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turgid [soylentnews.org] writes:

The Register reports [theregister.com] 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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