from the yet-another-great-british-idea-in-the-dustbin dept.
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.
(Score: 2) by gtomorrow on Wednesday November 06, @07:45AM (1 child)
No comment
(Score: 3, Touché) by turgid on Wednesday November 06, @10:07AM
Sorry, that'll be a lysdexic tripo.
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 4, Interesting) by PiMuNu on Wednesday November 06, @07:58AM (2 children)
> Still, we export a lot of cheese.
Interestingly, the British empire was built on cotton. Not steam engines or any other "high tech" industry of the time. Sometimes cheese is more important than $SUPERHIGHTECH
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Unixnut on Wednesday November 06, @09:56AM (1 child)
Agreed, the UK started out with cotton, coal, ceramics and tin (that is what drove the canal network to be built in the first place). A lot of the first mechanisation and machinery was built to handle the mining and processing of those raw materials, which made the UK rich, which then (coupled with the spoils of empire) gave them the wealth to invest and build higher technologies.
The steam engine was not the start of the industrial revolution but its accelerant, allowing more efficient transport (railways replaced canals as primary transportation) industrialisation and economies of scale to take hold which resulted in the improved quality of life for people.
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As for Reaction Engines, I remember reading about them years ago with their plans. An engine that would supercool the intake air in order to liquefy it in real time and then burn it in a rocket at the rear always seemed a bit overcomplicated to me as a solution to SSO (Single Stage to Orbit) craft.
Needless to say the idea floundered due to the engineering challenges. There was no "foundation" industry that could make use of the technology in the UK, so they had no buyers. Then they touted the system to the Americans (including the defence industry) but it seems they were not too interested in the idea either. So they were struggling to find any way to make a profit. They best they came up with was to licence their very efficient radiator for cryogenic refrigeration, which wasn't enough to justify the investment.
It was only a matter of time before they would go out of business, but the technology still exists and I am sure someone will buy it up. It will be interesting to see if others take the idea any further.
The main selling point of their SSO craft was to be a reusable space craft and less fuel needed per KG of mass launched into space, resulting in a reduction of space launch costs. In many ways I think SpaceX did them in, as SpaceX didn't try to overcomplicate with revolutionary propulsion technology but instead refined existing rocket tech to make it cheaper and re-usable. The result is not as good as Skylon would have been, but the difference is that it exists now and is already profitable.
It would have been better to do incremental development instead of immediately trying to jump to the top end idea. Who knows, perhaps SpaceX will buy the technology? They have the cashflow to do further R&D and maybe build such a craft in future.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by pTamok on Wednesday November 06, @11:11AM
While Single-Stage-to-Orbit 'space-planes' are an attractive idea for science-fiction aficionados, what the cooling technology does allow for is the building of hypersonic missiles that don't need to carry oxidant, thus extending their range, or increasing the conventional explosive payload, or a combination of both. Horribly expensive, and quite probably unreliable.
I think that hypersonic nuclear-explosive missiles have the advantage over ICBMs in being more difficult to detect by early-warning systems, as they stay below the horizon for longer. They would make the probability of a 'first-strike' being a disabling strike higher, and act to destabilise things. This probably isn't a good thing.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by ledow on Wednesday November 06, @11:40AM (3 children)
"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."
Can you name the other GB engineering visions? Dyson is the only one to spring to mind even vaguely recently and technically he's far more a farmer now (and hence complaining about inheritance tax).
Aside from that, what did you expect? Because people tend to invest in things that'll work AND be commercially successful, no matter how ridiculous they appear, so some literal rocket-science should have been able to secure funding somehow.
"The company is a privately owned engineering research biz that operated for more than 30 years."
"PwC told us Reaction Engines was primarily funded by grants and equity fundraising rounds, given its R&D focus. The company was pursuing opportunities to raise additional investment, however, these were unsuccessful and the directors had no option but to place it into administration."
"According to the Financial Times, Reaction Engines had warned investors earlier this year that it needed to raise additional money. It was in talks with shareholders over a £20 million ($25 million) cash injection for several weeks, while some of its strategic backers such as aerospace and defense giant BAE Systems and aero engine maker Rolls-Royce are said to have been reluctant to commit to more funding."
"The FT also noted that several Formula One racing teams could be hit by the demise of Reaction Engines as its precooler technology is used as part of the cooling system for the engines in their cars."
"Furthermore, the UK Space Agency made a £3.9 million ($5 million) grant to the company in 2021 to support the development of the SABRE engine technology. We asked the agency why it did not step up to help save Reaction Engines, and will update if we get a response. ®"
Sounds like they had a very, very decent shot at it, a lot of large and good investors who know their stuff, AND had a long time to capitalise on that, and just weren't able to produce enough of anything investable.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by PiMuNu on Wednesday November 06, @12:38PM (2 children)
> Can you name the other GB engineering visions?
Without thinking very hard:
Oxford Instruments is a world leading manufacturer of superconducting magnets.
Lots of satellite manufacturers (though for obvious reasons not a household name).
Vodafone/mobile phones.
Pharmaceuticals e.g. GSK
(Petro)chemicals e.g. ICI, BP, Shell
(Score: 3, Touché) by ledow on Wednesday November 06, @01:36PM (1 child)
And none "finds its way onto the scrapheap for lack of vision among investors" as implied.
If anything, there are even some that you mention that did (e.g. the newer satellite companies that were trying to be shoehorned into provided a Galileo replacement - and was largely nonsense all alone - not to mention the EV battery companies like Volt or whatever it was called, etc.)
The implication is that the UK somehow just abandons innovation through lack of investment, subsidy or support - and that's just not true.
(Score: 2) by PiMuNu on Wednesday November 06, @04:53PM
Agree.
While Skylon is cool, it looks like they failed to bring in the R&D on a reasonable time scale and guarantee a decent market.
ps: I speculate the timing is coupled to SpaceX demonstrating Starship.
pps: as a Random Guy on the Internet, I can confirm that the space plane in KSP was pretty rubbish. One can implement reusable rockets and they are way better (e.g. payload). Therefore Skylon is rubbish.
(Score: 3, Funny) by janrinok on Thursday November 07, @07:27PM
You probably cannot imagine the amount of insult the French feel when a British cheese or wine is awarded accolades, prizes and even best in Category!
Me? I don't mock them - honest, no I don't, well not very much :)
I am not interested in knowing who people are or where they live. My interest starts and stops at our servers.