It’s not often that the passing of a medium sized company on an industrial estate on a damp and soggy former airfield in southern England is worthy of a Hackaday mention, but the news of hypersonic propulsion company Reaction Engines ceasing trading a few weeks ago is one of those moments that causes a second look. Their advanced engine technology may have taken decades to reach the point of sustainable testing, but it held the promise of one day delivering true spaceplanes able to take off from a runway and fly to the edge of the atmosphere before continuing to orbit. It seems their demise is due to a failure to secure more funding.
We’ve written about their work more than once in the past, of their hybrid engines and the development of the advanced cooling system required to deliver air to a jet engine working at extreme speeds. The rights to this tech will no doubt survive the company, and given that its origins lie in a previously canceled British Aerospace project it’s not impossible that it might return. The dream of a short flight from London to Sydney may be on hold for now then.
Writing this from the UK there’s a slight air of sadness about this news, but given that it’s not the first time a British space effort has failed, we should be used to it by now.
Header: Science Museum London / Science and Society Picture Library, CC BY-SA 2.0
In the current climate it seems bonkers to me they couldn’t manage to get military funding from some allied nation or defence company, as those engines are far enough along in development by all reports I’ve read to say they will definitely work, and have very measurable advantages over chemical rocket or regular jet engines. Good as things like Falcon 9 or the aircraft are they are not really direct competitors to each other or a platform using these engines that somewhat straddles the line between the two.
Lack of sticking power to finish a project isn’t anything new in Britain of recent years, especially while a Labour government is in power. They historically always seem to find a future tech project that is 90% done and effectively already paid for, ready to give decades of service to scrap, while probably paying extra for privilege to throw it out… So no way they’d be sponsoring the company for a technology that looks forward. (Not that failure to finish/support projects on time, budget or at all is unique to Labour of course (HS2 for instance))
Same old. The Americans will come in and buy the technology and throw it back in our faces. We deserve everything that we get. Such a gutless country.
Not every idea that we passed on turns out to be valuable. According to Bill Gunston, Britain’s Gas Turbine Research Establishment did some experiments on helicopter rotors which, by having turbine gases blown out through slots, could change their aerodynamics in flight and potentially be stopped altogether to act as a static wing. The money ran out and Sikorsky took it over in America, ultimately producing the S-72:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sikorsky_S-72
The money ran out before they could get the thing to fly and they gave up. Boeing then had a go at building a small, remotely controlled stopped-rotor helicopter, which was safer and cheaper, and a good thing too as both the test models they built crashed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_X-50_Dragonfly
After that the idea of the stopped-rotor helicopter seems to have been abandoned. We will never know, but given the amount of time Reaction Engines has been in development without ever coming close to producing an actual flyable engine it may be the same.
The problem with stop-rotors is the blades need to be something other than a standard airfoil shape. It’d be like putting one wing of a plane on backwards
Exactly
Unfortunately, they weren’t far along in development work at all, in spite of decades of trying. I worked with them on a couple of projects, and they couldn’t make a heat exchanger that didn’t leak like a sieve, even when running with water. Hydrogen / helium are notoriously leaky.
And then they had to get the rest of the engine to work, which they were nowhere near close to. I’m also saddened by their demise, but not at all surprised.
You’re quite incorrect, they have operational heat exchangers in various industries. You see their working heat exchangers every time you watch an F1 race. That wasn’t their problem at all.
What a load of rubbish! 10-9mbar l/s is more than sufficient for any application
Personally I was thinking quite the opposite: that the current surge in military funding might have caused the company to make up the ruse that it needed to cease its commercial ambitions, and quietly go underground to work on top secret military projects.
Who knows. Of one thing I am sure: nobody will ever tell us the full story, and so anything can happen.
Why would they need to go underground when plenty of companies are around that make missiles openly. What weird conspiracy brain logic “freethinking”
I’ve seen a number of different promising technologies suddenly disappear without a trace, including the inventors, the companies that they worked for, and the technology itself. When something completely disappears with zero traceable footprints, without bankruptcy, corporate dissolution or even some sort of scandal, it usually a pretty big clue that the government took the tech ‘black’.
With the Americans having their traditional “not invented here” syndrome and throwing their money at Musk instead, and the ESA being a three way public money sink between France, Germany and Italy, nobody is really looking forward to actually develop novel space launch technology.
Granted, the Skylon would be more of a cheap cargo truck to and from LEO instead of general purpose launch platform for satellites. To see the prospects in it, you would need something in LEO that requires cheap lift capability and cargo return, and there isn’t any except the ISS, and that’s on its way out within a decade.
You’re assuming using actually using these engine for that specific purpose, could be very useful for way more than just that. Fast and extremely high altitude have value for many things even if you never intend to leave the atmosphere at all – very hard to shoot down, doesn’t fly such predicable orbits as a satellite etc. Or if you can make the engines work well enough for a suitably low (but still astronomical) price even longer range and faster cruise missiles etc. And away from the military side if they are cheap enough to run its the replacement to Concord for passenger services or to make satellite EOL a recovery for recycling refurbishment over parking orbits or burning up…
Obviously I’m not saying the development is really far enough along for any of these to be functional product in the really near future, but the potential is there for way more use than just LEO cargo truck, and everything I’ve read says the thing is far enough along to be sure it can be done.
You are assuming that their engine was actually a workable thing. They spent three decades pushing hype and had very little to show for it. You can design incredible things that rely on non existent materials that have amazing properties. Actual atmospheric conditions can can cripple designs that will work under ideal ones. Their engine requires cryogenic cooling for the intake air and humidity will plug that up in a heartbeat.
They demonstrated frost control over a decade ago.
There is more than enough evidence that says it will be. Plus 3 decades of very little investment isn’t much for ground breaking tech – look at the jet engine for instance Whittle spent a decade to get nowhere much, mostly because there was no funding. Then the first remotely practical jet engines don’t turn up for even more years, and probably only because WWII rather demanded all defence spending you can get, and funding plausible innovations to improve your war fighting capacity is dirt cheap compared the astronomical cost of the ongoing or clearly soon to start war. It then takes another few decades for a jet engine to improve enough to become possible outside of a military context.
Or you could take rocketry, steam engines, turbines – almost every major technical leap spends sometimes centuries sitting there as a novel thought experiment or impractical demonstration before somebody puts in the work!
In this case they are clearly far enough along from everything I’ve read to say with the right investment it will be a very viable and useful engine option, yes its not a working product yet, no doubt the first fully functional engine will cost an insane seeming amount etc. But it is close enough there is little doubt it can actually be turned into a functional and useful, and rather uniquely useful engine if you put the money in to make it happen.
Nobody wants to touch the “Concorde II” because of the economic lessons learned with the original one. For military applications, it would be a very expensive “Wunderwaffe” that doesn’t have much use in warfare because it is so expensive. The only country that would ever use it is probably the US, and as said before “not invented here”.
Really not how force multipliers work, especially if you can manage to have something your rivials can’t manage to build or can’t easily counter – which is why aircraft carrier for instance exist, huge, massively expensive before you even bother to count the airframe costs, and still actually quite vulnerable so to go with them you need a fleet of escorts. The cost is huge, but ability to operate at a high tempo for a pretty long time and rapidly deploy makes it something many nations want, and all the ones that can just about afford to run them have them!
Or in this case an airborne radar and drone control platform that is so high it can see over the curve of the Earth a long way, while staying a very safe distance, and fast so any attempts at interception are easier to deal with. Also that speed will give your radar many more data points on the same object from different positions which should help filter out the helicopter flying near the treetop from the noise.
You’re still talking about a scenario where you’re essentially using the U2 spy plane as a cruise missile. For the other uses – well, look how many countries have U2 spy planes and what do they get out of them?
The U2 was something only the USA used, mostly because only the USA could all that time ago find enough budget to make such a knife edge of technology tool useful, and by the time tech exists for everyone else that the U2 concept would be relatively easy satellites have mostly taken over the one thing it was really good for.
Also no I’m really not talking about using it like a U2 – though it would potentially overlap with that sort of concept, I’m talking about AEW&C type replacements – instead of a retrofitted jumbo jet that can’t fly as high or fast have something with these engines. Jumbo’s are really quite vulnerable in comparison, while also being much closer to blind as the horizon still gets in the way when you can’t get any higher…
Or for the much touted manned and drone swarm buddy system control aircraft – you get all the benefits of a real mind in close proximity, with relatively disposable but in many cases hopefully reusable interceptors that can have much higher performance envelopes as they don’t have to keep the meatsack alive etc. And with direct LOS to your interceptor its reasonable to assume you can signal with laser, which gets past the much easier to jam more omni-directional RF issues.
And the USA has used many bits of equipment they didn’t invent or even work on the development of at all – The Harrier in the world of aircraft for instance actually lasted in US service longer than the nation that designed it! And being a younger nation many of their staples for war fighting started as copies or minor reinventions of somebody else’s ideas. Though developed since then.
The USA likes to use its own home built/developed equipment certainly, and develops stuff in partnership often – defence economics wise that makes a great deal of sense. But if say Sweden makes the only suitable aircraft/tank or even just a smaller component for some specific conditions/requirements the USA’s own defence base doesn’t they will buy into an allied system when it doesn’t make sense to start up their own production lines. Rich as the USA’s defence budget has been they do have a budget!
You can also use your LEO cargo truck to get parts of another craft to low earth orbit efficiently, assemble it, and then send to wherever. You don’t need to do the whole journey in one leg.
Yes, but that assumes you have an orbital assembly facility for some reason, and that’s another piece of technology that doesn’t exist very soon. See the point about the ISS.
It’s simply the ratio of o2 to nitrogen that hinders this project.
That is a relatively easy fix. Even if you need to supply extra oxygen to get around it at some point.
You must be thinking of British Volt
you must be thinking of britishvolt. the previous government let that fold
Presumably they tried to find a suitable partner. Maybe the spaceX success with reusability and blue origin to follow has changed the long term economics? If they’ve now run out of all funds we can be sure they’ve been looking for refunding intensely for at least the last year. Maybe the Chinese will buy it, if they haven’t hacked the tech details already. Of all the things the UK has spent on to accumulate a debt level that’s 100% of the country’s economy was it decided that such a leading edge project was not worth pursuing even if success was uncertain. The ESA reviewed the tech concept and agreed it was plausible. A space plane would be a useful alternative if some issue grounds spaceX which, whatever it’s excellence, is still one company that dominates, and itself was the alternative to Boeing for supply to the space station then dependent on the Russians as single service provider. Maybe there’s something else in the pipeline that makes REL’s tech redundant?
You need to check your facts labour led a massive programme of development after the war it was the tories that axed most of it just like our big aircraft carriers, harriers that were quickly bought by the Americans when axed by Cameron
I did say future tech not existing capability – Labour have a habit of axing projects that would be revolutionary, are close to finished, look so good they’d probably stay in service for a very very long time – like the TSR-2, not only cancelled but all the existing materials ordered destroyed…
The Conservatives on the hand have a tendency to cut back on existing and ageing equipment usually a bit too early before there is a replacement ready, as is the case with the Harrier – its already a few decades old at that point! And have with the peace dividend since the cold war penny pinched the MOD rather more than I’d like, though so did Labour…
Dont agree on the politics. History speaks for itself! We dont look to the furure, we are to wrapped up in our past. We have lost our passion for going forward and investing in our future. It’s sad but I see us spiralling, my only advice to any good innovators, emigrate! Sorry to see this company go. No doubt it will be at some point, reinitialized by the US or China at some point.
These things seem to work best when commissioned by a government. Or if you could use them as a swap in replacement on a commercial aircraft.
It is sad to have seen so many “this is cool” things that never came to fruition. After 20 years of war on terror spending, there isn’t even a teflon frying pan nor an internet.
Hmmm I dunno about that. Self-landing rockets weren’t really government funded. Possibly subsidized, in a capitalist kind if way if you want to split hairs. The entire government-funded NASA industrial complex was shitting on them at the time if I recall correctly. Right up until they pulled it off and started stealing their business.
I would argue involving the government and/or it’s institutional contractors (who will win the bids in most cases) slows down innovation UNLESS it involves war, but that’s just by my limited experience working with both government and private software contractors in the American military 20 some odd years ago. The difference in attitude and drive is jarring. Maybe things have changed.
Looking at recent news about Boeing in the commercial sector and the dragging on and on of their flagship government pork project STS… I don’t think it has.
How’s that HLS humming along?
Except entirely. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McDonnell_Douglas_DC-X
The reason it was dumped was because NASA wanted a Space Shuttle II instead of a re-usable rocket, so they were looking for any excuse to end the project. The way SpaceX got started with reusable rockets was, they poached the engineers and the technology for simplified efficient rocket engines from JPL (government funded), and the experience gained from the DC-X, and threw a bunch of NASA (COTS) money on building it.
SpaceX is essentially a part of the “government funded NASA industrial complex” with the minor difference that NASA is not the sole source of their income, which is what gives them the right to claim “private industry” instead of government industry. COTS was a “cost plus” contract, meaning that NASA will pay the cost of the development plus a huge reward for completing the targets, which put a huge boost on the company and lent them the credibility to gain investments by Google etc.
The hybrid air breathing rocket powered spaceplane may never have been able to compete with SpaceX’s services.
However, producing a 0 to Hypersonic jet engine is the potential game changer.
You might not be able to compete with normal space companies, but governments will always want a bigger and faster engine for military projects.
Just imagine the GCAP/Tempest fighter having hypersonic engines that can be used from takeoff to to at least Mach 5 is such an important capability.
With the world as it is these days, I say letting this project die is a serious national security issue.
If it were up to me as a UK citizen, I would have kept it on life-support with taxpayer money, then sought private investment after a thorough analysis of what more it would take to create a viable product. It’s not like we don’t have the money, and at least this had the chance of seeing a return, as it is someone might well buy it for the IP rights for pennies on the pound.
Surely four or five hours worth of NHS funding would have gotten it operational
Or 1 Rwanda scheme…
Scott Manley did a video on the same topic a few days ago:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4YLg8X0BAL0
I don’t know about a hypersonic fighter. I thought the whole issue with the YF-12 was that it wasn’t practical — turning radius was enormous and missiles and interceptors were plenty fast already for furball purposes. Also, pulling g’s at hypersonic speeds is probably not great for a pilot. A hypersonic UCAV won’t have the G issue but I can’t imagine you could reliably maintain human-in-the-loop at such speeds.
From a pilot’s perspective, a 1G turn at hypersonic speeds is no different than a 1G turn at subsonic speeds… the jet may fly a wider-radius turn at supersonic, but the 1G specifies the pilot feels 1x the force of gravity.
Removing the pilot from the equation, what you really care about is can the aircraft pull multi-G turns at supersonic speeds with a tight radius and not immediately turn into chaff.
So the UK government allowed once again another BRITISH Technology company go under with no fighting to save them. We have the world everything! No all we give them is a dumbing ground for unwanted junk. The UK government needs to wake up and actually start investing in UK innovation!
I think you will find that Dawn Aerospace in New Zealand have got an engine like this working recently. Damn colonials
Shame the government won’t step in and save this but no chance with labour
I don’t know anything about this particular company, but I just finished reading an article about how bad the UK is for startups.
True, they are in a serious economic situation. But I really don’t think this project will die, maybe a US jet/rocket consortium would buy the IP and tooling (if any). It certainly won’t be the first time UK engineering had the ideas and engineering but not enough money to bring things to reality.
This company worked at a snail’s pace. Their engineers were more interested in retirement than innovation. This “advanced” engine was nothing more than a scam to attract government and investor dollars. It is no surprise they failed to attract further funding.
The UK has no industrial strategy and successive governments with absolutely no idea, IE taxes, incentives, business environment. Hasn’t even got self-sufficiency in power generation and therefore no national security. Hardly surprising tech companies struggle.
Hermeus is taking a shot at this “mythology”. Seems much of the r&d has been done.