Skylon - British Space Plane

[Mossie]

A copy of BBC Focus landed on my doorstep this morning & in it where a few interesting space articles, all blowing the British trumpet.  One about Richard Branson & Virgin Galactic, one about Bridget, a Mars rover & one about Skylon:



Click here for more Skylon images

Skylon is the Brainchild of Alan Bond, one of the head honcho's behind HOTOL at BAe & he's set up the Reaction Engines company to fund & build it.  The spaceplane is a single stage to orbit, with air breathing SABRE rocket engines similar to those planned for HOTOL.  It's design seems promising, but it'll require £7 billion to get it up into space.  Alan Bond is hoping to get some funding off the back of the space tourism rush (hype? I guess only time will tell) & Sir Richards crwoning project.  I'm not holding out a lot of hope as British rocket projects don't have a great track record.

They've also got a Hypersonic plane called LAPCAT on the drawing board, part of a European funded project to design an aircraft capable of flying from Brussells to Sidney in less than 4 hours:


Something very Gerry Anderson-ish about this pic!  Click here fore more LAPCAT images

Maybe this will fly eventually,


but I doubt it.  Shame......

[Archibald]

Love the Skylon! At a time, I was totally fascinated by "reusable lauchers" space planes and the like. I even made a website on the topic (in french...that was the main error! )

http://starmaks.populus.ch/

well I can even describe you how the engine of the Skylon works if you are interested...  

But the last pic has nothing to do with spaceplanes! It's a CG rendering of the good old Avro 730 mach 2.5 bomber from 1955!!!!!

The Skylon has received no funds from ESA nor the GB governement (I think the LAPCAT was a contender for FLPP program)
The Hotol had financial backing in the mid-80's, the engine was promising, but the aerodynamic configuration was crap...

[Ollie]

The Skylon looks like a ship from Naboo or something too...

 

[Mossie]

But the last pic has nothing to do with spaceplanes! It's a CG rendering of the good old Avro 730 mach 2.5 bomber from 1955!!!!!

Sorry Archie, that was part of the point I was trying to make, a bit ambiguos I realise now though!  In my sub titltle, I put "Remind you of anything?....."  If you look at the three-view you'll see that the structure of the Skylon is almost identical to the Avro 730!  Even the engine pod configuration is the same.  They've obviously borrowed heavilly from Avro.

Is this because aerodynamic research was so advanced in 1950?  Or is it because Reaction Engines haven't actually done any real research on the structure & so 'borrowed' a tested design?  Probably a bit of both!  Whatever is true, the Skylon would be nearly double the size of the 730, 85m compared to 48.5m & Avro's aeroplane was a big old bird!

I think I've got the gist of how the engine works from the article, although if I started explaining I'd probably just confuse people again, so you'd probably be best off telling us Archie!

EDIT - OOPS! Hit the 'submit post' rather than the 'preview' button by accident!

[Jschmus]

That LAPCAT thing looks an awful lot like the Myasishchev M-50 "Bounder".

[Archibald]

I'm sorry! You're right, they are similar, but its only a coincidence. High-speed delta canards aircrafts tends to be similar, and there was really a mass of projects like this over the years (M-50 is a good example)

I try to explain ? here we go!

To go on space, you need a rocket engine, with liquid oxygen stored in huges and heavy tanks. Before reaching space, you have obviously to cross the Atmospher, full of oxygen. Main problem : this oxygen is gazeous, whereas the rocket engine need lquid oxygen.
First idea (in the Aerospaceplane of 1965 and HOTOL of 1985) was to liquefy the air. To obtain liquefied air, you need to cool it. so you need a source of cold... the idea was to use the hydrogen fuel, which is stored at -270°C. This is a bad solution for three reasons
- you use fuel to cool the air, augmenting the fuel consuption of the rocket engine
- you can't reuse the fuel, because the hydrogen is no longer liquid (too hot!)
- the liquified air tend to freeze the cooling system itself!

So the SABRE engine of the Skylon was modified.

Instead of using the Hydrogen fuel directly (to cool the air) they use what they call an Helium loop. This Helium take the hot temperature of the air.
The air is not liquefied, it is a very cold gas (at the extreme limit between gaseous and liquid...)
As it is not liquefied, it can't freeze the cooling system, and you can even use a fan (something like a turbofan engine, which is very practical take off)  
When the helium is too hot, it is put in contact with some cold hydrogen. this cold hydrogen became hot, so what to do with it ? simple! Use an expander rocket... This rocket engine is able to burn hot, gazeous hydrogen and it is in current use in rockets.

hope it is clear enough... you're perfectly right Mossie it's hard not too confuse people...

[John Howling Mouse]

Nope, Ollie had it the first time: Princess Armadillo's chromed Naboo-boo-bob interstellar roadster-turned-spaceship....

[Mossie]

Hmm, I think your right JHM & Ollie, alien technology is in evidence here.  Aliens must have infiltrated the higher echelons of British Society, how else do you explain Prince Charles???

[Archibald]

...we all he is Mr Spock cousin    

[Archibald]

In the "guignol de l'info" (famous caricature of the French show-biz and politics) the Prince charles was only a long nose with two enormous ears...  

[Weaver]

They just tested the engine pre-cooler for the first time:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-17864782


http://www.reactionengines.co.uk/skylon.html

[KJ_Lesnick]

I know they've been doing elaborate work to ensure frost wouldn't form in the pre-cooler.  Have they ever specified if the design would be able to handle foreign-object damage?


KJ

[Mossie]

I've never found anything with specifics on the frost control system.  My only knowledge is that loss of it would be a disaster, the engine would clog up with ice in matter of seconds at altitudes below 12km.  I guess it would have to be bomb-proof or some kind of back up available in it's failure.

[KJ_Lesnick]

I remember hearing years back about Paul Czysz talking about an engine concept proposed sometime during the years he worked at McDonnell which entailed pre-cooling the incoming airflow while simultaneously increasing the engine RPM so as to keep the engine running into the hypersonic speed range -- I cannot find the article where he said this, though I do remember him talking about the design being somewhat like Skylon in principle.  Has anybody read this?

[Weaver]

Government and private funding has been secured for SABRE development, leading to a flight test in 2020:

http://www.nbcnews.com/science/space-plane-engine-future-get-flight-test-2020-6C10679981#