Reaction Engines, the British company behind the reusable SABER jet-cum-rocket engine that could revolutionize aerospace, has secured the last installment of funding to build a SABER demonstrator engine by 2020.
At the Farnborough Air Show on Tuesday, Reaction Engines signed a £10 million development contract with the European Space Agency. This commitment from the ESA in turn generated a £50 million grant from the UK Space Agency (an executive agency of the government).
In November 2015, BAE Systems – the huge defense and aerospace multinational based in the UK – invested £20.6 million in Reaction Engines; in return, it took over 20 percent of the company’s share capital, while also agreeing to provide industrial and technological support during the development phase.
According to Reaction Engines, there is now enough money and technological expertise to make a SABER ground-based demonstration engine by 2020.
SABER, if you’ve never heard of it, stands for Synergistic Air-Breathing Rocket Engine. Despite the rather buzzword name, the engine is essentially a hybrid rocket-jet engine: at low altitudes it’s a jet engine, at higher altitudes it’s a rocket engine.
The engine will theoretically be able to provide enough thrust to get a spaceplane from tarmac at sea level all the way to low Earth orbit (i.e. single-stage-to-orbit, SSTO). “Air breathing” is the most important element here; usually the air above a certain altitude is too thin (i.e. there is not enough oxygen) for a jet engine to operate. However, SABER can apparently reach Mach 5.5 at 28.5 km (17.7 mi) before having to switch to stored liquid oxygen, which then propels the aircraft/spacecraft to orbital speed (Mach 25-ish).
The secret sauce, according to Reaction Engines, is a pre-cooling heat exchanger, which can cool incoming air from 1,000C to -150C in one millisecond. To prevent the formation of ice crystals, the company injects methanol (aka antifreeze) into the cooling matrix.
“We have multiple injection and extraction points in the matrix, but the overall effect is that the mix of methanol and water actually flows forward in the matrix against the direction of the airflow,” said the company’s technical director, Richard Varvill. , last year.
The ultimate goal, no doubt many years from now, is for SABER to power a space plane called the Skylon. However, not much has been said about the Skylon in recent years. When it first came up in 2004, the Skylon was intended to significantly reduce the cost of getting stuff into space, but a lot has changed since then, most notably SpaceX and Blue Origin’s efforts to relaunch space rockets. to land on earth.