Why Europe’s astronauts are learning Chinese.

The secrets of the US military spaceplane.The reuseable spaceplane launched inside a rocket.The Synergetic Air Breathing Rocket Engine (Sabre) is a hydrogen-powered engine that can propel a spaceplane like Skylon from zero to hypersonic speeds by using the oxygen in the Earth's atmosphere, and then when travelling fast enough, blast the vehicle into space using an on-board supply of oxygen like a conventional rocket. Its aim was to create Hotol's successor, the ultra-sleek, single-stage-to-orbit spaceplane Skylon, together with the engine that would power it. Reaction Engines is a British aerospace company founded by engineers Alan Bond, Richard Varvill and John Scott in 1989 after the cancellation of the British spaceplane project Hotol. Tests that were backed by the US government's secretive Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa). The facility at the Colorado Air and Space Port was purpose-built by Reaction Engines to run 'hot tests' of the technology that the company's revolutionary new rocket engine depends on. One answer to this question can be found at a test site 2,900km (1,800 miles) away from Kitty Hawk at the foot of the Rocky Mountains in Colorado. So why has the spaceplane – apart from Nasa's now-retired Space Shuttle – not yet taken off? The European Space Agency's similar autonomous Space Rider flying laboratory is expected to blast off in 2023 and India's own mini spaceplane later this decade.īut we still rely on rockets to blast astronauts into space, bringing them back to Earth in capsules suspended by parachute. In September 2020, China appears to have launched its own Boeing-like reusable space plane and may have as many as seven crewed and non-crewed spaceplane projects in development. The dream of the graceful spaceplane is still live, even if the ambition for their actual role may have shrunk.

Only the small, unmanned Boeing remains in service. In Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), a large spaceplane maneuvers effortlessly in time with Strauss's Blue Danube waltz to dock with a huge spinning space station.ĭespite many plans, prototypes, and experimental flights since, only two spaceplanes have ever entered service, the Space Shuttle and the top-secret Boeing X-37B.

Less than 70 years later, we had a thoroughly realistic example of what that might look like. The dream of flying all the way into space began when the first aircraft flew at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, in 1903.

Spaceplan prototype