I’ve just seen the excellent news that the UK Skylon spaceplane design has passed its technical review by the European Space Agency.

This is fantastic news for the UK space industry. Reaction Engines Ltd, the company behind Skylon, has come up with a truly revolutionary concept for launching payloads into Earth orbit. Rather than having a multi-stage rocket in which used stages are dropped as the craft ascends, Skylon has an air-breathing engine that works much like a jet while it is taking off, and then switches to its on-board oxygen supply when it gets so high that the air is too thin. The craft will take off from a runway, and will land on a runway too. If this can be made to work reliably, the cost savings for launching payloads into space will be enormous.

The SABRE engine incorporates some very clever technology for accomplishing this dual task, and there are some severe challenges to getting this working. That’s why this ESA technical review is so important for giving confidence that the design is on the right track. (The people I’ve spoken to at REL are very tight-lipped about exactly how their engine works!)

We would like to congratulate Reaction Engines Ltd, and wish them good luck for the future.

Tags: skylon, space, spaceplane

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 25th, 2011 at 10:51 am by Pat Galea and is filed under Aerospace & Defence. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.