Funding flows for UK’s ‘revolutionary’ Sabre rocket engine

[bananas]

Source: BBC

The £60m UK government investment in the "revolutionary" Sabre rocket engine concept has finally started to flow.

<snip>

Farnborough witnessed the signing of an £8m (€10m) contract between REL and the European Space Agency, which will result in Esa keeping its role as the "technical auditor" on the project.

<snip>

"The contract we sign today will take us to a Preliminary Design Review in 2018 and we're looking for a demonstrator to be tested on the ground in 2020."

<snip>

In the past, Reaction Engines has talked of a total financial package of £200-300m. However, REL CEO Mark Thomas said engineers had recently re-scoped the test engine, making it more modular and smaller. "We now need much less than that old figure," he told BBC News.

<snip>

Read more: http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-36773074

[bananas]

1. Reaction Engines secures more development funding; US subsidiary established

http://www.themanufacturer.com/articles/reaction-engines-secures-more-development-funding/

Reaction Engines secures more development funding
Posted on 12 Jul 2016 by Michael Cruickshank

UK-based aerospace startup Reaction Engines has been awarded further funding from European and UK space agencies.

<snip>

US subsidiary established

Beyond this new funding, the company has also announced that it will set up a new subsidiary in the US.

The purpose of this subsidiary will likely be to help Reaction Engines establish contacts within the large US space launch market, as well as to secure sources of additional future funding.

“The establishment of a US office is the obvious next step for us, building on excellent work done under a collaborative R&D agreement with future export markets in mind,” said Mark Thomas, CEO of Reaction Engines.

The subsidiary will be lead by Dr. Adam Dissel, formerly of Lockheed Martin Space Systems.

[iandhr]

2. Sounds pretty cool

[Jerry442]

3. Good luck guys.

Sounds to me like the nearest competition would be a conventional jet lower stage launching a conventional rocket upper stage

[uawchild]

4. Is this a newer rendition of a scramjet?

A scramjet (supersonic combusting ramjet) is a variant of a ramjet airbreathing jet engine in which combustion takes place in supersonic airflow. As in ramjets, a scramjet relies on high vehicle speed to forcefully compress the incoming air before combustion (hence ramjet), but a ramjet decelerates the air to subsonic velocities before combustion, while airflow in a scramjet is supersonic throughout the entire engine. This allows the scramjet to operate efficiently at extremely high speeds.
Wikipedia

[bananas]

6. Yes and no

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skylon_(spacecraft)

<snip>

The engines are designed to operate much like a conventional jet engine to around Mach 5.5 (1,700 m/s),[41] 26 kilometres (16 mi) altitude, beyond which the air inlet closes and the engine operates as a highly efficient rocket to orbital speed.[41]

The proposed SABRE engine is not a scramjet, but a jet engine running combined cycles of a precooled jet engine, rocket engine and ramjet.[3]

<snip>

http://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-talk/aerospace/aviation/bae-systems-uk-invest-120-million-in-skylon-space-plane-engine-prototype

<snip>

It has a thrust to weight ratio of up to 14, which is nearly three times as great as a conventional jet engine’s, and seven times as high as a scramjet’s.

Inside the atmosphere, it has a peak specific impulse of something like 3500 seconds, or 20 percent more efficient than a turbofan jet engine.

<snip>

https://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index.php?topic=36826.1520

<snip>

The point, and it's quite a valid one, is that asking someone who works on SCramjets about a zero-to-hypersonic propulsion system is going to get you a vary biased and probably highly inaccurate answer because the person you're asking ONLY works with hypersonic to VERY-HIGH hypersonic propulsion and not anything that can start from zero and even go supersonic let alone reach hypersonic speeds on it's own. And you're asking the question of someone who very well knows that any positive answer can potentially cause their own research to lose funding, support, or interest.

SABRE barely touches hypersonic speed, (at most Mach-6 when "hypersonic" is at least Mach-5) it uses a compressor, it has rocket engines, and it takes off from a runway all of which a SCramjet doesn't do and frankly no one has been designing them to for almost 40 years. SCramjet researchers have all been concentrating on getting from Mach-7, (where a SCramjet starts working efficiently if at all) to higher speeds, the closest they have come in the last 20 years to addressing the "zero-to-" issue is suggesting an integral rocket/ramjet/SCramjet but since the 'duel-mode' SCramjet (a subsonic and supersonic combustion ramjet in one engine) never panned out and SCramjet research has sucked up all the money for integral rocket/ramjet research there has been nothing else but to launch SCramjet test articles by brute force rocket launch. Yet the same folks will tell you how wonderful the "theory" is that once we have SCramjets we can "easily" fly to Mach-26+ in the atmosphere and drift out into space for pennies per pound...

<snip>

[uawchild]

7. Wow! Thanks for the info. n/t

[bananas]

8. "The system chills incoming air from more than 1,000C to minus 150C in less than 1/100th of a second

before passing the pre-cooled air through a turbo-compressor and into the rocket combustion chamber, where it is burned with sub-cooled liquid hydrogen."
http://www.democraticunderground.com/1016127244

[Matthew28]

5. This can go from airplane mode

to rocket mode as it passes from the atmosphere to space. This would allow much cheaper means of getting into space and we could use run ways to take off.