EU clears UK to give £50m to SABRE space launcher engine Their benevolent highnesses at the European Commission have seen fit to allow the UK to grant £50m towards the designing of the SABRE space launcher, after questioning whether the grant was in line with EU state aid rules. The Synergetic Air-Breathing Rocket Engine (SABRE) is a reusable engine for the Skylon single-stage-to- …
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I remember being in the Dublin Castle pub near Camden once, suitably refreshed after an evening's socializing, and seeing said estate agents across the road. Being a H2G2TG fan it quite freaked me out at the time.
According to Wikipedia it's kind of a continuation of HOTOL, too; I met some of the HOTOL team in the 1980s through the Industrial Soc at University, great guys that had their heart and soul in the project and were devastated when the government failed to believe in its possibilities and killed it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HOTOL
Ahead of its time then, perhaps its time has come at last.
This would be the same Euro Commission that decides how member states should spend their cash for the greater good, right?
A noble cause, sure. Similar to any council in fact. Unfortunately it also shares their traits of being overly political and buerocratic.
Fair enough, "project manage" was the wrong phrase. But they do control the purse strings and the agenda. The results are not always as, well, *efficient*, as they could be.
Meet me back here in a few years and see if we have our sexy new space plane or not. I really hope we do.
No, it would be the same commission that says if public money given to a private company is a distortion of competition.
Without this rule, I bet some european states would be pleased to help financially their national industries to crush their EU competitors.... I doubt UK would win playing that game.
Much as I want to get on a rant about the EU (which has progressively reduced the autonomy of its members to the point that they have to beg for permission to spend their own money)... yay for skylon! SSTO is the dream of space travel. Using an SSTO to get payloads to orbit would dramatically reduce the cost of assembling truly useful interplanetary and even interstellar spacecraft - though the latter would be a long time coming no matter what - and this sort of technology will form a fundamental part of any coherent space-based economy.
And then perhaps one day we can set up our libertarian utopias and socialist paradises away from the petty meddling of the bureaucrats. Or perhaps not... but at least, if Skylon takes off, we can try.
@ Graham Dawson
"which has progressively reduced the autonomy of its members to the point that they have to beg for permission to spend their own money)"
Oh wow wow Mr Dawson, imagine the outburst in old England if the French government decided to support an industrial project competing with a British one. The tears the accusations the stiff lips, the frogs the cheese. Please Mr Dawson, either you are a kid without any knowledge of European history or a complete idiot.
What the EU does here is to accept governments support to a project that is seen as good for all of Europe without having to listen to nationalistic idiots like you. Sometimes I wonder witch is the most retarded country in the EU, and I still refuse to believe it's the UK. You add to my efforts believing it though.
if the French government decided to support an industrial project competing with a British one.
I'd be f***ing amazed if the French government ever stopped doing that.
In fact I'd be even more amazed if the French government stopped funding its industrial projects with money from all the other EU states.
The UK government can give £50 million toward Sabre research (which probably requires £1 billion+) instead of sending it over the channel so the French government can use it to develop the next generation of Arianne.
"if the French government decided to support an industrial project competing with a British one.
I'd be f***ing amazed if the French government ever stopped doing that."
good example is how the frogs tried to scupper the Eurofighter / Typhoon project through continuous delay before finally pulling out and using the acquired knowledge to build Rafale in competition
Rafale is the better plane too, built to the particular needs of the French rather than trying to be something for everyone. Sweden built the technologically equivalent Gripen without ever going anywhere near the Eurofighter program and came up with something similar to Rafale, but suited to the needs of the Swedish airforce. I'm not saying the French didn't cheat, but I am saying that they took the knowledge the acquired and turned it to something that was tailored specifically for French needs.
@lars "Please Mr Dawson, either you are a kid without any knowledge of European history or a complete idiot."
Condescend all you want, doesn't change what I said in the least.
No need to be angry just because the Eurofighter is just a big pile of dung, just able to fight the war that could have happened 30 years ago
You know, Dassault didn't need any external knowledge to build a delta fighter, even with canards surfaces like the company designed for the Mirage 4000...
" Dassault didn't need any external knowledge to build a delta fighter"
I think you'll find the composite airframe technology was pinched from BAE, turbine blade technology from Rolls Royce, radar technology from wherever they could............les 'frogs have an exceedingly functional electronic eavesdropping capability, much of it directed at the technical secrets of their western "allies"
would that be before or after Rolls Royce gifted their turbine technology to the Russians?
But no matter - the main thing is that SpaceX have Arianespace concerned, as the former look set to make the latter look a tad expensive (albeit maybe not as expensive as Boeing et al). But if the Sabre engines work as expected, then there's no reason Arianespace couldn't build Skylons powered by Sabres, and suddenly things become MUCH more interesting in the new space race.
Always assuming that Kessler Syndrome doesn't end up grounding everybody for a few centuries first though.
"...So how long till reaction engines build their prototype get it working then collapse under massive debt only to be sold to a US corp that makes a massive profit out of the design?..."
"...But the US mega-corp won't need to buy the designs. Thanks to the NSA/GCHQ, they'll already have them..."
No. If it's a success, the UK will give US the designs for free. After all, sycophancy is all about giving your all, with no expectation of reward.
That is another piece of good space-related news in the last seven days. The other is the fantastic pictures coming back from Rosetta.
I really hope this works out. If so its yet more vindication for Arthur C Clarke's vision. See his 'Prelude to Space' for one of the first realistic accounts of an SSTO space plane.
"Johnson is notorious for his complete inability to produce anything according to specification or common sense, or (sometimes) even the laws of physics. This fact never stopped him from trying, however. He is also known as Bloody Stupid "It Might Look A Bit Messy Now But Just You Come Back In Five Hundred Years' Time" Johnson and Bloody Stupid "Look, The Plans Were The Right Way Round When I Drew Them" Johnson.
Johnson was not incompetent, far from it; indeed in many ways he was a kind of genius. Pratchett suggests on numerous occasions that he possessed a kind of "inverse genius"; as far from incompetence as genius but in the opposite direction. Certainly no one else could produce an explosive mixture from nothing more than common sand and water, or create a triangle with three right angles. "
There aren't many projects I would say this about but for Sabre I wish our Government had the guts to just given them a ton of money and deal with the consequences later (forgiveness is much easier to get than permission after all). Sabre might not work but the pay-off if it does is huge, astronomically huge. The UK could easily go from being a bit player in space to a leading figure over night. When you look at the other options out there which mostly seem to revolve around reusable rockets Sabre, if it can be made to work, looks decades ahead of it's time.
Having said that I saw something the other day about NASA handing out a few tens of millions in funding for similar sorts of ideas. Perhaps that's how we should get around the funding issue, set up a space research body, give it tons of money and then let it fund Sabre.
Perhaps that's how we should get around the funding issue, set up a space research body, give it tons of money and then let it fund Sabre.
Les Frogs will insist that all the research is carried out not only in French but in Fance/Guyana and be only staffed by Frenchmen/women.
Then the EU will say NON and it will die a long drawn out death.
"The UK could easily go from being a bit player in space to a leading figure over night"
Whilst 15 tonnes to LEO is nothing to sneeze at, it's at the lower end of what's needed for a lot of future applications. 15 tonnes to GEO would be a good starting point, but 50 would be better.
_IF_ it can get launch costs down by a factor of 10 from current pricing then it's worth pursuing - anything less than a factor of 10 can be outcompeted by existing tech simply dropping their profit margins.
I have been enthusiastically following both Elon Musk's reusable rocket program and the development of Skylon. Elon's program seems more mature, but Skylon seems to offer a more complete solution. I wonder which horse will finish first.
Do I still win if I bet on both?
"Elon's program seems more mature, but Skylon seems to offer a more complete solution. "
That view would have been reasonable in 2011, when SX were promising full F9 reusability.
Today they have fallen back to only 1st stage reusability, which suggests they have discovered turning an ELV stage into an RLV stage is much harder than anyone thought possible. Kudos to them for pushing much further than anyone has tried to go before.
Skylon does offer a more complete solution. It's materials science is riskier and engine are riskier than an expendable rocket but gradually REL have demonstrated it works.
More importantly when they've had full funding they've done it on budget and schedule.
Musk is now saying SX will do full reusability with the "BFR" which is going to be 6x-9x the size of an F9.
That's likely 8-10 years away. :( .
.
"Do I still win if I bet on both?"
Yes. Falcon will lift _much_ greater payloads than Skylon can, especially in its evolutionary stages (XX Heavy). This is critical for heavy lifting - but Skylon will be better-suited for lifting humans and returning payloads.
Someday we'll get to the stage that Sea Dragon would have been. Hopefully.
This is exactly what we should be doing with public money.
There is a book by Mariana Mazzucato called The Entrepreneurial State (Debunking Public vs. Private Sector Myths). It uses Apple as an example of how they have benefited from the US's massive investment in (D)ARPA. She says big companies are unwilling to spend massive amounts of money in investment, but are happy to ride on the backs of government research and reap the rewards.
Well this is what the EU should be doing -- and we should get to keep the intellectual capital, so the whole of Europe can gain, just like the US has gained from it's global reach.
She has been influential in some policy making circles; it would not surprise me if she was behind some of those influencing the Commission. She argues cogently and intelligently and is worth a listen.
The Entrepreneurial State
Not that shit again. I'm using that book as toilet paperrecycled it properly.
A state is ANYTHING but "entrepreneurial" BY ITS VERY NATURE OF THE PEOPLE WHO ARE MAKING UP THE DISCOMBOBULATED ORGANISATION.
It couldn't detect an opportunity if it bit it in the arse. Nepotism, colonization, vainglorious shit and the current thing à la mode are of course acceptable.
Yeah, it's "entrepreneurial" under the condition that infinite money can be allocated from the actually entrepreneurial side of the economy. And from time to time that side is killed off in a war or two.
She says big companies are unwilling to spend massive amounts of money in investment, but are happy to ride on the backs of government research and reap the rewards.
That dumb bitch should maybe check out how actual investment takes places.
While it's great that the EU has cleared the way for money to flow, bear in mind that the EU Space Agency has green-lit the development of the Ariane 6 launcher (A6), which is intended to be better, faster, cheaper against the current Falcon 9 from SpaceX.
As is the case with most bureaucracies, A6, when it arrives, will find itself at a considerable disadvantage against a 1st-stage-reusable Falcon 9 ($30-40 million per launch?) and ridiculously expensive when compared to Skylon ($10 million per launch) when it enters service. Thus, when Skylon moves more to the center of attention (it's remarkably low-key for a launcher given that the two boilerplate testbeds are less than 5 years away from flying) we can all expect the EU aerospace industries (yes, France, I'm looking at you) to put pressure on the EU Space Agency to start throwing up roadblocks to stop Skylon. After all, they stand to make quite a profit from the use of A6 and a reusable, cheap launcher would wreck those plans...
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