The British Space Agency has revealed its plans for a sort of "spaceplane" capable of flying at breakneck speed, a plane of the future that could cross the skies by 2030.
SABER
All thanks to a new supersonic aircraft that makes use of a super engine, the SABER (Synergetic Air-Breathing Rocket Engine), currently developed by the scientists of Reaction Engines. Thanks to hydrogen as fuel and a mixture of air and oxygen as oxidizer, SABER is capable of taking an airplane to a speed of Mach 5.4 (6.300 km per hour) for commercial flights. That's nearly five times the speed of sound, and would make it the fastest jet in the world. We've seen planes of the future, but this one beats them all.
UK Space Agency CEO Graham Turnock has announced that the UK should work more closely with Australia on the world's first “space bridge”. An agreement to send supersonic planes that transport passengers from one continent to another in just 4 hours, and on the specific London-New York route in the record time of 60 minutes. In any weather under 7 saber hours it would be the fastest plane in the world. I dare not think about the London Italy route.
And that's not all: in suborbital flight mode it is a super-fast plane: Mach 25, the equivalent of 30.500 km per hour.
Not only: the propulsion system and the cutting of flight times make the Saber aircraft also more economical and environmentally friendly than current flights.
Bollenti spiriti
One of the major challenges of hypersonic flight is to ensure the system the ability to manage super heat: a temperature that can melt the engine in a short time at that speed.
SABER cools the air with thin tubes of freezing helium, and uses the captured heat to power the engine.
“Our cooler captures the air surrounding the aircraft at 1000 degrees Celsius, and cools it down to zero degrees in a twentieth of a second,” says Shaun Driscoll by Reaction Engines.
The history of superfast planes is wide and articulated: it has been a long time since a new plane (in that case it was also the first) was going at 15km / h.
There have been many attempts to reach the current 11.700km per hour, reached by the X-43 hydrogen plane which is currently the fastest plane in the world. The aircraft of the future will surpass these results, being able to count on an energy range that has never been so wide. Civil or military, they will be ultrasonic aircraft (at least) like the Overture plane, the Boom Sonic prototype that raised 100 million dollars in funding in January 2019, or sometimes suborbital like the SpaceX aircraft being developed by Elon Musk. Mass supersonic flight is only just beginning.
From words to deeds
Among the supersonic aircraft of the future, the copper Saber project is undoubtedly the most relevant, light years ahead of any airliner. It seems like a frontier project, the new supersonic aircraft is already at a fairly advanced stage. Last April, the Oxfordshire-based company announced successful testing of the cooling system. It is the core of all technology, and nothing could be done without it.
The conditions currently exceeded are from Mach 3.3. It is 50% faster than the Concorde, the supersonic jet which flew from London to New York in three and a half hours and was decommissioned in 2003 after a catastrophic accident that killed 109 passengers.
Mach 3.3 is also the speed of the Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird, the fastest jet ever made.
Reaction Engines will continue to test the separate engine components and the system that will form the core of the aircraft on each future aircraft. The tests are numerous and will focus from next year until 2026.
The first commercial flights of the world's fastest airliner are expected in the early 2030s onwards, although the price is not yet known. The UK Government has already invested 73 million dollars in the SABER engine, with three separate orders for the construction of the future aircraft by Rolls Royce, BAE Systems and Boeing.
