Reaction Engines' hypersonic hopes stall as funding fizzles out
- Reference: 1730465635
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2024/11/01/reaction_engines_administration/
- Source link:
The company is a privately owned engineering research biz that operated for more than 30 years. Its major focus was the development of SABRE (Synergetic Air Breathing Rocket Engine), said to combine the fuel efficiency of a jet engine with the power and high speed offered by rockets.
It had been hoped that SABRE would lead to a new generation of hypersonic spaceplanes, but on October 31, PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) was appointed as administrator after the company was unable to secure further funding.
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PwC told us Reaction Engines was primarily funded by grants and equity fundraising rounds, given its R&D focus. The company was pursuing opportunities to raise additional investment, however, these were unsuccessful and the directors had no option but to place it into administration.
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"It's with great sadness that a pioneering company with a 35-year history of spearheading aerospace innovation has unfortunately been unable to raise the funding required to continue operations," PwC partner and joint administrator Sarah O'Toole said in a statement to The Register .
"We know this is a deeply uncertain and unsettling time for the company's talented and dedicated employees. We are committed to providing them with all the necessary support at this time."
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The administrators will retain some Reaction Engines employees at its head office in Culham, Oxfordshire, to complete a number of existing orders and support winding down operations. However, this meant immediate redundancy for 173 out of the 208 staff.
SABRE is an exotic design, described as an air-breathing rocket engine. It allows an aircraft to take off from a runway as normal, then travel at velocities of about five times the speed of sound in the atmosphere. Switching over to liquid oxygen, a spaceplane using SABRE engines was envisioned as accelerating to Mach 25 to go beyond the atmosphere and into orbit.
The innovative precooler technology, one of the three core building blocks of SABRE, was [5]tested in 2019 . This is necessary because the air entering the engine would otherwise be hot enough to melt steel, thanks to the effects of friction and compression. Testing of the core engine components and preburner took place during 2020 and 2021.
[6]Reaction Engines' precooler tech demo chills 1,000°C air in less than 1/20th of a second
[7]Brit rocket boffins Reaction Engines notch up first supersonic precooler test
[8]Brit rocket wranglers get Reaction they wanted after rattling SABRE
[9]Revolutionary Brit-made SABRE hybrid rocket engine to burn in 2020
Visitors to the Reaction Engines website will find the home page redirects to PwC, but the rest of the site still appears to be up, including pages on the [10]SABRE engine technology .
According to the [11]Financial Times , Reaction Engines had warned investors earlier this year that it needed to raise additional money. It was in talks with shareholders over a £20 million ($25 million) cash injection for several weeks, while some of its strategic backers such as aerospace and defense giant BAE Systems and aero engine maker Rolls-Royce are said to have been reluctant to commit to more funding.
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The FT also noted that several Formula One racing teams could be hit by the demise of Reaction Engines as its precooler technology is used as part of the cooling system for the engines in their cars.
Questions are now likely to be raised regarding the intellectual property of Reaction Engines, which may be sold off if the company itself cannot be saved.
Furthermore, the UK Space Agency made a £3.9 million ($5 million) grant to the company in 2021 to support the development of the SABRE engine technology. We asked the agency why it did not step up to help save Reaction Engines, and will update if we get a response. ®
Updated at 15.41 UTC on Friday November 1, 2024, to add:
Following publication of this article, a spokesperson for UK government sent us a statement:
"While this is a commercial decision for the company, we understand this will be a concerning time for workers at Reaction Engines and their families, and support is available to those affected."
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[5] https://www.theregister.com/2019/10/22/reaction_engines_precooler_demo_mach_5/
[6] https://www.theregister.com/2019/10/22/reaction_engines_precooler_demo_mach_5/
[7] https://www.theregister.com/2019/04/08/brit_rocketeers_notch_up_first_supersonic_precooler_test/
[8] https://www.theregister.com/2019/03/14/reaction_engines/
[9] https://www.theregister.com/2016/07/13/sabre_hybrid_rocket_engine_ready_in_2020/
[10] https://reactionengines.co.uk/about/sabre/
[11] https://www.ft.com/content/c7c9e828-2a79-47b3-9a40-93215c39cf7b
[12] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_offbeat/science&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33ZyUJNnKFsntpXb-3spzPhwAAAMQ&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[13] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
Re: damn shame
Indeed. Whilst there's always a limit to what government should put up as risk capital, this seems to have some potential.
Meanwhile, government throw a staggering £100+ billion at the white elephant of HS2, £50bn on Hinkley Point C, £9bn+ for a short tunnel under the Thames, £6bn for an out of date armoured personnel carrier that doesn't even work, £1.4bn on the failed Watchkeeper drones, etc etc.
Re: damn shame
Don't forget £22bn on a new gas power plant where half the energy will be used to push the CO2 back into the ground (lets hope there are never any small earthquakes in the area).
Re: damn shame
Do you have a citation on those gas plant figures? They seem wildly out of proportion to the technology to me.
You can build a 1 GW gas plant for way less than 2 billion so 20 Billion on CC tech would quite frankly just price them straight out of the electricity market.
Re: damn shame
It's a package so I don't have an exact breakdown.
There will be a 850MW burner at Teesside and a hydrogen gas production plant (splitting natgas to make hydrogen and CO2) at Merseyside, the government is also going to be paying for the electricity used for the carbon capture, the total cost to the government will be £21.7Bn.
Private investors are also putting in another £8bn.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cy4301n3771o
https://www.constructionenquirer.com/2024/10/04/work-to-start-on-teesside-and-merseyside-carbon-capture-schemes/
https://www.edie.net/carbon-capture-uk-government-supports-two-clusters-in-industrial-heartlands-pledges-up-to-21-7bn/
Re: damn shame
Well, it's "Reaction Engines" fault for not having politician mates on the board.
Those other projects you mention are GREAT value for money..... for the politicians mates!
Re: damn shame
"£100+ billion at the white elephant of HS2, £50bn on Hinkley Point C, £9bn+ for a short tunnel under the Thames, £6bn for an out of date armoured personnel carrier that doesn't even work, £1.4bn on the failed Watchkeeper drones, etc etc."
These are capital projects, not investments in future technologies. They are totally different. The UK problem is the lack of long term investment strategies. The investment is short term, which means we are very good at piggy backing onto other blue sky R&D projects, since once committed, it is politically difficult to pull out, but domestic ones are always going to be in danger of falling to the latest whim of whichever government is in charge.
We need an investment fund that takes a long term view and is largely independent of treasury and other departmental in-fighting
Re: damn shame
The APC seems to over the worst of its issues from coverage I've seen.
Though it's possible that David Willey* is in the pay of the government and the manufacturers, he seems to be above board.
*https://tankmuseum.org/article/david-willey-retirement
Reluctant to commit to more funding
Why would they when they can now by the whole thing (or at least the tech and the IP) for bargain basement prices?
Re: Reluctant to commit to more funding
Although the only reason to buy it up is to make sure it dies. Why develop an expensive advance when you can harvest more beans by sticking with today's tech?
Second time around
In the mid 1980s there was a project with similar aims called HOTOL. It failed to come to fruition too.
Re: Second time around
HOTOL is the same group of engineers and scientists I believe.
I do wonder why there was a static firing of the SABRE engine prototype and then no apparent progress after that. I suspect the big problem is the difficulty of building the airframe, which has worse structural demands than a rocket. (Big bending moments along the length) This might use up a large chunk of the mass saved by needing to carry less liquid oxygen than a similarly fueled conventional rocket
Re: Second time around
Was the same Alan Bond - he started Reaction Engines to develop the tech after HOTOL collapsed. And it collapsed for exactly the same reason: BAe and R-R were both in there but canned any further investment. Eventually, they came back on board Reaction Engines, but now they're off again. What a bunch of yoyos!
Cheap
I guess the Americans will now get access to the technology for a song. They acquired the jet engine and hovercraft IP in much the same way.
Re: Cheap
"They acquired the jet engine and hovercraft IP in much the same way."
Well, there was this thing called a war, where the UK needed materials, men and equipment, and it seemed prudent to share information to get it
As for hovercraft, the principles were pretty clear, and in the long term turned out to be a white elephant
It is not so much as "giving" away technology, it is the lack of investment. The US has a much greater amount of private venture capital, while the UK depends on government hand outs which are the 1st to be chopped in economic hardship due to the lack of a long term strategic thing
As for hovercraft, the principles were pretty clear, and in the long term turned out to be a white elephant
Well not as far as Hovertravel are concerned.
I have made many trips across the Solent on their hovercraft and the technology seems to be in fine fettle, and it works. Unlike our much storied Cowes floating bridge that is out of service more often that it's in operation.
Not to mention the fabulous SRN-4. The youngsters of today won't ever get to ride one, but a marvellous piece of kit for fast Channel crossings in the days before fastcats or the tunnel.
And an SRN-4 coming up the beach at Calais was the most awesome thing I've ever seen. Perhaps CalMac should think about getting production restarted, since running regular boats appears to be beyond their meagre talents.
SpaceX may have killed this
The development of Falcon 9 and now Starship changes the economics of spaceflight completely. Maybe if this technology had come into use earlier, things might have been different.
They were always so bad at funding.
But when fully funded delivered everything they promised*
They had to fight for every penny they raised and stress-tested their ideas with a 100 strong panel of hypersonics experts from across the globe, unlike every other design.
Barring a massive recapitalisation programme the IP will now probably be sold off to some defence con-tractor (probably in the US) and used to rescue their attempt to duplicate Reaction's technology.
With the demise of Masten and XCOR already I htink they were the last of that generation of startups who wanted to change how space was done.
BTW Historical note. Frank Whittle's jet patent expired because they asked for £5 to renew it and it was a toss-up for him to either renew the patent or have his gas fire on. This made the jet engine effectively "open source" and left him with basically fu**all.
*Unlike say the X-30 programme that swallowed north of $10Bn until the early 90's and delivered nothing
Re: They were always so bad at funding.
Frank Whittle couldn't get his jet engine to work ... Rover (the car company) got it going then there was a "IP" swap where the government gave RR the jet engine to build and in return Rover got to build tank engines (the Meteor)
Re: They were always so bad at funding.
"Frank Whittle couldn't get his jet engine to work ..."
For exactly the same problem of visionless numpties who wouldn't invest in it. The only reason Rover got involved was because the Air Ministry started to (slightly) buck their ideas up because it was becoming obvious that the Germans were going to throw a war to which everybody was invited.
Lottery tonight is £81 million. for just £20 million the winner could basically take over SABRE and make a fortune. It's extremely close to success.
damn shame
great tech, and as usual we throw it way just for others to buy it up and make money.