[ExI] Skylon- a plane that can fly anywhere in under four hours!

[Keith Henson]

On Thu, Dec 18, 2014 at 4:00 AM,  "spike" <spike66 at att.net> wrote:

>>? On Behalf Of John Grigg

> "This craft is powered by a new kind of engine, known as a SABRE engine?

> This was developed by the British, and amazingly, not the United States, despite our huge defense budget...   ;   )
>
> John I am not going to get too excited by this until I see that they can make that precooler perform the way they say it will.  I did the numbers on this a few years ago and they suggested that this precooler would need to be higher performing than any heat exchanger we have.  If the Brits get it to work, then I will offer a Jolly good show, chaps, jolly good.

Spike, they did.  And indeed the performance is better than any
previous heat exchanger.  The tubing is so fine that the things look
like fabric.  I have seen them up close.

It was making and testing the precooler (performed to spec) which
convinced the UK government to grant them 60 million pounds a year ago
in June.

The precooler is nothing special in terms of design.  You need a lot
of area to transfer a good fraction of a GW, and they got it by using
really fine tubing, some 27 km of it.

What amazed me was that these things, with thousands of brazed joints,
don't leak helium.

Keith