The senior government minister has given them a supportive statement for their press release (see link on website in Post #205). We are told separately there is £110bn (US$170bn) available to lend to "business", just there for the asking.
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The senior government minister has given them a supportive statement for their press release (see link on website in Post #205). We are told separately there is £110bn (US$170bn) available to lend to "business", just there for the asking.
Order of Kilopi
Don't hold your breath. Courtesy of all that public money the banks liquid assets have gone by 50% while lending has increased by 0.2% Frankly choosing between funding from the UK government and UK banks is like being asked if you want to be shot or hung...Originally Posted by kzb
Fortunately REL has stated in the past they have several hundred million in private funding lined up to carry on to the next phase.
Order of Kilopi
Maybe space advocates across the pond should suggest funding Skylon by raiding the Carrier budget:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-18237029
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Carriers shmarriers. They are needed you know. the rest of the world does not like to be dominated by the US as much as it is when it comes to military might. Sooo.. if the US will scrap theirs then the rest of us may scap ours.
on a more serious note. carriers are extremely useful for more than just force projection. they are capable of policing an immense amount of ocean all by it's lonesome. someone got to keep an eye out for those pesky pirates you know.
The oceans have never been safer to traverse at any time during history than they are right now. this is partly so thanks to carriers and their huge area of influence.
I could not in good conscience demand that any nation shirk their responsibility to partake in the continuing work that is required to safeguard the international merchant fleets we are all critically dependent on to transport goods and fuel across the globe.
I would love to see space opened up as a proper frontier for expansion asap. but not at any cost like that.
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Unless someone is going to launch a rocketplane off of a carrier, please do not discuss military budgets, force projection, or similar issues on BAUT.
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I have to admit it would be really awesome if someone managed to pull that off.
Good. Do they have enough to make it through the whole thing, or just enough to develop the engines?Fortunately REL has stated in the past they have several hundred million in private funding lined up to carry on to the next phase.
Order of Kilopi
I think that's to take them through a prototype engine; going further will take a lot more money but it's what they need for now.
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I think i saw mr Hempshell say something along these lines in an interview somewhere. been a while since i saw it, so i cannot remember where atm. At any rate. without an engine there is no vehicle. So it makes sense to complete the engine prototype phase before going much further with the rest of the vehicle.
Order of Kilopi
That was also the approach we used: rough design of the whole craft so you know what your engines need to be capable of (and to verify that the craft as a whole is more or less achievable), and then focus on detail design of the engine first as that's the major bottleneck (unless the rough design of the whole craft points out differently).
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Been quiet in this thread for a while. No big news to report really, but i stumbled across this Q/A session where REL answers questions from the readers of the Engineer.
Order of Kilopi
Well it appears the major test of the intercooler has been passed!:
Skylon spaceplane engine concept achieves key milestone
Next step a scale SABRE prototype, and history in the making!
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Indeed. I'm really stoked about this. I think this is the best shot we got for making space access cheap enough to make us a truly space faring civilization.
Order of Kilopi
I know, I was slightly depressed to see the proposed design for Ariane 6 (another lets shuffle the engines around a bit rocket), so the new from REL was excellent; hopefully the fund-raising goes well.
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I seen a lot of people from MY side of pond hunging up on Skylon like Second Coming or something like that. It is even funny.
I see Skylon as something that will need a lot of luck. It will be in 30s (generous, as I assume it will actually exist at all!). Real Skylon will have worse parameters than paper Skylon. And it will have to compete with reusable rockets of future fielded by SpaceX, LockMart, Boeing and whatever will survive until then.
Order of Kilopi
Same old. same old. Every time they cross one of the major hurdles someone comes up with a post like this. Frankly I'll take the wild optimists over sour pessimists any day of the week.
Order of Kilopi
I saw an aphorism: Optimists invented the airplane; pessimists invented the parachute.
I've worked in aerospace; even projects that are not as leading-edge as Skylon routinely run over budget and late. It's also routine for performance goals to be unmet.
Skylon is, regardless of anything else, most definitely a high-risk project, in that it requires several major technical innovations, not least the engines, to work to expectations to succeed. Good luck to them, but they're not guaranteed success.
Order of Kilopi
Oh I don't think it's guaranteed but its the people who seem to almost be willing the likes of REL and SpaceX to fail I don't have time for.
Order of Kilopi
I want as many in the game as possible. The intercooler is what had me worried. I'm hoping the worst part is over. The European LEA/hexafly programs might pick up interest over this. If one country tries its hand in a certain type of space acess, it causes others to look in the same direction.
The recent AV Week showed a lot of recent hypersonic advances, with Scramspace on the cover. The H-Magjet concept is interesting (hypermach.com_. I wonder what Musk's hyperloop is supposed to be.
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The more teams working on achieving a goal the bigger the chance of overall sucess is. most of these attempts are going to fail. there is no doubt about that, but REL is definately one of the favorites in this race.
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