Adam Dissel, President of Reaction Engines, reported that business operations were being shutdown. The US business of the UK company operated for 8.5 years. They pushed the boundaries of propulsion and thermal management with our technology. The team achieved some astounding milestones and technology firsts, including engine precooler tests at Mach 5 equivalent temperatures, the …
Radian Aerospace has $31 million of funding to develop a single stage to orbit spaceplane. It will use a 3000 meter long sled to get it up to launch speed. It will deliver 2.27 tons to anywhere on Earth in under one hour. It can land on a regular runway. The Spaceplane will be about …
China Aerospace Science and Industry Corporation’s (CASIC) plans to build a giant magnetic launcher to propel airplanes up to speeds where they can start hypersonic scramjet engines. CASIC has built a 2000 meter long low-vacuum track high-speed maglev test facility in the industrial heartland of Datong, Shanxi province. This is able to accelerate heavy object …
Sierra Space will soon launch the Dream Chaser, a reusable lifting-body spaceplane and inflatable space stations. The cargo Dream Chaser is designed to resupply the International Space Station with both pressurized and unpressurized cargo. It is intended to launch vertically on the Vulcan Centaur rocket and autonomously land horizontally on conventional runways. A proposed version …
The U.S. military’s X-37B space plane is set to launch Thursday, Dec. 28 in the evening on a SpaceX Falcon Heavy. The spacecraft has a four-hour window starting at 7 p.m. to take off from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The SpaceX Falcon heavy is at pad 39A to prepare for tomorrow’s launch. Falcon …
The Sierra Space Tenacity spaceplane should have its first flight in 2024. It is compatible with a wide variety of launch vehicles (rockets) and will be launched in a stowed configuration inside a payload fairing. This makes Tenacity significantly more flexible and reduces ascent loads on the vehicle compared to the space shuttle. Dream Chaser …
Reaction Engines in the UK have been developing a space plane for two decades and they made progress on the core technology. The Foreign Comparative Testing campaign was a success. Reaction Engine’s joint U.S. and UK team achieved over 10 megawatts of transferred thermal energy using the same style of precooler tested under the HTX …
Reaction Engines today revealed the start of a new testing campaign to expand the performance envelope of their high-Mach enabling technology through the Foreign Comparative Testing (FCT) Program at the Department of Defense and supported by the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL). The FCT Program is administered by the Directorate of Defense Research and Engineering …
In 2018, Reaction Engines has been building two test facilities which they will use to validate the performance of key parts of the SABRE™ spaceplane hypersonic engine. In the US test facility (TF2) will enable the precooler test article (HTX) to be exposed to high-temperature airflow conditions in excess of 1,000°C (~1800°F) that are expected …
PD Aerospace is a Japanese startup that is trying to build reusable spaceplanes. They want to reduce the cost of access to space by 100 times. They want to create sub-orbital space tourism. They want their first space plane flying tourists to suborbital altitude by 2023. They have raised about $5 million (520 million yen) …
The U.S. Air Force this week awarded Lockheed Martin Corp. a $928 million contract to develop a prototype hypersonic cruise missile, or the Hypersonic Conventional Strike Weapon. The project is one of two hypersonic weapon prototyping efforts the service is pursuing. US officials have said they fear the US may be lagging behind Russia and …