Skylon: A brilliantly British spaceplane

In the early imaginings of spaceflight, astronauts were carried into the cosmos by rockets that took off and landed and took of again. It wasn’t until we discovered just how much heft was required to toss a craft out of Earth’s gravity that the single-stage idea was abandoned.

The reality of spaceflight since then has been multistage rockets that, like giant eczematous centipedes, shed layer upon layer of rocket booster as they clamber labouriously skyward.

Over the years, there have been many attempts to build single-stage reusable spacecraft, but, plagued by technical and financial problems, they have always been abandoned. Now a British firm, Reaction Engines, believe they have the problem solved – and the solution is a brilliantly British spaceplane, called Skylon.

[Graphic: Science fiction made real – Meet the Skylon spaceplane. Click to launch]

Skylon, certainly looks the part – it has a dark, sleekness that seems to have been summoned straight from science-fiction’s most erotic mechanised dreams. But Skylon is much more than a comic book-derived wet dream. Skylon is a completely new approach to space travel. Instead of thrusting spaceward vertically, Skylon will take off from a runway like an airliner. Rather than hauling huge fuel tanks, Skylon gulps fuel from the air as it carves through the atmosphere and, in place of expensive, disposable rocket boosters, Skylon has an innovative engine, called Sabre.

Sabre, or Synergistic Air-Breathing Rocket Engine, is the result of more than two decades of research. When the craft takes off, it operates in ‘air-breathing’ mode that allows the engines to gather oxygen from the air, which is mixed with liquid hydrogen from internal tanks. When the air becomes too thin at higher altitudes, Sabre closes its air intakes and shifts into rocket mode.

This design reduces the amount of oxygen the craft has to carry by some 250 tonnes, making take-off a less labourious affair.
In theory, Skylon could slash the cost of getting payloads into space and become the sort of quick-turnaround, reusable spacecraft that the Space Shuttle could only ever aspire to be.

A recent feasibility study by the UK Space Agency found no ‘critical impediments’ blocking the development of Skylon, although critics have pointed out there are still considerable technical hurdles that will need to be addressed – not least the reinforced 5.4km-long runway needed to get the beast of the ground.

If all goes according to plan (and Reaction Engines get the extra £7.5bn they need to complete the project) Skylon could be ready to penetrate the heavens by 2020...
...but does anything ever go according to plan in space travel?

Is the original space dream on its way to reality? Compare an imaginary ‘future’ spaceport from 1953 (above) with Reaction Engine’s concept of the Skylon spaceplane leaving its hangar (below)

Skylon will take off just like a normal jet aircraft... albeit on longer (and reinforced) runways

Skylon’s payload bay is 4.6m wide and 12.3m long and can carry different configurations of payload containers.
It can also be adapted into a cabin for up to 30 passengers