Breaking News
U.S. Strengths and Weaknesses in Production
Washington Lost the Equivalent of Two Apples. Did Anyone Notice?
The Light at The End of the Tunnel - It's Not All Doom & Gloom
Iran has published a naive letter to the American People
Top Tech News
A laser just photographed objects through six feet of concrete
Elon Musk's Next-Gen Motor Destroy Entire EV Industry
China's disputed satellite refueling heralds new space war era
BYD Will Put Solid-State Batteries In An EV Next Year: Executive
FDA-cleared exoskeleton puts spinal-cord patients back on their feet
Your Robotic Vacuum Is Watching You -- Could It Someday Testify Against You in Court?
Why Unigrid's Sodium-Ion Batteries Are the Game-Changer for Off-Grid Energy Storage
This Battery On Wheels Makes Any Diesel Truck Electric In 5 Minutes
Mass-Production of AI Infrastructure – Speed Up by 10X
3D-printed Martian mud homes look critical for life beyond Earth
Boeing and Rolls-Royce back British hypersonic spaceplane venture
Part of a US$37.3 million Series B funding round that also included BAE Systems, it follows a £60 million (US$85.6 million) investment in the company by the British government in 2013.
Reaction Engines has been working on its plans for a hypersonic spaceplane long before the company was founded in 1989. Based on the work of engineer Alan Bond, it began life as the HOTOL project, which was a joint project by Rolls-Royce and British Aerospace. When that fell through due to technical problems, Bond, along with engineers John Scott-Scott and Richard Varvill, formed REL, which has concentrated for the past 29 years on developing variants of the Synergetic Air-Breathing Rocket Engine (SABRE) engine.
The main component of REL's Skylon spaceplane, SABRE is a hypersonic hybrid engine that acts like a conventional jet at speeds below Mach 5 (3,704 mph, 5,961 km/h), but at hypersonic speeds it converts into a pure rocket engine burning hydrogen and liquid oxygen to achieve speeds of up to Mach 25 (17,521 mph, 29,808 km/h). Key to this is a revolutionary heat exchanger that protects the engine against melting as it approaches hypersonic velocity.