Comment by privateSFacct | Hacker News Reader

Comment by privateSFacct | Hacker News Reader

These guys don't disappear - they have been around forever with their Skylon plane.

Just a heads up, it's a long way from testing one component of an engine on the ground to getting a full engine demo going to then testing it in the air to then build the plane then integrating engine - then getting orbital trips working with reentry!

I am curious how much private capital they have been able to attract (outside of govt contract players). Obviously if this is really revolutionary then they will but this always felt like a long term / govt kinda of cool - tech forward but pork barrel project for the UK.

More of their background from a somewhat more balanced source - at least the headline put revolutionary in quotes.

https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-36773074

They do claim to have the "best engineers" in the industry - so beating out big players like rolls royce, PW, CFM, spacex, blue origin, ariane aerospace - so that is a positive they have.

These things take time, but it's not the complete story, Virgin Galactic has been around since 2004, so the same year GMail launched, without producing a single passenger flight.

Blue Origin has been around for almost 20 years, and they have a few suborbital flights to their credit, and an engine that has yet to fly.

SpaceX, on the other hand, has been around since 2002 and achieved orbit in 2008, and have completed a lot of milestones since then.

I suspect the biggest difference between these companies is not talent or vision, but sens of urgency

Sense of urgency lets one leverage the best current technologies and take the best compromises within the time and monetary budget. But this is incremental innovation. It fails at tackling novel concepts where the paths forward are not so clear. You can't incrementally tunnel through a wall.

At one point maybe SABRE is ready and the next SpaceX comes along and will build a spaceship with it. The spoils of innovation seldom accrue with the inventors.

> The spoils of innovation seldom accrue with the inventors.

We are British, why change the habit of a lifetime ;)

That said, critical aspects of the design are protected and the private investors (big scary defense contractors etc) would no doubt sic the lawyers on anyone that attempted to rip it off.

Some ideas also have a tendency to be leapfrogged by a combination of lesser novel ideas used in a new way, the idea of a plane as a first stage was probably great until SpaceX showed up and landed a Falcon9 first stage to reuse.

"Virgin Galactic has been around since 2004"

I'm 54 - Sabre/Skylon were in the news when I was in high school!

I think the name Skylon was first used for this project in 1993 [1], so unless you repeated quite a few years, i doubt that's true.

RB454/HOTOL could have been in the news back then, though. I remember having some sort of brochure for HOTOL back in the mid-80s.

[1] https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1993SpFl...35..162V/abstra...

Yeah - you are probably correct - basically the same thing though albeit done by a different company.

>I suspect the biggest difference between these companies is not talent or vision, but sens of urgency

Well that and the SABRE engine is a completely new design and SpaceXs engines are based on engines created in the 1960s and refined since then.

Its comparing apples and oranges.

I think that “spaceplanes” where a great idea until SpaceX landed a Falcon9 first stage, after that point they are mostly a complication.

You speak as if the design has not changed over time. To be precise, the history dates back to American studies in the 50s and 60s which were not taken forward but that were picked up by Alan Bond in the UK and evolved, then later developed into the HOTOL design, and still later into Skylon/SABRE - with significant work undertaken throughout this history.

I think that there are some factors to give one faith that this won't just become another sad episode of unrealised promise to add to the history: the engine design has had significant verification along the way by authorities of the very highest credentials, is furthermore thought to be of sufficient promise to have attracted significant external funding, and finally has resulted in working hardware on the test stand that has not yet indicated that the expectations of success are ill-founded; it's getting to the point where the glaring flaw that some seem to want to be uncovered is increasingly unlikely to be found (I'd add personally I find it a little sad that amongst tech/space enthusiasts many seem so sceptical about SABRE when the facts suggests otherwise, and I wonder whether it would be a different story if it were an American project - I'm enthusiastic for anything that gets the human race off this rock, no matter where it comes from).

That said, I think it is important to separate SABRE and Skylon. The former as I've said is thought by many well credentialled people to have genuine promise, whereas the latter seems far more of a PR exercise to illustrate potential application of the technology. Nobody's actually building parts of Skylon yet as far as I'm aware, wheres they are building bits of SABRE and getting them signed off as workable.

Much of the “significant external funding” is coming from govt funded defense contractors - nothing better then selling star wars military dreams to politicians spending taxpayer money.

I’m glad research is happening - agreed on Sabre vs Skylon too. could do with a touch less hype.

. . . it's a long way from testing one component of an engine on the ground to getting a full engine demo going to then testing it in the air to then build the plane then integrating engine . . .

True, but my understanding is that the heat exchanger is the critical piece of difficult technology/engineering. With that, they have the potential to revolutionise industries even if none of the rest comes to pass.

Exactly, there is talk of it having significant impact even if it never flies a mile.

People gloss over things like building a turbine engine as easy - it is not - it's been done, yes, but for these guys to build, qualify, validate and get an engine flying on passenger planes is a HUGE undertaking even ASSUMING this critical piece of tech was perfect.

To also then build the plane? I'm curious to see what their re-entry technology looks like - feels pretty critical path to me.

What are these applications and industries that will be revolutionized? I'm serious - I've heard this will revolutionize hypersonic cars. OK.

The plane concept itself required a closed loop normal rocket engine - so you've got to have that AND the Sabre AND are doing single stage to orbit. I shudder to think of the mass fractions - how does carrying all this extra around make sense just from the physics - do you save that much in terms of LOX?

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