SABRE : it's actually gonna work

The SABRE air-breathing rocket engine is designed to drive space planes to orbit and take airliners around the world in just a few hours. To work, it needs to manage very high temperature airflows, and the team at Reaction Engines Ltd has developed a heat-exchanger for the purpose. This key element has just demonstrated an impressive level of performance.

"We're now able to prove many of the claims we've been making as a business, backed up by very high-quality data," REL's CEO Mark Thomas told BBC News. "In this most recent experiment, we've near-instantaneously transferred 1.5 Megawatts of heat energy - the equivalent of 1,000 homes' worth of heat energy."

In 2012, REL put the pre-cooler in front of a Viper jet engine and sucked ambient air through the heat-exchanger. The gas stream immediately dropped to minus 150C. Now, the company has flipped the set-up, putting the jet engine from an old F-4 Phantom fighter-bomber in front of the pre-cooler to drive hot gases directly across the piping array. The completed Colorado experiment replicates the thermal conditions corresponding to flight at Mach 3.3, the record-breaking speed at which the American SR-71 Blackbird spy plane used to operate.

"This technology has wide application, not just in the immediate, obvious domain of high-speed flight but across the aerospace industry more generally, and into more commercial applications - anywhere there's a significant heat-management challenge and you're looking for ultra-lightweight, miniaturised, high-performance solutions," Mr Thomas said.

Let's hope we do actually manage to capitalise on this then. It looks like we'll soon need all the advantages we can get.

Super-fast engine tech in new milestone

UK engineers developing a novel propulsion system say their technology has passed another key milestone. The Sabre air-breathing rocket engine is designed to drive space planes to orbit and take airliners around the world in just a few hours.