Comments by "Tim Murphy" (@timmurphy5541) on "Joe Scott" channel.

  1. "He singlehandedly..........." "......built upon the work of....." :-)
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  2. a long self-excuse.
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  3. The company is looking at TSTO designs instead because Skylon is just too expensive to develop and too big to be of use to hypersonic flight. Quite possible a hypersonic aeroplane will come before space access.
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  4. Actually Skylon is on pause because there isn't the money to do it. TSTO is going to get done first and won't defeat the purpose because there are lots of advantages to being able to launch from an airport and land at perhaps another one. An engine of suitable size is also going to be the basis for hypersonic aircraft (albeit with a max speed of Mach 5 but at least you can get there from 0mph with the same engine). Hypersonics is getting a lot of attention right now from the military thanks to the Russian and Chinese boasts. The real reason why Skylon had any difficulty competing with SpaceX is that the entire cost of developing a new engine cycle was to be dumped at the door of one vehicle. The precooler now will be tried out in military jet engines to improve range and speed and there are hypersonics applications and several different TSTO design studies with different groups like the US AFRL and ONERA etc so the development won't need to be paid back by the first couple of Skylons. The TSTO designs won't need the unique materials and avoid other considerations about wing and foreplane size or heat shielding which make them that much less expensive to develop quite apart from being smaller.
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  5. The REL guys already have a design for that because it would do the same for Skylon.
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  6. I think Dyson is an idiot. He supports Brexit but from what I can see he also shifts jobs overseas and makes his biggest investments outside the UK too. I think you're much better off buying Bosch or Miele products which have less theatre but are reliable.
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  7.  @musaran2  Skylon was a way of proving the design and justifying the effort to make the engine - if Skylon had been impossible then why build the engine? Also what size would the engine have to be to make Skylon possible? They certainly did hope that it would get built up to the point where Alan Bond retired, I think. After he left a less initially ambitious approach was developed which switched to Two-Stage to Orbit. This makes everything cheaper at the expense of a non-reusable upper stage. Their engine is now actually a family of engines that scale all the way up to a Skylon one by increasing numbers of the various modules. So it should not be a from-scratch effort to build bigger engines. In the meantime they are trying to diversify in all sorts of directions to apply their heat exchanger technology. It can help jets to fly more economically at supersonic speeds or cool hotspots in electric car batteries or a number of other interesting things.
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  8.  @DavidKnowles0  they have been studying TSTO with CNES (the French space agency) too.There was a recent report on how to adapt Kourou as a base for such a launcher at least one more that compared a CNES design to an in-house REL one for missions from Kourou. The SABRE version they're going to test is also going to be TSTO sized rather than Skylon sized. So I think even if DARPA set them on that course they are staying on it.
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