SOME good ideas take years of dogged perseverance to come to fruition. That has certainly been true of a hypersonic engine which Alan Bond, a British engineer, began developing in 1982. Its first incarnation was as part of a government-backed spaceplane project called HOTOL (horizontal take-off and landing), run by Rolls-Royce and British Aerospace. When the money for this dried up in 1989, Mr Bond and two fellow Rolls-Royce engineers set up a company called Reaction Engines to keep the work going. This week BAE Systems (as British Aerospace is now called) bought 20% of Reaction Engines for £20m ($31m). That vote of confidence suggests Mr Bond’s novel propulsion system may be turning into reality.
His system is, as the firm’s name implies, a reaction engine. That means it relies on Newton’s third law of motion (to every action there is an equal and opposite reaction) to drive it forward. Broadly, reaction engines come in two varieties—rockets and jets—in which hot gases created by burning fuel are ejected out of the back, providing the action part of the law. The reaction part is forward movement. The distinction between rockets and jets is that...Continue reading
Source: Science and technology http://ift.tt/1kwnzif
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