Space travel will only be affordable for the elite you might say, well this new super-plane could apparently make low-cost space travel possible and it could be available sooner than you think…
With Richard Branson and co at Virgin struggling to develop space tourism for all these oligarchs and other people with more money than sense, the UK government has now pumped in £60m into a next-generation engine that can travel anywhere on the earth in four hours of less and make space travel more affordable for us ‘norms’.
The new ‘Sabre’ engine is still at least a decade away, but a full ground-based engine test is planned for 2020, with the team behind its development at Reaction Engines- based in Oxfordshire – building the Skylon super-plane.
Aerospace giant BAE is excited about the prospect and has already snapped up 20 per cent of Reaction for just over £20m to progress the project further.
This new engine, will double the technical limits of a jet engine and allow the aircraft to travel up to five times the speed of sound before switching to a rocket engine to reach orbit-so it’s pretty quick.
Sod going to space, just get me to Sydney in four hours and I’d be happy…
