Re:XB-1 First Supersonic Flight [video]
by notahacker on Tuesday January 28, 2025 @05:40PM
(#42859066)
Reaction Engines in the UK spent over 35 years working mostly on that concept
(though when they eventually went bust trying to scale up last year I think they were focused on reusable space launch business model which is ironically more realistic)
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Re:XB-1 First Supersonic Flight [video]
by ballooney on Wednesday January 29, 2025 @02:11AM
(#42862398)
No, they were working on the latter (skylon) most of the time, though the new management that came in after their £60M investment quickly dropped SSTO in favour of more immediate RoI applications. The passenger plane was LAPCAT which was a paper study commissioned by the EU. They did some interesting real work too, such as designing and testing a hypersonic engine combustion chamber that could reduce NOx emissions, which would be a big problem in any ‘conventional’ (eg scramjet) hypersonic engine.