 bn is very expensive and possibly OTT, the train would be nice to have if we could afford to ride it. Though personally I'd like some more upgrades to local services in the north, such as re-expanding lines that used to have four tracks and giving more rolling stock. Would be much cheaper and offer a fair benefit to business at the other end of the country.

[Nuke]

that article was so much derp. fine example of what is wrong with technical reporting.

as i understand it they already have secured 1/3 of the required funds needed to develop the engine. if it takes several engine prototypes throughout the development then they might have a working prototype before they run out of cash. having a working prototype is a great way to drum up investors. a better idea would be licensing out the heat exchanger tech for other applications. it could make up some of the difference.

[Streetwind]

Pretty much all the articles that that Google news aggregator thingy belches up are worthless, sadly. They randomly copy from each other and still manage to contradict each other at the same time... Feels like all these small tech sites have scripts set up that read each other's RSS feeds and when one site posts something, a variant of that is automatically regurgitated by all the others.

What we need is an ESA or Reaction Engines press release... and frankly, aside from this one from July 2013, I can find no such thing on either of their official websites. What's going on here?

What I was able to find is this: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2875158/The-plane-fly-four-hours-space-just-15-minutes.html

The Daily Mail isn't exactly a a paragon of unbiased science reporting either, but at least they really put effort into this article. It's long, full of infographics, links to videos and gives a few more details that let us guess as to what actually happened. I think that a study that ESA was performing throughout 2014 may have been completed recently. This study apparently looked at the feasibility of concepts that use an engine just like the SABRE. In other words, ESA asked: "if Reaction Engines can actually deliver this engine with these specs, will this actually let us do something useful with it?"

The answer to that is apparently "Yes", which is is what the news is about. The article mentions the Lapcat A2, which is a concept for a 300-passenger atmospheric aircraft based on the SABRE engines that will fly at up to Mach 5 and will deliver passengers to "anywhere in the world in four hours". It looks like a derivative of the Skylon which ditches the spacefaring capabilities for more passenger capacity. It is also mentioned that ESA thinks that the Skylon spaceplane, coupled with an expendable upper stage (I assume for GTO insertions), could cover most if not all of Europe's projected space launch needs.

Edited December 19, 2014 by Streetwind

[lincourtl]

Feels like all these small tech sites have scripts set up that read each other's RSS feeds and when one site posts something, a variant of that is automatically regurgitated by all the others.

Heh. I've long thought the same thing.