Reaction Engines (of SABRE and Skylon Fame) Has Gone Out of Buisiness
turgid writes:
The Register reports that Reaction Engines has gone out of business.
Reaction Engines was the company of Alan Bond, of HOTOL (1980s space plane) fame, which he founded to develop new air-breathing rocket engine technology. Their flagship project was the Skylon Single Stage to Orbit space plane, which would use Synergistic Air-Breathing Ram-jet Engines (SABRE) to capture oxygen from the atmosphere, cool and compress it and burn it with on-board liquid hydrogen up to about Mach 5. Then, at speed and altitude, the spacecraft would switch to on-board oxygen stores. In this way, more mass fraction could be dedicated to payload, making SSTO economically feasible.
Also, based on similar technology was LAPCAT, a hypersonic airliner.
Yet another great British Engineering vision finds its way onto the scrapheap for lack of vision among investors. Still, we export a lot of cheese.
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