Hypersonic engine manufacturer Reaction Engines goes bankrupt
Reaction Engines, the British hypersonic engine company that since 2011 has been touting its Skylon spaceplane and winning a variety of development contracts to build it. has now gone bankrupt, shutting down all operations.
However, this year, the company found itself in major financial difficulties due to unexpectedly slow growth and the inability to secure an additional £150 million (US$193 million) in funding, followed by BAE Systems and Rolls-Royce being unwilling to put up bail-out capital.
As a result, as of October 31, Reaction Engines is in the hands of administrators PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC). The company’s website forwards to PwC where there is a notice saying that further information will be released to creditors as the available assets are assessed. According to Sky News, 173 of the company’s 208 staff were made redundant.
After more than a decade of work and no apparent progress, it appears no one was willing to front the company any additional cash.
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Reaction Engines, the British hypersonic engine company that since 2011 has been touting its Skylon spaceplane and winning a variety of development contracts to build it. has now gone bankrupt, shutting down all operations.
However, this year, the company found itself in major financial difficulties due to unexpectedly slow growth and the inability to secure an additional £150 million (US$193 million) in funding, followed by BAE Systems and Rolls-Royce being unwilling to put up bail-out capital.
As a result, as of October 31, Reaction Engines is in the hands of administrators PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC). The company’s website forwards to PwC where there is a notice saying that further information will be released to creditors as the available assets are assessed. According to Sky News, 173 of the company’s 208 staff were made redundant.
After more than a decade of work and no apparent progress, it appears no one was willing to front the company any additional cash.
Readers!
Please consider supporting my work here at Behind the Black. Your support allows me the freedom and ability to analyze objectively the ongoing renaissance in space, as well as the cultural changes -- for good or ill -- that are happening across America. Fourteen years ago I wrote that SLS and Orion were a bad ideas, a waste of money, would be years behind schedule, and better replaced by commercial private enterprise. Only now does it appear that Washington might finally recognize this reality.
In 2020 when the world panicked over COVID I wrote that the panic was unnecessary, that the virus was apparently simply a variation of the flu, that masks were not simply pointless but if worn incorrectly were a health threat, that the lockdowns were a disaster and did nothing to stop the spread of COVID. Only in the past year have some of our so-called experts in the health field have begun to recognize these facts.
Your help allows me to do this kind of intelligent analysis. I take no advertising or sponsors, so my reporting isn't influenced by donations by established space or drug companies. Instead, I rely entirely on donations and subscriptions from my readers, which gives me the freedom to write what I think, unencumbered by outside influences.
You can support me either by giving a one-time contribution or a regular subscription. There are four ways of doing so:
1. Zelle: This is the only internet method that charges no fees. All you have to do is use the Zelle link at your internet bank and give my name and email address (zimmerman at nasw dot org). What you donate is what I get.
2. Patreon: Go to my website there and pick one of five monthly subscription amounts, or by making a one-time donation.
3. A Paypal Donation or subscription:
4. Donate by check, payable to Robert Zimmerman and mailed to
Behind The Black
c/o Robert Zimmerman
P.O.Box 1262
Cortaro, AZ 85652
You can also support me by buying one of my books, as noted in the boxes interspersed throughout the webpage or shown in the menu above.
What was “unexpected” about the “slow growth”?
Skylon might have been practical a few decades ago, but the design’s 10-ton payload capacity is totally dwarfed by that of Starship, and it could never scale up to match. Cost-wise, I’d expect it would be hard pressed to compete with the current Falcon 9. Maybe it could work as a usable point-to-point airline vehicle, but would likely end up as a more extravagant and less affordable Concorde. Skylon and its HOTOL predecessor have been in the works since the early 1980s, and it now appears the window of opportunity has simply come and gone – who wants to throw away yet more money on an obsolete market solution?
With the re-usability of first stages it would be cheaper to launch a smaller re-usable shuttle like second stage to return with.
Something with just enough engine to give it a better than one shot at landing like the shuttle had.
An overly complex solution to the wrong problem. LOx is cheap and Falcon 9 booster re-usability has made it obsolete. Think of a first stage booster as a tugboat guiding a ship out of harbor.
Still, that technology deserves support.
That having been said, an all rocket TSTO could have an orbiter that would burn kerosene, unlike this:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceLiner
Buran actually was to have landing jets where we put the OMS:
https://www.secretprojects.co.uk/threads/energia-buran-space-transportation-system.5656/page-6#post-719399
A mix of these concepts means an orbiter, after re-entry, is just another airplane with run-of-the-mill jet engines—no advanced airbreathing engines.
The RAF should have funded SABRE
Just the other day, I was wondering how Reaction Engines was doing with its Skylon project. Now I know, and I am disappointed that we have lost yet another attempted single stage to orbit (SSTO) idea.
It does not have to carry the same load as Starship in order to succeed. It would fill a niche that Starship, Falcon, New Glenn, and Vulcan don’t. More is not always better, although many people seem to think so. ISS and other proposed space stations do not need to be resupplied with 100-tonne payloads, and they do not need 100-passenger shuttles.
Reusable first stages may make things less expensive than expendable, but as a reusable SSTO vehicle, Skylon would have a reduced complexity of operation and would have the possibility of even greater reductions in operating costs.
The main technical development that was needed was the engine, which would transition from air-breathing to on-board oxygen. One advantage would have been that the craft would not have to carry several tonnes of LOX, reducing the overall fuel need, size of the craft, and weight of the structure. Notice how much larger first stages are than the upper stages, yet these first stages tend to take the upper stages only around 1/5th of the way to orbit.
Jeff Wright & Edward,
Oh God, where to start?
The rocket equation makes SSTO barely possible for a purely rocket-powered theoretical vehicle with no appreciable payload-to-orbit capability. Having barely reached LEO, an SSTO would then be tapped out and would have no source of propellant to refill its tanks so it could go much of anywhere else. Propellant depots supplied from the ground by fully-reusable TSTO brute lifters would get around this limitation – that is, after all, part of SpaceX’s Starship architecture. But, if one has a perfectly serviceable fully-reusable TSTO brute lifter, of what real benefit is having a far more expensive, complex and also vastly less lift-capable SSTO? The question answers itself.
And even that scenario posits a pure-rocket-powered SSTO. The whole Skylon concept introduced several additional hurdles to overcome – apparently Earth’s gravity well having been an insufficient challenge.
A combined-cycle engine that can be a jet in sensible atmosphere and a rocket above it does not relieve a designer of the necessity of carrying tons of liquid oxygen if the vehicle is intended both to reach orbit and have some way to come back. It merely shifts the burden of producing that LOX from ground systems to on-board systems – pretty much the opposite of SpaceX’s engineering principles, to wit “the best part is no part” and the off-loading of every possible function to “stage zero” and not the vehicle.
Then there’s the dry mass of the vehicle to consider. Making LOX in-flight requires not only a flying LOX plant but a heat sink into which to dump the heat generated by compression of ambient air. On Skylon, that was to have been the extremely cold LH2 fuel. LH2, unfortunately, has quite a low density, requiring very large tankage which, in turn, increases the dry mass of the vehicle. And Skylon needed to carry enough LH2 not only to burn to putatively reach orbit, but enough additional into which to dump the heat of liquefaction of the LOX. Just densifying ambient air would be tough enough, but an actual phase change is needed to liquify oxygen while not doing the same for the propulsively useless, yet dominant, nitrogen fraction of Earthly atmosphere.
And then there’s the putative “ceramic-metal composite” airframe material which was to have done double duty as structure and TPS. Color me skeptical – even with a buttload of LH2 aboard to act as a re-entry, as well as an ascent phase heat sink.
The whole Skylon notion had much in common with Ptolemaic cosmology in that Ptolemy tried to save a fundamentally incorrect concept with multiple layers of epicycles while the Skylon vehicle design required multiple layers of subsystems that purported to fix the problems introduced by the next-lower layer of subsystems.
For those with better math than I could ever have.
Lets say a Falcon Heavy is used to launch an orbiter and throw away second booster.
The orbiter needs to have reaction jets and fuel to help dock with something else in space.
It also needs to have heat shielding to get back into the atmosphere.
It also needs to keep enough fuel for air breathing jet engines to keep it flying for 30 minutes.
It also needs a large enough jet engine to provide enough thrust.
This is only if you insist on the orbiter actually flying at some point and not just gliding.
Or go the other way and have a carrier plane that gets you to about 300 thousand feet and drop off a rocket to reach orbit. How big would that rocket have to be to reach orbit from that speed and altitude. HUGE!. Your carrier plane is only saving the first 300 thousand feet and 1000 miles per hour. A drop in the bucket.
Apollo back in the day proved we could re enter a capsule with good one mile accuracy. Space X has proven we can directly hit a target within a few feet. Why fly to our eventual target landing area? Wings are no longer needed. They are just wasted weight along with air breathing engines.
Dick Eagleson,
You wrote: “A combined-cycle engine that can be a jet in sensible atmosphere and a rocket above it does not relieve a designer of the necessity of carrying tons of liquid oxygen if the vehicle is intended both to reach orbit and have some way to come back.”
The idea of Skylon was to not have to carry and accelerate the oxygen that would have been used by a first stage. It makes the beginning mass lower and allows for more mass to orbit than a regular rocket, the kind of rocket that is limited by the tyranny of the rocket equation.
It would have been nice to see whether Reaction Engines could make it work and how economical it would have been. This is the beauty of having so many companies trying their own solutions. Not all of them will work, but they may make progress into the impossible. SpaceX has done the impossible a few times in the last two decades, and it would be nice if someone else could also perform miracles.
Scott Manley explains the SABRE engine and its use on the Skylon rocket:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4YLg8X0BAL0 (17 minutes)