Skylon and the Sabre Engine

[annodomini2]

maffski said:

dr_gn said:

"The engine is called Sabre, which stands for Synergetic Air-Breathing Rocket Engine, and was built by British firm Reaction Engines."

"The Sabre engine has taken part in 100 successful test runs and its design was recently validated by the European Space Agency to validate the design."

So, from that it reads like it's already been built, tested (and then design validated last) then?

What an utterly crap article.

I think the special bit is the air coolers, which have been ground tested but I presume they weren't able to get anywhere near flight conditions. The original idea was to liquefy the air but that froze the coolers so they cool it a bit less. The actual drive engine itself is pretty much existing tech I believe, just with a clever exhaust bell to change the profile for low/high altitude - they use a moving shock cone in the bell chamber (an Expansion Deflection Nozzle apparently)

The test was running the precooler on a jet engine and in specially designed wind tunnels, it hasn't been tested on an air breathing rocket engine as yet.

The basics of the other tech are already proven, you've basically a LH2 + LOx rocket engine, plus jet engine inlet compressor + turbopump drive stage feeding the chilled air into the system. These have been implemented before, the main barrier with LACE engines in the past is the key thing Reaction Engines has solved.

The engineering to get this into a complete system will not be simple, but it is not infeasible.

The biggest joke is that the government is willing to dump billions into HS2 (complete waste of money IMO), yet leave a true engineering spectacle like this to struggle with partial funding.

Not to mention it would result in a truly marketable export product.

[annodomini2]

Apparently the EU has chucked another £6m in as well.

[Simpo Two]

annodomini2 said:

Apparently the EU has chucked another £6m in as well.

You mean 'they gave us a bit more of our money back'.

[Hooli]

Simpo Two said:

annodomini2 said:

Apparently the EU has chucked another £6m in as well.

You mean 'they gave us a bit more of our money back'.

+1

Let me guess, that £6million will have cost us about £7-8million after the EU stole their cut.

[matchmaker]

yellowjack said:

Damn you lot. I saw Sabre Engine in the thread title and immediately thought "Napier Sabre" and the Typhoon/Tempest.


Bullocks!

So did I!

[hidetheelephants]

Another hyperbolic Wail article, although it appears to just be a rehash of old news unfortunately.

[dr_gn]

"The Sabre engine has taken part in 100 successful test runs"

Errr, I don't think so...

[Halmyre]

dr_gn said:

Simpo Two said:

The jet engine was given to the Russians by the post-war Labour government in a gesture of ludicrously naive socialist bonhomie. The Russians promptly reverse-engineered it and put it in Mig-15s for the Korean war.

Sold to the Russians, and at the end of the day the axial flow designs from Germany were the way forward.

Apologies for bumping an ancient thread, but the UK was running axial flow jets as early as 1941.

[annodomini2]

hidetheelephants said:

Another hyperbolic Wail article, although it appears to just be a rehash of old news unfortunately.

Lots of errors too, typical daily fail.

[yellowjack]

So it's basically an upscaled Blue Steel fuselage, mated to the wings and engines from an SR71, stood on Concorde's old landing gear?


To be honest, I'm not spotting that many differences...

Is this the latest in high-tech, high-speed passenger transport, and the future of civilian air travel? Or is it a rehash of some ideas from the 1960s brought together to be the future of military drone warfare? Perhaps it's the ultimate pilotless, long range, long loiter, precision guided missile?

Edited by yellowjack on Wednesday 17th December 21:24

[dr_gn]

yellowjack said:

Or is it a rehash of some ideas from the 1960s brought together to be the future of military drone warfare? Perhaps it's the ultimate pilotless, long range, long loiter, precision guided missile?

If it was, it would probably have had some serious funding by now...The clever bit of the engine is the pre-cooler, not something the J-58 ever had AFAIK.

[hidetheelephants]

yellowjack said:

So it's basically an upscaled Blue Steel fuselage, mated to the wings and engines from an SR71, stood on Concorde's old landing gear?


To be honest, I'm not spotting that many differences...

Is this the latest in high-tech, high-speed passenger transport, and the future of civilian air travel? Or is it a rehash of some ideas from the 1960s brought together to be the future of military drone warfare? Perhaps it's the ultimate pilotless, long range, long loiter, precision guided missile?

There's a definite resemblance to the Avro 730 which was supposed to reach Mach 3, but when you want to travel that fast there are a limited number of shapes that work.

[annodomini2]

yellowjack said:

So it's basically an upscaled Blue Steel fuselage, mated to the wings and engines from an SR71, stood on Concorde's old landing gear?

NO, the SR71 was a Turbo Jet/Ram Jet, this is an air breathing rocket engine.

The airframe is a carbon fibre composite.

yellowjack said:

To be honest, I'm not spotting that many differences...

Is this the latest in high-tech, high-speed passenger transport, and the future of civilian air travel? Or is it a rehash of some ideas from the 1960s brought together to be the future of military drone warfare? Perhaps it's the ultimate pilotless, long range, long loiter, precision guided missile?

Edited by yellowjack on Wednesday 17th December 21:24

It's a space launcher, very radical one at that, the concept isn't new, but the technology that allows it to work has just been proven. If they ever get the funding to build it, it will be the first fully reusable space launcher, with SSTO (Single Stage To Orbit).

The hypersonic transport is the Lapcat A2 and looks different and uses a different engine.

This tech will be used for military purposes.

[Penguinracer]

Up to what sort of altitude could these engines operate?

Could it get sufficiently high to act as a launching platform for a smaller orbital satellite or orbital vehicle - in addition to its obvious Hypersonic capabilities?

[Eric Mc]

The idea is that the entire Skylon vehicle can itself enter orbit. So it would achieve orbits similar to those managed by the now retired Space Shuttle i.e. sub 300 miles. It could therefore place satellites directly into low earth orbit (LEO). Satellites that needed higher orbits would need to carry a boost pack to push them up to a higher altitude. This was the technique used when the space Shuttle launched satellites or space probes that needed to move beyond LEO.

[yellowjack]

annodomini2 said:

yellowjack said:

So it's basically an upscaled Blue Steel fuselage, mated to the wings and engines from an SR71, stood on Concorde's old landing gear?

NO, the SR71 was a Turbo Jet/Ram Jet, this is an air breathing rocket engine.

The airframe is a carbon fibre composite.

yellowjack said:

To be honest, I'm not spotting that many differences...

Is this the latest in high-tech, high-speed passenger transport, and the future of civilian air travel? Or is it a rehash of some ideas from the 1960s brought together to be the future of military drone warfare? Perhaps it's the ultimate pilotless, long range, long loiter, precision guided missile?

Edited by yellowjack on Wednesday 17th December 21:24

It's a space launcher, very radical one at that, the concept isn't new, but the technology that allows it to work has just been proven. If they ever get the funding to build it, it will be the first fully reusable space launcher, with SSTO (Single Stage To Orbit).

The hypersonic transport is the Lapcat A2 and looks different and uses a different engine.

This tech will be used for military purposes.

For the avoidance of confusion, and to save me the bother of dispatching a parrot...

My comments were entirely based upon aesthetics. I do know what powered the SR71. I'm aware of the functional differences between that, and this proposed new design. It was not meant to be taken seriously as a criticism of the technological design team behind Skylon, but as a bit of a joke.

I still think that the money would be far better spent on producing a small run of replica Typhoons with re-engineered Napier Sabre engines. I'd love to see one of those fly, with all of the bugs ironed out, at a modern air show...

...oh, and it still looks like a fookin' massive Blue Steel!

[maffski]

BAE invest £20.6m for 20% stake in reaction engines

With an additional 60m UK government funding the plan is to switch focus from research to the design and build of a prototype engine.

[Eric Mc]

About bloody time.

HOTOL rises from the ashes.

[FourWheelDrift]

Doesn't sound like a lot of money though, but it's a start.

[hidetheelephants]

Should be enough to get most of the way to a technology demonstrator; once they get to that point it's a matter of whether it works or not, if it does then it's time for a Skylon or Lapcat to start being knocked together.