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.