Skylon
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- For other uses of the word Skylon, see Skylon (disambiguation)
Skylon is a proposal by Reaction Engines Limited (managed by British rocket scientist Alan Bond) for an orbital spaceplane. The Skylon is based on the cancelled British HOTOL project and is conceptually similar to the cancelled American X-30 National Aero-Space Plane project.
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[edit] Single stage to orbit
Currently, all orbital spacecraft use a process known as staging. Staging requires the jettisoning of parts of a launch vehicle during the flight to reduce weight—otherwise the vehicle would be too heavy to reach orbit (would have an inadequate mass ratio).
The Skylon design aims to take off from a specially strengthened runway, fly into low earth orbit, reenter the atmosphere, and land back on the runway like a conventional airplane, without staging whilst being fully reusable. This is known as single stage to orbit (SSTO).
Proponents of SSTO claim that staging causes a number of problems such as being difficult, expensive or even impossible to recover, reuse and reassemble the parts and therefore believe that SSTO designs hold the promise of reducing the cost of space flight.
[edit] The engines
One of the significant features of the Skylon design is the engine, called SABRE. The engines are designed to operate like a jet engine at up to around Mach 5 (1700 m/s), and then close the air inlet and operate as a highly efficient rocket to orbital speed.
Operating a jet engine at up to Mach 5.0 is difficult. Previous engines proposed by other designers have been good jet engines but poor rockets. This engine design aims to be a good rocket engine, as well as being an excellent jet engine at all speeds. The problem with operating at Mach 5.0 has been that the air coming into the engine heats up as it is compressed into the engine, which can cause the engine to overheat and eventually melt. Attempts to avoid these issues typically make the engine much heavier or greatly reduce the thrust. In either case the end result is an engine that has a poor thrust to weight ratio at high speeds, and the engine is too heavy to assist much in reaching orbit.
The SABRE engine design aims to avoid this by using some of the liquid hydrogen fuel to cool the air right at the inlet. The air is then burnt much like in a conventional jet. Because the air is cool at all speeds, the jet can be built of light alloys and the weight is roughly halved. Additionally, more fuel can be burnt at high speed. Beyond Mach 5, the air would still end up unusably hot, so the air inlet closes and the engine instead turns to burning the hydrogen with onboard liquid oxygen as in a normal rocket.
Because the engine uses the atmosphere as reaction mass at low altitude it would have a high specific impulse and burn about one fifth as much propellant while operating as a jet engine. Therefore, it would take off with much less total propellant. This, in turn, means that it doesn't need as much lift or thrust, which permits smaller engines, and allows conventional wings to be used at takeoff. While in the atmosphere, using wings to counteract gravity drag is more fuel-efficient than simply expelling propellant (as in a rocket), again reducing the total amount of propellant needed.
Compared to launching a rocket from the ground, launching from Mach 5 would reduce the kinetic energy required to reach orbit by about five percent as well as reducing losses due to gravity and atmospheric drag.
[edit] Differences from HOTOL
Skylon was based upon a previous project, HOTOL, that ended when the funding was cut by the UK government.
One difference is the undercarriage. To save weight HOTOL was to use sled launch. Skylon uses a relatively conventional-looking retractable undercarriage. This is achieved by using high pressure tires on a specially strengthened runway, and using water cooled brakes. If problems occur just before takeoff the brakes are applied to stop the vehicle and the water is boiled away to dissipate the heat. Upon successful takeoff, the water is jettisoned. This reduces the weight of the undercarriage by many tons. During landing, the empty vehicle is far lighter, and hence the water is not needed.
Skylon also uses a different engine design. This is partly due to patent and Official Secrets Act issues, but the SABRE engine is expected to offer higher performance.
Another issue that the Skylon design aims to circumvent is the intrinsically poor stability of HOTOL. The weight of the rear-mounted engine tended to make the HOTOL vehicle fly backwards. Attempts to fix this problem ended up sacrificing much of the payload the HOTOL vehicle could carry, and contributed to the failure of the project. Skylon solves this by putting the engines on the end of the wings nearer the center of the vehicle and thus moving the center of mass forward, ahead of the center of drag.
[edit] Vehicle shape and dimensions
The overall shape of the fuselage of Skylon bears a resemblence to the similarly named futuristic structure, the Skylon at the Festival of Britain.
The vehicle design is physically big—82 m long and 6.3 m in diameter—mainly because it uses low-density liquid hydrogen as fuel. The relatively large tanks required are kept very light by running them at low pressure. This size may mean that the vehicle would have an easier time during reentry compared to other vehicles, such as the Space Shuttle. The vehicle would end up slowing down at higher altitudes where the air is thinner. The skin of the vehicle would only reach 1100°Kelvin, and the extremely fragile tiles that the Space Shuttle thermal protection system employs would not be required. The Shuttle's ceramic tiles are damaged even flying through rain, whereas the Skylon's proposed skin material, a more reinforced ceramic, is much more durable.
The proportion of payload to takeoff weight (the payload fraction) would be more than twice that of normal rockets and the vehicle should be fully reusable.
Skylon Statistics:
- Length: 82 m
- Fuselage diameter: 6.25 m
- Wingspan: 25 m
- Unladen mass: 41,000 kg
- Fuel mass: 220,000 kg
- Maximum payload mass: 12,000 kg
- Specific impulse: 2000 to 2800 s (20 to 27 kN·s/kg) atmospheric, 450 s (4.4 kN·s/kg) exoatmospheric
- SABRE engine thrust/weight ratio: greater than 10
[edit] Comparisons with other vehicles
Compared to the Space Shuttle Orbiter the Skylon design is for a vehicle:
- more than twice the size
- more than two and a half times the takeoff weight
- with an unladen weight slightly more than half that of the Orbiter.
The SR-71 Blackbird holds the official speed record for a jet powered aircraft. Compared to the Blackbird the Skylon design is for a vehicle:
- more than twice the size
- more than one and a half times as fast under jet power
- more than three times the takeoff weight
- with an unladen weight about a third higher than that of the Blackbird.
[edit] Ongoing work
Alan Bond's company Reaction Engines Limited in conjunction with Bristol University has been engaged in research, mainly covering the SABRE engine's heat exchangers; which have now been proven to be manufactureable.
Alan Bond is currently trying to build an actual working SABRE engine.
The complete Skylon project has a projected R&D cost of under $10 billion and an estimated program length of 7-10 years.
Reaction Research Limited is working on LAPCAT, a program investigating hypersonic intercontinental transport designs.
[edit] Sources
All claims on the design and performance of the Skylon design included in this article are from the Reaction Engines Limited website.
