For space access, the engines would then switch to rocket mode to do the remaining 80 percent. The Sabre engine could take a plane to five times the speed of sound and an altitude of 25 km, about 20 percent of the speed and altitude needed to reach orbit. The company has deliberately avoided filing patents on its heat exchanger technology to avoid details of how it works - particularly the method for preventing the build-up of frost - becoming public. This core piece of technology solves one of the constraints that limit jet engines to a top speed of about 2.5 times the speed of sound, which Reaction Engines believes it could double. What the company has right now is a remarkable heat exchanger that is able to cool air sucked into the engine at high speed from 1,000 degrees Celsius to minus 150 degrees in one hundredth of a second.
The space plane, dubbed Skylon, only exists on paper. “The gateway is now open to move beyond the jet age.”
“One of the major obstacles to a re-usable vehicle has been removed,” he said. “ESA are satisfied that the tests demonstrate the technology required for the Sabre engine development,” the agency’s head of propulsion engineering Mark Ford told a news conference. That ambition was given a boost on Wednesday by ESA, which has acted as an independent auditor on the Sabre test program. Reaction Engines Ltd believes its Sabre engine, which would operate like a jet engine in the atmosphere and a rocket in space, could displace rockets for space access and transform air travel by bringing any destination on Earth to no more than four hours away. A small British company with a dream of building a re-usable space plane has won an important endorsement from the European Space Agency after completing key tests on its novel engine technology. A Skylon in flight with a cutaway of the SABRE engine, in an illustration courtesy of Reaction Images Ltd.
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