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 The company recently announced a strategic investment from BAE
Systems of 20.6 million pounds ($31.4 million USD), in addition to a
grant funding of 60 million pounds ($.4 million USD) from the
British government, to accelerate the development of their unique
SABRE engine.
SABRE, which stands for Synergetic Air-Breathing Rocket Engine, is
designed to enable aircraft to operate from a standstill on the
runway to hypersonic flight in the atmosphere, and then transition
to rocket mode for spaceflight.
"What we're developing here is a revolutionary new form of
propulsion, and it's designed for low-cost space access and
hypersonic air travel," explained Reaction Engines' Managing
Director, Mark Thomas.
"It's a synthesis of rocket and jet engine technologies. It's a
device that would power a vehicle to more than five times the speed
of sound; so more than 4,000 miles-per-hour, and up to 20 times the
speed of sound if it's going into orbit," he added.
 Previous attempts to build single stage to orbit propulsion systems
have been hampered by the weight of an on-board oxidizer, such as
liquid oxygen, that is needed by conventional rocket engines.
Reaction Engines' idea was to design a device that could use the
oxygen already present in the atmosphere through combustion like an
ordinary jet engine.
"The biggest issue that the guys have had to wrestle with is how you
cope with extremely high temperatures that come into the engine when
you're doing hypersonic speeds; so more than five times the speed of
sound, 4,000 miles-per-hour. The temperature coming in at the front
of the engine is a thousand degrees centigrade. And you have to be
able to cool that air very rapidly to be able to do anything useful
with it," said Thomas.
Head of Advanced Manufacturing, Simon Hanks, said SABRE is the first
engine in the world to successfully build an on-board oxidizer that
uses the oxygen in the atmosphere via its pre-cooler technology.
This rapidly cools the incoming airstream in the blink of an eye.
"Essentially, it is an extremely efficient heat exchanging system,
which will effectively mount on the front of our new engine design
and very efficiently cool incoming air of a very high temperature of
about a thousand degrees C [Centigrade], to minus 150 degrees C in a
fraction of a second; approximately one-hundredth of a second," said
Hanks.
He added that the state-of-the-art high vacuum furnace at their
headquarters in Oxfordshire is being used to fuse together the
complex matrices that make up their pre-cooler module.
"We're using here some technology to high-vacuum braise a much
larger version of this (pre-cooler module) together. We're operating
at about one ten-billionth of an atmosphere at very high
temperatures approaching a thousand degrees to achieve this joining
process, which is very much unique to Reaction Engines."
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Once built, their technology will allow SABRE-powered vehicles to
save carrying hundreds of tons of on-board oxidant on their way to
orbit, and negate the need for first-stage rockets that are
jettisoned once the oxidant is used up. The company says this could
lead to a ten-fold saving in the cost of sending a craft into space,
which currently costs about 100 million dollars.
To demonstrate how the SABRE engine could make space access much
easier, Reaction Engines have come up with the concept Skylon
spaceplane. It's an unpiloted, reusable vehicle that would be
capable of transporting 15 tonnes of cargo into space.
"The concept of a re-usable space plane is the Holy Grail of space
access. But it's incredibly difficult to pull off, and one of the
reasons is designs up to this point have relied on multiple forms of
propulsion, so jet engines, ramjets and rockets. If you can combine
all the best elements of those propulsion systems in a single
device, which is what we have in our SABRE engine, then you have a
much more realistic proposition and a much greater chance of
achieving that reusable space access," explained Thomas.
Reaction Engines say SABRE has undergone extensive independent
testing by the European Space Agency (ESA). They have confirmed the
viability of the test engine technology and its potential vehicle
applications.
With the investment from both BAE Systems and the UK government, the
company is committed to having a full engine demonstration by the
end of the decade. This will be a precursor to the development of a
space access vehicle, but Mark Thomas said there is no limit to its
potential applications.
"The range of operation is extraordinary. There's not another engine
anywhere in the world even in people's imagination that can achieve
that range of operation. So that's what really makes it unique."
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