Reaction Engines' hypersonic hopes stall as funding fizzles out Aerospace specialist Reaction Engines has gone into administration, potentially taking with it the dreams of hypersonic aircraft powered by its hybrid air-breathing rocket engine tech. The company is a privately owned engineering research biz that operated for more than 30 years. Its major focus was the development of SABRE ( …
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billion at the white elephant of HS2, £50bn on Hinkley Point C, £9bn+ for a short tunnel under the Thames, £6bn for an out of date armoured personnel carrier that doesn't even work, £1.4bn on the failed Watchkeeper drones, etc etc.
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/
From the BBC article
'Up to £21.7bn will subsidise three projects on Teesside and Merseyside to support the development of the clusters, including the infrastructure to transport and store carbon.
It will also support two transport and storage networks carrying captured carbon to deep geological storage in Liverpool Bay and the North Sea.'
It also indicates this money is committed over 25 years.
So it's 5 projects across at least 2 disparate locations over a 25 year timeframe.
Not really the picture you were painting ehh?
Well they can borrow, which is largely taxation delayed.
They get some income from their assets (well our collective assets, run by them).
But bottom line, the vast majority of Government expenditure comes from taxes in one guise or another, AFAIK.
[Written by a small-l liberal Grauniad reader]
Wrong way round.
Government expenditure is what creates money in the economy in the first place. Taxation is then used to take money out of the system, to avoid problems such as inflation.
Despite what politicians say/think, the economics of government are not the same as commercial/domestic economics.
"£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
Yes, the UK seems to be very poor at supporting startups, especially those with longer term prospect rather than short term. I suspect if REL had been American, they'd have been awash with money and probably more advanced by now. Now the IP will be sold to the highest bidder, who may or may not manage to do anything with it without the team behind it.
the UK seems to be very poor at supporting startups, especially those with longer term prospect rather than short term
That's not just the UK. I have a project which is global and has a rather decent ROI (according to independent evaluations), but because it doesn't contain buzzwords like AI, few are interested.
Frankly, as far as I can tell, EU investors act like banks: unless there is zero risk, medium size projects don't get any look in. Of course, if it's mega big especially banks get an immediate slice for their efforts and then they absolutely don't seem to care how daft the idea is.
US investors are more willing to take a punt at something - sadly, my project needs to exclude those explicitly for a whole raft of reasons, one of them political. Also because their offer is usually of the type "Great, we like it, we'll give you 1% and we control everything" (read: if it doesn't work because they screwed it up - think Musk/Twitter - your share will be tied up in lawsuits, and trust them to deliberately do that once it's ready for live).
So yes, the whole EU investment culture sucks. Badly. And you cannot trust US investment because they're waaaay too fond to leverage a working company to death (one of the reasons I'm worried about the current spate of US buyouts of Europe based security companies).
"I suspect if REL had been American, they'd have been awash with money and probably more advanced by now. "
In the US there's the Department of Energy, but any money they are awash with goes to people like Elon in the form of low interest loans. They do some small grants and should do more for projects that seem to have some merit even if it turns out plenty only show yet another way to not do something. That's what NASA was doing in the 1960's and it's nearly all published. If you want to know what the pros and cons are for a particular rocket propellant combination, chances are they have data for you. Nobody has to chase up that alley if it turns out to be blind. That said, sometimes it's only a blind alley for a given set of circumstances. A combination that outputs deadly byproducts isn't an issue on the moon. That it is easy to store and hypergolic (no ignition source needed), might fit the bill.
I suspect if REL had been American, they'd have been awash with money and probably more advanced by now.
I was under the impression that they'd always had standing offers from the US but didn't want to handcuff themselves to defence or risk falling under ITAR. Unfortunately that meant it crept along in the best traditions of British garden shed boffinry (albeit a very fancy garden shed as they go). Although they did end up with a test facility in the US when they got a prototype of the HTX pre-cooler on the stand, so there evidently ended up being something US-based.
As cool as their tech is, I'd long since abandoned any excitement that we might get a space plane or even a sub-orbital plane. The engine itself has always been a concept. They've been bashing along for three decades without producing a marketable product (although apparently they've done something with F1, and their cooling tech has other industrial applications)... somewhere along the line you need to be a bit commercially minded and pivot away from being a 30-year-old R&D startup. You can't live on grants alone.
And that probably played into investment availability - the first question an investor would have asked is "When are you going to market, and with what product? Am I bankrolling the tooling for something saleable, or another few years of R&D?".
None of which is to knock the top-grade boffinry and engineering going on there. But if you exist largely as an R&D outfit with limited commercial income streams then you'll always be vulnerable to running out of money.
"government throw a staggering £100+ billion at the white elephant"
For solid infrastructure, there always seems to be a return. Hardware can certainly be a money pit and HS2 is as bad as the HSR that California is way over-budget on and was never authorized to spend money on in the way it's going forward. The US is finally spending money on rail, but HSR isn't as grand as people think it will be. Brightline is betting that overnight service between Los Angeles and San Francisco traveling at 50mph is the way to go. Instead of spending 3 waking hours or more on getting to a high speed rail train and travel, one can leave from downtown and make the trip while sleeping. The prices for the Caledonian Sleeper are more money and it takes more time than some other trains on the same route but, for somebody on holiday or business they don't lose a day traveling. Grab the train in London, wake up in Scotland, do business, take the train home to London that evening to arrive in the AM. They even have showers at some of the station lounges.
I always figure that on any long trip, it's the whole day regardless of the mode of travel. If trains in the US could go 125mph much of the time, they could handle a lot of people's travel needs. The money spent on HSR could be used to install dedicated passenger tracks, create underpasses at level crossings, improve tracks for higher speeds and do more electrification. I'd rather see the upgrades to a larger part of the system than to have a couple of high speed lines between two endpoints I don't care to visit that won't be completed for another decade or more.
a staggering £100+ billion at the white elephant of HS2
You think that a 20-year capital infrastructure project spending 60% of the annual NHS budget (or 50% of the Social Welfare budget) over those 20 years is "staggering"? You should familiarise yourself with government spending.
Of course someone will then come along and say "Ah well, rail itself is fine but this project was out of control". Which is also untrue. In the year prior to Rishi cancelling Phase 2, HS2 Ltd hadn't touched their contingency budget. After some starting pains, the project was running relatively smoothly, on time and on budget - excepting the bits (like Euston) where government kept interfering. This of course is not a technical or engineering overrun. If you are having a house built and you decide that actually you're going to render the brick, and you want to rip out the just-fitted windows in favour of a different style, then that's not a "spiralling cost overrun". It's an approved scope change by a nightmare client who loves spending money.
The first real not-back-of-a-napkin budget for Phase 1 was ~£35-40Bn, with contingency for stuff that turned up in surveys and groundworks. With the extensive tunnelling and political meddling, that rose to £45-50Bn (approved scope changes), and actually, they were more or less on target for that.
People are now bandying around £60Bn, but that's the "amount HS2 Ltd will have spent when Phase 1 opens" which includes survey, design and land acquisition for Phase 2, as well as fixed-cost investments like railheads for quarries to get aggregate out. If you amortise those fixed costs over 100km of railway, then those fixed costs appear 3x higher (per km) than if you amortise them over 300km of track (the more you build the less it costs). The same is also true of the enormous apprenticeship and training schemes that HS2 have had to spin up (skills shortage). We're going to piss all those trained workers off into other industries after Phase 1 instead of using those expensive skills to build Phase 2a/b and then turn to improving the legacy railways once the ICE trains have been offloaded to HS2 (which is the entire point of HS2 - get the non-stop trains on HS2 and you can run 3-4x more local/regional services, start reopening mothballed stations, etc).
So you want to spend, what is by your own admission, 3% of the NHS budget? That is indeed staggering. The NHS (and social care) is budget-limited, not needs-limited. If the NHS had more money, it could save more lives, or make those lives more bearable, it really is that simple. The current price for a QALY (quality-adjusted-life-year) is about £25k. £5bn annual spend buys you 200,000 quality adjusted life years. For most major treatments you will be saving in chunks of 10-20 years or so, so between 10,000-20,000 lives. HS2 would serve about 50000 passengers per day (one way), 25000 per day (return). So, very similar numbers to lives saved.
So you think that saving an hour on your train trip each way, every day, is worth the same as somebody’s life and death? Of course, in the real world, nobody makes the train trip every day, so more people get the benefits are more spread out, but equally less benefit per person.
This is why large infrastructure projects, relative to social and health service, are not just immoral but really *cruel*. Imagine having to stand in front of somebody to tell them their life is worth less than a middle-class train trip, and therefore they won’t be getting their operation. Except, you don’t have to imagine it, doctors have to do exactly that, a thousand times a day, up and down the country. Social services have to stand in front of families at the end of their tether, and tell them we can’t afford twenty minutes a day of care assistant time at home, so now your father must go into a home. Large infrastructure is *cruel*.
I see your point, and agree that health should be a priority, but you're baking in the assumption that it has to be either or - which may well be true in the UK right now, but is not the case everywhere - see Japan and wider Europe.
I'd rather hammer the point that we fundamentally fail at building things in general, so should fix that, then we can have both infrastructure and healthcare.
70 years ago, we built the world's first commercial nuclear power plant. That we are now paying France gazillions to build another one massively late and over-budget is...a mind-boggling timeline to have ended up in.
Likewise, we invented the steam engine and the world's first commercial railways - this stuff should be easy for us.
but you're baking in the assumption that it has to be either or - which may well be true in the UK right now, but is not the case everywhere - see Japan and wider Europe.
They are. But the UK is in a much better situation than Europe right now because we have our own currency and our own central bank. We have far more control over our ability to set interest rates, issue gilts (borrowing), etc than Germany, France or Greece does. The fact we're not on the Euro also means that a Greek-style debt crisis *cannot* happen in the UK. Not just "it's very unlikely because our economy is more industrialised, etc, etc". It's literally1 impossible. If you ever hear a pundit on TV talking about the risk of us going the way of Greece, you can immediately discount their opinion (which you probably already did when they were introduced as being from Tufton Street2).
To quote John Maynard Keynes "Anything we can actually do, we can afford".
1. A correct and accurate use of "literally" btw. I mean literally. A Greek-style run on state debt can't happen in the UK, USA, Japan, Canada or anywhere that they borrow in their own currency (Weimar and Zimbabwe's hyperinflation was caused because their debt was denominated in other currencies and they flooded the ForEx markets with Marks/Zimbabwean dollars trying to buy USD/Sterling/Francs to service the debt).
2. Any of the TaxPayers' Alliance, Civitas, the Adam Smith Institute, Leave Means Leave, the Global Warming Policy Foundation, BrexitCentral, the Centre for Policy Studies or the Institute of Economic Affairs.
You've highlighted the salient point there though "the worlds first commercial railways".
They were produced by investors deciding to throw money into railways, because they could make a profit doing so. The government bought the railways after WW2 from willing sellers who were looking at the growth of motorways and busses and the number of railway tickets going down faster than the Titanic. They'd have been bankrupt if the taxpayer hadn't have very generously bought them for much more than they were worth, along with basically every other industry.
If there was any real money to be made today then private industry would have provided it to make a profit. That this does not happen indicates that there is no money in it because the prospectus for infrastructure is only good for conning a politician into spending our tax money on it, and it doesn't survive any contact with a commercial due diligence exercise aimed at not wasting money.
British business is actually pretty good at building things; Rolls Royce for instance is the second largest builder of jet engines in the world. The British government is not good at building things, because they can't go bust when they fuck things up and so lack the corrective mechanism for punishing severe incompetence that exists within the business world.
From your own link in the first paragraph:-
Rolls-Royce is the world's second-largest maker of aircraft engines[3] (after CFM International)[4] and has major businesses in the marine propulsion and energy sectors.
And yes as per the second paragraph, the 4th largest commercial aircraft engine manufacturer if you exclude military aircraft jet engines. (although why you'd decide to not count the most powerful and difficult to make engines i'm not sure...)
The NHS (and social care) is budget-limited, not needs-limited. If the NHS had more money, it could save more lives, or make those lives more bearable, it really is that simple.
1. Capital investment is not funded the same way that annual spending is. I gave that example merely to give a sense of the order of magnitude. And I bet if I said "The NHS spends £160Bn/yr, and over the next 20years we're going to spend £160Bn on capital improvements" then you'd be nodding along sagely and saying "ah yes, a 4-5% rate of capital investment is very healthy. We must have new wards and the latest diagnostic gear". Perhaps another comparison would be to say "The NHS annual budget lasts a year. HS2 will last a century or more, during which time the NHS will have spent ~£16Tn (2024 money). A couple of billion per year on new infrastructure is actually inconsequential to the UKGov's >£1Tn annual budget.
2. Unfortunately I've had to visit hospitals more times this year than in the past decade (not for myself, merely the ones I love). Parking is terrible because everyone tries to drive. And that's because public transport is abysmal. Quite how a pensioner who can't drive any more is supposed to get there is beyond me (answer: they call 999, and clog up the ambulance service). Or people with disabilities, or who simply don't have access to a car for economic reasons, or who can't afford to learn and take their test. Poor public transport directly inhibits access to education, employment and healthcare. And you have the gall to talk about "cruel"?! Goodness.
3. Road transport makes up 25% of UK carbon emissions (not transport emissions. Total carbon emissions - energy, industry, the lot) and results in a disproportionate number of hospital admissions from collisions (trauma), increased respiratory illness and other factors. It would be a very fine thing if urban areas in North Staffordshire or the East Midlands were given their railways back to use for local and regional services, reducing car dependency, congestion when the M1 or M6 is closed and general hazards to the general public.
If you want to improve access to healthcare, the two big things you do are (1) improve funding for local authority social care (to get the bed-blockers off wards and into assisted living until they can go home) and (2) improve public transport (which both reduces demand on the NHS and improves patient access).
When the bores say "why don't we spend the money on fixing our local lines", I point them to the stretch of WCML through Stoke on Trent with 3 closed stations and Stone (<1 train per hour). You can refurb those stations, but you won't be able to run a train to them until the ICE trains are socked off to a separate line. They weren't closed for lack of demand, but because you can't schedule services to there without having an express train running into the back of you. It'd be like having a bus pick up passengers on the side of the motorway. And nor will you be able to schedule a train to the proposed new station at Meecebrook (a big garden-village home-building scheme in Staffordshire). Lack of transport infrastructure is directly inhibiting home-building programmes. It's never been about speed (except in Boris' head). It's all about segregation of service patterns.
This is why large infrastructure projects, relative to social and health service, are not just immoral but really *cruel*.
This is an insane take.
1. HS2 is not "large" relative to £600Bn/yr in health and social welfare.
2. WE CAN DO BOTH. Different pots of money. Go read some Keynes, or Krugman, or Kelton. Do you know what's cruel? Telling people they're not urgent enough to warrant an ambulance (there are lots of urgent but not "bleeding out or cardiac arrest" scenarios) but - oh sorry - there are no trains and the buses stopped at 9pm. Maybe you can wait 8 hours for the next one? That's cruel. And it harms people. And it's not just access to healthcare. It means low-income shift workers are walking home at midnight along the former bus route. Or teenage girls stuck in bus shelters waiting for a connection that may never come.
3. Don't come at me about cruelty. I see cruelty every day in people who can't accept a job offer because it's on a business park that's only accessible by car. Or who just struggle to participate in civic life because they're trapped on an estate with no transport. And that feeds into healthcare, but it also feeds into literally every aspect of life. That's cruel. Really cruel. And it's easily fixable - but we won't, because we're too pent up about the budget deficit (which economists agree is inconsequential) instead of the deficits in jobs/working conditions/mental health (which are very much not).
There's room for some savings in the health system. I just came across an article where a woman was critical that she wasn't getting the fertility services she wanted. Ya know, there are kids that need a good home. To demand that the government (taxpayers) make sure you can conceive and have a healthy child at any cost is rather selfish, but once those services have been provided, there's a sense of entitlement. From there, people want government to pay for childcare as well. I've known a few couples where if the mother stayed home for at least the first few years, they would have been better off than her going back to work and spending that whole paycheck in childcare and the costs of working (wardrobe, commuting, professional licenses, etc) or such a large percentage that it would be better to not work. It's almost as if personal finance isn't taught in school.........
We have roads. They exist. We have railways. They exist. If we were pegged to the transport infrastructure we had in 1970, then it is inconvenient, no more. I lived in 1970, and it was absolutely fine. Sure, if we had arbitrary money a la Ferris Buellers Day Off, do build more railways. But since we don’t, save lives, care for people, educate people.
HS2 is, as the name suggests, a project whose entire spend is dominated by the requirement High Speed. The railway needs to be super-straight, which causes some bizarre and expensive land-buying and construction decisions. The same railway, carrying the same number of people can be build for less than a fifth of the price if it weren’t High Speed. The entire cost is basically some middle-class tossers spending public money to get a quicker commute, and getting support from train drivers.
This is not a coincidence. Large infrastructure projects *always* do this. The pot of money is so large that it becomes worth spending rivers of cash *lobbying* to get your greedy little hands on it. That’s what this is about. There are no lobby groups to get government to employ minimum wage care workers, because there’s nothing to skim from them.
We have roads. They exist. We have railways. They exist. If we were pegged to the transport infrastructure we had in 1970, then it is inconvenient, no more. I lived in 1970, and it was absolutely fine.
* With a much smaller population.
* 50 years ago, urban planning hadn't destroyed our walkable mixed neighbourhoods in favour of isolated housing and business estates where everyone gets in the car to drive between them at 8am and 5pm, and you need to drive off-estate just to get a pint of milk.
* Bully for you. Plenty didn't find it "absolutely fine". In particular low income workers, the disabled and 16-year-old apprentices (who at least had more comprehensive buses back then).
HS2 is, as the name suggests, a project whose entire spend is dominated by the requirement High Speed.
Lol no it isn't. No planning document for HS2 has ever made that claim. You don't believe every bit of political marketing bumpf do you? Just because Westminster politicos can't take their eyes off the shiny doesn't change the underlying engineering considerations.
The railway needs to be super-straight, which causes some bizarre and expensive land-buying and construction decisions.
High Speed running does limit your alignments and mean you clip some more expensive land in places. It also means you buy less acreage than a wiggly (longer) railway would need to. The land acquisition all washes out in the end. Moreover, building a straight alignment leaves room for upgrades in future decades instead of painting yourself into a corner.
It's a shame people have forgotten the wisdom of Joseph Bazalgette:
Basing his calculations on the most densely populated areas of the metropolis (and allowing each citizen a generous intake of food), he came up with a number and doubled it, saying: “We’re only going to do this once and there’s always the unforeseen.” This foresight meant that a century later the system still had the capacity to accommodate the mushrooming of London’s population created by the advent of the mid 1950’s residential tower block ‘building boom’. Says the ICE: “If Bazalgette had used the smaller pipe diameter, the city’s sewers would have overflowed in the 1960s. Instead, they’ve coped into the 21st century.”
The same railway, carrying the same number of people can be build for less than a fifth of the price if it weren’t High Speed.
Citation required. Trump/Muskian levels of optimism here. The marginal cost of 120mph vs. 200mph running is inconsequential compared with basic cost of surveying, CPO, land-buying, planning process and passing supporting legislation. The Arup claim that their stripped back version of HS2 Phase 2 could be 40% cheaper has been laughed out the room. Where are you finding 80%?!? Laughable.
And why does it have to be 120mph? That’s High Speed Rail. It’s roughly *straight* anyway. London to Liverpool is only 200 miles. You *really* have to get there 1h50 instead of 2h30 @ 80mph? Wow. Once the train has to stop a few times, at 5 minutes per stop, the difference almost disappears.
You don’t need this. 80mph will do, for 90% of the economic benefit. You just like playing with trains, and there is no reason why the rest of the country should pay with their lives to finance your hobby.
Except outside of London routes you will never see this speeds. Typical speeds for Birmingham / Manchester IE the cancelled leg of HS2 are <50mph. High Speed Rail? I'd like to see Full Speed Rail.
Why is this? Because railway signalling works like the pipeline inside a microprocessor. If you want to increase "Throughput" IE the number instructions (trains) you can start you add a stage.
Or another PoV is you lengthen the time it takes for a specific instruction to go end-to-end.
And signalling techs aim for the lowest number of stages to begin with. Slower trains --> More signals --> more trains starting. Result. All passengers can manage 75mph. A lot can do 100+ and at least one class on Brum/Manch can do 140+ (if they had the right signalling).
Since when has it been seen as a good thing that a trains is competitive with a car at 30mph? I mean WTF?
Part of the problem is that actual throughput is set by the difference between the top speed of the fastest and slowest trains on the line and freight train speed limits haven't been re-assessed since the mid 60's. Since them all UK trains have all-car braking. All cars have wheels on suspension bogies rather that hard mounted to frame. These features are optional on US freights, which lead to the Palestine derailment on a straight flat track. The historical rule of thumb in the UK has been freight == 2/3 passenger top speed. Recent, but incomplete work suggests freight == passenger speed in mph -10 is viable and will be safe. Consider what that would do to throughput.
Part of this is that 1/2 the 10 000 miles of the UK rail network was built by 1846 when trains didn't go up hills very well and "Earth moving" meant 10 000 navies (actually more like sons-of-navies given when the canals were built) with wheel barrows. The UK therefore has the "Snakiest" rail lines in Europe (the world?). Since it's very difficult to see out the back (or front) of a train this is not obvious to the passengers. Train maps are no more accurate than underground maps.
It is also estimated that electrifying less than 100 single track Km could mean 70+% of all UK freight (which today carries 1 in 4 containers but could carry a lot more) could end a lot of diesel-electric miles and a lot of HGV (a freight can carry 70 containers) trips. Unfortunately "failing" Grayling saw the fallout of the botched WCML electrification (Hint:Ramping up the skills to electrify an average of 9Km/yr over the last 16 years to 2000Km+ is never likely to end well) and decreed electric/diesel was the way to go.
Something I didn't know fully appreciate is that the UK is 1/2 the size of France. France needs those sorts of speeds, like Sweden does. The UK could have done just as well at significantly lower speed (but Boris wouldn't have been so happy :-( )
Great British Railways (which is going ahead) is a once-in-a-generation shot at unifying timetabling and revenue collection across the whole country which might finally operate to deliver a globally optimal network instead of a optimal-for-this-region approach, which as people who've studied Operations Research know, never results in a globally optimal solution. They might also finally integrate the data management of the speed restrictions, as it's quite likely some of them have not been reviewed for decades.
Bon voyage and cheeri-bye.
"So you think that saving an hour on your train trip each way, every day, is worth the same as somebody’s life and death? Of course, in the real world, nobody makes the train trip every day, so more people get the benefits are more spread out, but equally less benefit per person."
Ah, so your "research" basically involves working out what the acronym stands for.
Talk to anyone whose job it is to force more trains up the congested West Coast Mainline, and you'd understand the point of HS2 - capacity. We need more rail capacity, and this is the best way to provide it. You can't just tinker with existing lines, they are at the limit, and would be costly to add to in a way that makes HS2 look like pocket money.
That's not to say that the project hasn't been badly managed. Having politicians constantly want to review it (read: fiddle and change the basic parameters) doesn't help. Nor has a refusal to stand up to Chiltern NIMBYs so most of it will run in tunnels so as not to offend their sensibilities. If we'd got the French or Chinese to build the thing, it would be done by now...
This makes zero sense. If you want a capacity system, build one, but HS2 is the very opposite of a capacity system. It is designed to *minimise* the capacity-add for any given amount of infrastructure, for some rather obvious reasons: if you build a High Speed link from London to Manchester, two things happen. Firstly, the train only stops very infrequently. So you are designing a system to carry *one* person 200 miles. Whereas the same length of track, with the same number of trains, carries ten people for 20 miles each. If you want to even stop once per 20 miles, that’s ten stops which makes the difference between 300kph and 100kph entirely moot. This is a service which is designed from bottom-up to carry a tiny number of people long distances. For comparison, *buses* carry nearly 3x as many passengers (total) as trains in the U.K. Its only because the pressure-groups have lobbied government to measure in passenger-miles instead of total passengers that trains look even barely relevant.
But far, far worse, you are encouraging monstrously inefficient living patterns. It’s the same maths that makes air-travel super-efficient “per passenger mile”. But people travel 2000 mile air-journeys which they wouldn’t dream of taking a train journey one-quarter that. On the one hand, we hear about “fifteen minute cities”.
On the other hand, if you make it feasible to travel a return trip from Leeds to London for a one-day meeting, rather than telco, people absolutely will. In absolute *droves*. You know why? Because they’ll set up in-person meetings with people in USA, Germany etc, and meet in bloody Heathrow Airport. Seriously. I used to know an accountant who commuted via train from Devon to Central London. Every single, day, return. Because he could, he liked his farmhouse in Devon, and the company paid for him to do so, First Class no less, and he was a 5am kind of guy. I knew another, corporate lawyer, who commuted from *rural Wales* to Central London, twice a week. Commuting daily Birmingham to London, or even Manchester to London will happen because housing is so damn expensive in London that it actually makes financial sense. But none of this is genuine economic activity, it’s *subsidised fuckwittage* for train enthusiasts.
Stop subsidising the wealthy. Stop corporate welfare.
Another cost comparison. It’s generally agreed (cross-party) that the U.K. is short of about 1.2 million social housing homes. The reason this doesn’t happen is that Local Councils can’t afford it, nothing else. Actual build costs would be around £250k each (ignoring land cost). For just three times the cost of HS2, we could solve *the entire housing crisis for the whole of the U.K.*, rather than just save 50000 middle-class people an hour on their commute time.
Large infrastructure is *cruel*.
the U.K. is short of about 1.2 million social housing homes.
Indeed. There are also 600,000 empty homes right now, of which 250k are long-term vacant (>6months). I've reported two across the road to the council (both years empty)... but their Empty Homes officer has moved on and they haven't re-filled the post yet. So whilst housebuilding is important. We could knock 20-30% off that number quite quickly if we funded council action to prod, cajole and CPO extant empty homes. And it'd cost a lot less than £300Bn!
Actual build costs would be around £250k each (ignoring land cost). For just three times the cost of HS2, we could solve *the entire housing crisis for the whole of the U.K.*, rather than just save 50000 middle-class people an hour on their commute time.
So why don't they fund it then? Borrowing for infrastructure or housing is cheap and easy for government. We can actually do both (up to the resource limit of the economy where we start creating demand-pull inflation. But we're nowhere near that. And our "modest" unemployment figures are masking huge amounts of underemployment, and people stuck in low-end or casual labour who would prefer a better full-time job, which would open up those casual jobs for students and others who are currently reporting themselves as wanting to work but unable to get a job, but not technically turning up in unemployment stats).
Building a million houses without building corresponding public transport infrastructure for those settlements would be mad.
rather than just save 50000 middle-class people an hour on their commute time.
Don't talk nonsense. We both know that the entire point of HS2 is to segregate non-stop ICE traffic from the legacy lines, meaning you can reopen stations like Polesworth, Barlaston, Norton Bridge and Wedgwood (and others in the East Mids), creating massively improved local rail routes in some of the UK's most deprived cities.
You could achieve the same effect with a new 100mph line. But obviously these are the 2020s, not 1820s and the standard base speed for ICE trains is 200mph. The cost is in design, planning, land purchase and consultation - the final fit and finish is inconsequential. You can go slower and switch from fancy slab track to cheaper ballast track - but that lower build cost comes with massively increased lifetime maintenance costs and inhibits future upgrades. More than 7tph and the TCO goes in favour of slab track (as IT Pros, we all understand TCO right?). People get so fixated on the headline speed bcause we don't have 200mph in the UK yet, but it's simply not the point - and never has been (and this is not me being revisionist. It's all in the 2009-10 business case studies, if people could be bothered to read them).
You can also do the station work necessary to support reopening lines like those to Leek, Newport and other significant towns (>15,000 people). You could open those lines today but again, they couldn't get a train into places like Stoke because there's no platform availability... but damn me for trying to make people's lives better.
"the U.K. is short of about 1.2 million social housing homes."
There's no way to build their way out of that. In order to do it means cheaply made breeze-block structures that leak like a sieve making them expensive to live in. Los Angeles is/was spending $600,000 per housing unit to find space for homeless people. If it is true that many of those really need institutional help, it would be far cheaper to build some institutions. I believe the cost was bloated due to the amount of "consulting" and the cost of "studies".
"The first real not-back-of-a-napkin budget for Phase 1 was ~£35-40Bn, with contingency for stuff that turned up in surveys and groundworks. With the extensive tunnelling and political meddling, that rose to £45-50Bn (approved scope changes), and actually, they were more or less on target for that."
My question would be if rail service would be better off by spending that money on a larger scope of upgrades rather than one line. It would certainly benefit more people since the funding is coming out of everybody's taxes and if they don't see a direct benefit, they aren't likely to support it. I'm in the US and one of the things that frustrates me is the lack of secure parking at most trains stations. I'd love to do my part, but I'm not going to leave my car in an open car park sat in a sketchy part of town for a couple of days if overnight parking is even allowed. A taxi from my house to the nearest station with long distance trains is very expensive (120 miles round trip). Some of the schedules don't make imposing on a friend a nice thing to do and if the schedule slips, as is normal, it can be even worse.
My question would be if rail service would be better off by spending that money on a larger scope of upgrades rather than one line.
Short answer: No.
HS2 provides massive capacity relief for the West Coast Mainline, the Midland Mainline and the East Coast Mainline.
Running mixed traffic is inherently inefficient. It is extremely common for two or three local trains to all come in 25minutes and then you have to wait 35minutes for the next one, it's because they send off all the slow trains in a block, then wait ages for them to get a headstart down the line before they dispatch the fast trains in a block (and then more slow trains behind). This creates big gaps where no trains are running - a massive waste of perfectly good railway.
If you segregate the services onto an express line and a local line you can dispatch trains every few minutes if you want. You gain capacity for 3-4 local trains for every fast train you shift onto the fast line. It's a huge multiplier. So HS2 is not merely about the new capacity it adds to the network - it allows the legacy lines to improve their utilisation. Now yes, you can do a bit with passing loops and stations, but you're always fighting the maths that fast trains will run into the back of slow trains unless you leave big headways (or put in so many passing loops that you might as well... build a new line for the fast trains).
Literally noone who has called for them to "spend it on local services" has been able to propose a way of tripling local services and unblocking the bottlenecks on the three existing mainlines for £100Bn. It would cost way more than that to add new express tracks to those lines.
HS2 also removes a national bottleneck in Birmingham New Street. By offloading long-distance services like Brum-Glasgow to Curzon Street, you unblock huge gobs of platform capacity at New Street, which will allow them to run many more trains down to Plymouth, Swansea and Aberystwyth, as well as increasing local cross-city services.
It would certainly benefit more people since the funding is coming out of everybody's taxes and if they don't see a direct benefit, they aren't likely to support it.
Everyone in England and Wales benefit from HS2 (even though it doesn't go to Wales). This has not been well communicated however because politicians have tiny brains and can't get past the "Ooooh, shiny, 200mph".
I'm in the US and one of the things that frustrates me is the lack of secure parking at most trains stations.
The UK has enjoyed periodic upgrades at many existing stations and parking is not an issue in most places. The problem the UK has is simply that the WCML is full, and in places where you could notionally (re)open a branch line, there's no platform capacity at the central stations to accept more trains. The fastest and cheapest way to improve capacity for all users is segregation of services (in the same way you don't see local buses setting people down on the side of a 70mph freeway, and in fact, this is the entire point of the inter-states network - to segregate through-traffic and stop it clogging up city centres).
"Literally noone who has called for them to "spend it on local services" has been able to propose a way of tripling local services and unblocking the bottlenecks on the three existing mainlines for £100Bn. "
Is everybody moving out of London (or any large city) due to crime, overcrowding, high costs, etc, and finding a better place to live with good train links? The issue changes from being the need to triple capacity, to making the need go away. I'm not saying that some sleepy village needs to be razed and high rise office blocks be built, but there should be some push for companies to rethink where they have offices. With modern communications, if accounts payable are in a separate office located in a small city, it doesn't make much difference that they aren't in the same building as marketing, corporate and customer service. Where do we stop with transportation links? 20 lane motorways and 6 HSR terminals in a big city inhaling and exhaling 2mn people each day?
Of course it would. There’s not even any serious debate about that. The economic payback of simple upgrades, maintenance, dualling up some lines where necessary is 5x HS2.
Or if you simply buy some new comfy buses, on the same routes, rather than deliberately run it down as a “rail replacement service”, you can approach 10x payback.
But, there’s no nameplates or “jobs in my constituency”. And most importantly, you can buy buses one at a time, and so there’s no £100bn pork barrel to feed the pigs from.
The economic payback of simple upgrades, maintenance, dualling up some lines where necessary is 5x HS2.
Citation required. I see this a lot. Nobody saying "just improve the legacy lines" can ever point to a credible scheme for unblocking Birmingham New Street, or reopening mothballed stations without building a new bypass line and new stations to segregate the non-stop services.
It is true that the economic return from unlocking local services is far higher than the economic benefit from high-speed intercity services. But you need that bypass line to unlock the local services.
The project is financed by EDF Energy and China General Nuclear Power Group (CGN)
Which tells part of the story, the part where we choose not to finance the building of it, and instead the government has agreed a CFD with a strike price of £89.50/MWh. Current generation costs averaged at £68/MWh over the last year. The French and the Chinese are paying for it now, we're paying for it later.
Klarna for power stations effectively
Development of SABRE and the Skylon plane it was intended to power started about 30 years ago. These were just new iterations of a string of even older conceptual designs that you can trace back to the USA in the 1950's. It was and still is a great concept but not great technology. It was just too hard to complete a working engine. Sometimes throwing it away is the right strategy.
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
It is, yes. And when that fizzled and folded, the engineers who believed this had wider applications had to be very careful how they described their work to make sure the government couldn't scream "You stole this from us!"
That said, there were HTX tests (the pre-cooler part of SABRE), but the engine has always only been theoretical (not enough funding to develop it further).
Now, where is that John fella (with a gold badge) who was telling me elsewhere that I was misinformed and that Reaction Engines was doing great?! I know several people at RE (and ex-RE people), so this news is unwelcome but not surprising. As the article points out, their main income was research grants and research funding, and their involvement in F1 was an effort to derive *some* income off their hard work.
I'm gutted for the folks all being laid off a month before Christmas, because that's a bad time to have to start looking for work. I hope they got at least at least a decent redundancy package to get through Christmas and the first month or three of 2025. :-(
Right here since you asked.
had to be very careful how they described their work to make sure the government couldn't scream "You stole this from us!"
Not quite. HMG had classified the patent. The correct term for revealing the details of it would have been Treason Fortunately the technology was 1st Generation and much better approaches were possible.
"who was telling me elsewhere that I was misinformed and that Reaction Engines was doing great?"
Not quite again. I don't think I've ever used the term "Doing great" about Reaction. I've certainly used the phase "High risk/High cost/High reward" business, with the potential to be the Boeing, or Airbus, of space launch in the 21st century. I hoped their F1 and EV work would finally give them some independent income that they could make progress toward their goals.
Please don't put words in my mouth, or on my posts. It's inaccurate and impolite.
"I know several people at RE (and ex-RE people), "
Oh really?
I was getting emails from someone who claimed they'd shared an office with Alan Bond. Their insight turned out to be quite unreliable. Perhaps your friends were more accurate?
TBH I've always wanted to get my hands on their investor pitch. With my Marketing hat on I'd love to run my eye over their approach to potential investors.
"I hope they got at least at least a decent redundancy package "
Well, perhaps you can ask your friends about that?
Call me cynical but you seem to trying to create the impression of someone who knows more about this subject than you actually do. Not sure why. If you're not perhaps you should reconsider your approach. If you are you perhaps you should try harder.
Tata.
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!
I worked for a while in the early 90s with a group at the Rutherford Lab which was mainly developing tanks for HOTOL. It was a dead end even then: a ludicrously expensive way to move a very small number of people a long way very quickly. Bearing in mind that Concorde was a financial flop, it's hard to see how something an order of magnitude more expensive would ever have worked commercially, let alone technically.
"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
It's worth remembering that Cockerell's innovation was annular jet confinement of the air cushion. An interesting but as it turned out unworkable idea which was replaced by skirts or jupes after the SRN-1.
> 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
Well, the agreement was that the UK would share with the US and the US would then share back any new designs after they had used their larger manufacturing base to help get the kinks out and demonstrate where the next phase of improvements could be made.
Of course, the US reneged[1] on that and so the UK had - just naively handed the IP over.
[1] cue some prat claiming that the US came in and saved all of Europe, so they needn't bother with any other pesky details.
"Well, the agreement was that the UK would share with the US and the US would then share back any new designs after they had used their larger manufacturing base to help get the kinks out and demonstrate where the next phase of improvements could be made."
There was also the distinct possibility that the Germans invaded so "exporting" any useful R&D to the US was seen as a future investment and hopefully destroying all records etc here do the Germans couldn't get it. No one really knew what the future held at that point and there was a lot of hedging of bets.
> and in the long term turned out to be a white elephant
So, any technology that had been superseded, no matter how well it fulfilled its role before a new method came along, is now a "white elephant"? You do know that is not the meaning of the phrase?
Unless you are also claiming that the steam locomotive was a white elephant? Or the horse-drawn carriage? The piston engined dedicated fighter aircraft was clearly a whiter shade of pale, as it's heyday was arguably shorter than the 32 years of the cross-channel hovercraft service.
Ok, there is hyperbole in this response, but for pity's sake, can we at least learn to use phrases like "white elephant" even vaguely correctly? Yo don't learn that something is a white elephant after decades of commercial service, you know it is one because it never even managed to make it into regular, self-sustaining, service!
What are they teaching in school today?
(Yank here) I wonder if this is a difference in US vs. UK usage?
On this side of the pond, a 'white elephant' is something that may be impressive in many ways, but has either no or a negative commercial value. "That 1950s-vintage computer is a nifty thing, but it takes up an entire room and isn't especially useful now, and nobody'll take it except as a museum donation."
The fact that the aged computer in question may have been quite useful for a decade or so is irrelevant. _Now_, it's a white elephant.
Ok, there is hyperbole in this response
If I've told you once, I've told you a thousand times : avoid hyperbole.
"So, any technology that had been superseded, no matter how well it fulfilled its role before a new method came along, is now a "white elephant"? You do know that is not the meaning of the phrase?"
The phrase is used for any technology that does not fulfill the potential that was expounded by the original inventor or developer.
While hovercraft technology is still widely used in niche applications such as search and rescue, its other applications such as mass transport were never really fully realized and now have largely been taken over by other technologies such as high speed catamarans, which carry more, at lower cost, and are far quieter, and can handle rough weather far better.
The promise was hovercrafts would supersede everything from ships to trains and cars, but it never became the mass transportation nirvana that was promised, and a lot of money invested in it, never showed a large profit to the companies that invested in it. Cool technology in its way, but sometimes people like to over look the challenges because it is new, rather than asking the right questions (e.g Ekranoplan)
Basically the hovercraft is the Segway of mass transportation
> The promise was hovercrafts would supersede everything from ships to trains and cars
Hmm, we clearly remember different different promises being made. Maybe we just paid attention to different media reporting. I recall the hovercraft being described as useful for - well, situations where (given the available alternatives at the time) its costly-but-unique abilities could be used. It was always pointed out to be costly - and noisy. Using one to explore along African rivers had something of the stunt about it, but that is true of every exploration trip made by the mighty non-native people's - and the craft did go where boats and cars had failed to, so it fulfilled its function.
> its other applications such as mass transport were never really fully realized and now have largely been taken over by other technologies such as high speed catamarans, which carry more, at lower cost, and are far quieter, and can handle rough weather far better
The Cross-Channel hovercraft was commercially run for 32 years and was retired because of the Channel Tunnel, not the catamaran. That is a quite reasonable existence and most definitely not the Mark of a white elephant.
> Basically the hovercraft is the Segway of mass transportation
When was the Segway ever anything functionally useful? That company did make an impressive balancing wheelchair, which did serve a real purpose and improve lives (at a heck of a price and bugger all longevity). Strange comparison.
There's much to be said about 'jet engine IP'... and who got what how and when.
There's a great book (a print-only tome) on the development of engines during the war. It also includes Whittle and others working on turbo- and super-charging technology, jets and the different approaches to them. Whittle made the centrifugal compressor popular, while most modern engines use the axial compressor because it's more straightforward.
If anything, the UK government can be accused of giving jet technology to the SOVIETS, given they approved the sale of a batch of R-R Nene engines to Moscow, which were promptly dismantled to be studied and copied.
Wikipedia said design work on the Avon started in 1945.
Axial flow turbines are a)More efficient b)More difficult to design that centrifugal compressors.
Power Jets was a small company so Whittle focussed on a design he and his team could actually succeed in designing (and maybe building).
Case in point. When he talked to furnace makers the heat release he was looking for in the space available was 10x what they were used to.
Likewise the turbine blade temperatures and stresses were pushing the 1938 SoA hard. Supposedly the Air Ministry had his design analysed by AA Griffiths* who said that it would never work as cast iron would be too heavy. This is very odd as Whittle had no plans to use cast iron for turbine blades.
Keep in mind till this point the SoA application of turbines to vehicles was steam turbines powering ships. The notion of a flight weight gas turbine that could power an aircraft instead was very bold. Gas turbines existed only in stationary form outside Germany (and of course the German work was highly secret).
*Griffiths seems to have opposed Whittle on a persistent basis. I've never really understood why. He did good theoretical work on fracture mechanics but seems to have known nothing about building a practical jet engine.
We will see. I bet that we *never* see this technology in a launcher…..because it doesn’t solve any useful engineering problem.
The problem it tries to solve, is reducing the amount of oxidiser you have to carry. But as SpaceX has shown, fuel and ox *just isn’t that expensive*. It is a solution that optimises for the wrong thing. The “rocket equation” has been mesmerising and misleading for over half a century. It’s an issue on the back of the napkin; but in a real engineering project it’s just not where the money goes. For the love of god, stop optimising for specific impulse, its *bad engineering*.
An Ariane 6 burns/carries roughly twice* the fuel-load of modern widebody jet. That is not why an Ariane 6 launch is expensive, compared to a transatlantic flight: It’s expensive when you throw away “smart mass” that you’ve spent tens of millions building electronics and inspecting. The amount of kerosene or whatever, plus a metal tube, is a “don’t care” in the grand scheme of things. An Ariane 6, as an object, is cheaper to buy than an Airbus A330. It just is.
Plus, the Reaction Engines thing only works while in the lower atmosphere, for only a bunch of *seconds*. Sure, it could save “some” oxidiser - but not that much in the grand scheme of things. And you still need to develop a “normal” rocket engine for when you are out of the lower atmosphere, so really what the hell are you doing?
Sabre is an exciting (and near impossible) technical challenge. I’m thrilled and amazed they managed that precooler at all, it’s staggeringly “cool”. But “c’est gloire, mais ce n’est pas la guerre”.
"But as SpaceX has shown, fuel and ox *just isn’t that expensive*."
True, but SpaceX only proved that relatively recently, not 30 odd years ago when REL started out. REL had a concept of at least some form of single stage to orbit with full reusabilty long before Musk got into the space game. I wonder where REL would be now if a monied benefactor as rich as Musk had decided REL was "the answer"? Yes, physics and chemistry will put limits on it, but then things can be interesting on the bleeding edge :-)
That’s half-true. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that Reaction Engines went titsup relatively shortly after Falcon9 has been a success.
But in a very real sense, I also think it was totally predictable two decades ago. HOTOL/Reaction Engines is a symptom of an even deeper malaise: the purpose (for most) in the space industry is to Get Funding. To get funding, you need a Single Big Idea; it’s just the way funding agencies think. You need “an intellectual property”, or an individual box with an elevator pitch (“a star tracker”, “an optical terminal”). The SABRE pre-cooler fits exactly into this framework.
The underlying problem is that Falcon9 (and most real products) do not fit this view of the world. There are, no real “key IP technologies” in Falcon9 or Starship. They are all contingent solutions to immediate problems, and often temporary. “Chopstick Landing! We need a Chopstick Landing Capability!” No, they just decided to take the legs off, for weight and complexity saving. And if that hadn’t worked, they’d have put legs back on. The whole development is “build metal tubes containing fuel, using as bog-basic methods as possible to keep costs sane and cycle-time low; launch, watch it explode and figure out why; repeat”. There’s no just Plan that you can fund.
Falcon9 *could have been built* in 2000. The only technologies it really depends on, compared to 1969, is the easy and cheap availability of miniaturised electronics for sensors and control units. And, for high-accuracy parts, quick CNC tooling available from “down the road” to achieve fast design cycle-time. That’s it.
"Falcon9 *could have been built* in 2000. "
As our left-pondian friends might say, coulda, woulda, shoulda. The point is they didn't. Nor did anyone else. Some may have tried and never got near even starting a prototype. There were previous Government attempts, but they got shelved for whatever reason. So REL looked at a different option. Until it's done, no one really knows for sure which method will succeed. Just look at the earliest "mobile engines", either locomotives or automobiles. There were vastly different designs and power sources tried out until one succeeded over the others. And even then, the "failed" methods have, in some cases, come back with new technology, eg early EVs never took off, now, EVs are relatively popular.
On the other hand, I do agree with you in what and how SpaceX are doing. It's a sorta like Henry Ford adapting known technology to make an efficient production line to make cheaper cars. Nothing especially new or revolutionary other than than being the first to think of what we now look back on as "obvious". I'm just saying it's not actually always so obvious to everyone and can take vision and possibly some significant money to implement. Sometimes it's just "time" for something. After all, the ancient Greeks had some pretty good understanding of Hydraulics and even steam power, but never really went anywhere with either.
"The point is they didn't. Nor did anyone else."
There's also the problem of people that aren't in the know that say the same thing. SpaceX isn't anywhere near the first company to land a rocket. They aren't even the first to think of landing one on a barge. In the 1960's, NASA was landing the Surveyor rockets on the moon (the Rangers just augered in taking photos the whole time to send back in real time). It doesn't matter that they didn't take off again and come home, that wasn't the plan. I see plenty of people that think Elon invented re-landing and reusing rockets. I was in the business and know better but it doesn't take much of a search to find previous examples.
Henry Ford had to put it in reverse at one point as he built a Model T line rather than a production line. A bit too optimized. When the Model A came along, they started refining how the assembly line worked so the didn't invest too much in something that will need too many changes in the future for no real advantage. I've seen production lines that are highly optimized for one thing, but the plan was to make a c-ton of those things and if they scrapped out the machinery a couple of years later, they were still ahead over something more generic that could be used for something else.
I’m not having a go at REL for *trying*, although I would have capitulated after the first two decades…...
But it seems clear that we don’t really need it *now*. I can see that it looks like I’m negative on “Big Idea” developments, but I’m not, and indeed my own business is built on two. But the vast majority of innovative products even in high-tech, are about engineering and project management competency rather than light-bulb.
"But as SpaceX has shown, fuel and ox *just isn’t that expensive*."
They also show that throwing away 33 big rocket engines at a time is no big deal either.
There's money expensive and there's mass expensive. If you can save mass by picking up your oxidizer as you go, that can work for certain things if there's a way to do it at an acceptable money cost.
With an Airbus A330, you won't put a satellite into orbit. Even a 747 isn't a profitable choice (as Sir Richard Branson discovered). Horses and courses. Will a Starship be economic? I doubt it unless you need to launch a heavy mass of satellites that can be dispensed like Pez candy. No development is in process for a disposable upper stage that can shed a fairing to launch a sat.
“They also show that throwing away 33 big rocket engines at a time is no big deal either.”
Starship is intended to be fully reusable…..all they’re saying at the moment is that their development costs are affordable (for them), not that it’s affordable running cost.
“There's money expensive and there's mass expensive.” No, there’s only money expensive. That was the lesson that the industry should have learned, but many still have not.
“Will a Starship be economic?” Ah, well that’s the trillion dollar question. IMHO, the answer is, if the only thing you need it for, is the payloads we know today, dominated by Starlink, then it’s probably marginal. Even with constellation of 15000 Starlink, it’s a decent small business by global telco standards, but no more than that. 100 launches a year of something that’s worth $20M each? You can’t factor it at $100M because otherwise Starlink is losing money. Well, $2bn a year *revenue* from SpaceX is very much not going to set the world on fire. $5bn a year target revenue from Starlink makes it a niche global telco, although reasonably profitable.
You don’t build Starship because you want a more cost-effective Starlink business. You build it because you have a grandiose belief in a trillion-dollar off world economy - which I do not, at least this century. Space mining is bogus, and so is “zero G manufacturing”. I thank Tesla shareholders for their generosity in ultimately financing a dream.
Even 42k satellites / $15bn still puts in the small- medium-size telco class. Vodafone is $40bn, and that’s global #9. I’m not sneering, but even with this disruption satcomms simply cannot be big enough to be the next Verizon, let alone the next Tesla or NVidia. Starship is the sort of *functional* thing you’d build for a $10bn return, when you are sure the market exists. It looks brave verging on foolhardy when you don’t, although the gamble may pay off. To be a sensible investment, you need a multi-hundred-billion payoff for the risk, which satcomms cannot be, and I don’t see where else thats coming from.
"IMHO, the answer is, if the only thing you need it for, is the payloads we know today, "
Until a satellite builder has said they are planning a bigger and heavier platform, building a launcher to match with something like that is not a good idea. Even the biggest satellite busses there are today don't have have many sales. Some haven't launched in years. It's also important to not be tied to a single launch provider since any hiccups would mean a monstrously expensive satellite would have to sit in very expensive storage until it could be launched instead of being able to switch to another launch company.
"They also show that throwing away 33 big rocket engines at a time is no big deal either."
Here we go again....
At what point did SpaceX say that they will throwing away 33 or 35 or 36 engines when Starship is in production ?
Will starship be economic ? Don't know, their plan is cost per kg is magnitude less then anything out there today and that includes F9. They certainly have an internal customer already that will use the capacity.
It is also planned that Starship will also have capability that no other launcher will have including SLS so there may be the opportunity to charge a premium for those launches. Who knows, lets wait they have something that works and start getting customers.
"There's money expensive and there's mass expensive. If you can save mass by picking up your oxidizer as you go, that can work for certain things if there's a way to do it at an acceptable money cost."
The mass they would saving getting oxidiser from atmosphere would be in the first stage, where mass is not as big of a factor as second stage. And how much could they save vs the extra mass/cost of system needed to collect the oxidiser ? I haven't seen the figures but it doesn't seem worthwhile, you can watch Tim Dodd's video on why they don't use planes for launching rockets as a starting point.
"No development is in process for a disposable upper stage that can shed a fairing to launch a sat."
Why would SpaceX be developing that when they goal is 100% usability ?
"At what point did SpaceX say that they will throwing away 33 or 35 or 36 engines when Starship is in production ?"
They have to get to production and in the mean time, their iterative design process has gone through nearly 200 qualified engines. They still have engines going out during flight where they need to pin down the reason for.
Any mass is a factor. Just because a second/third stage is out of the atmosphere doesn't change that. Dim Todd is a Larper pretending to understand rocket engineering. I did it professionally for several years and as a mad hobbyist for a few decades with a level 3 cert.
I have to wonder why they haven't built a scaled version of Starship they could launch with a Falcon to test thermal protection designs with and run that concurrently with things they are doing in Texas. To iterate a design, you have to be able to examine the failures. I've gone through plenty where no amount of instrumentation would have been adequate, but Mk1 eyeballs did the job.
> "I have to wonder why they haven't built a scaled version of Starship they could launch with a Falcon to test thermal protection designs with and run that concurrently with things they are doing in Texas. To iterate a design, you have to be able to examine the failures. I've gone through plenty where no amount of instrumentation would have been adequate, but Mk1 eyeballs did the job."
Because they've worked out that getting things up is relatively easy, it's the getting them back down intact that is difficult. Scaled models have issues because of the scaling, so if you can lob something up at full size, why not do that? It's also parallel development of booster, ship and production methods.
Yes, if you can get your eyes on something afterwards that helps a lot (and they're very much working on that), but they've also got some pretty impressive camera tech on board relaying live HD video which gives an awful lot of information alongside the plethora of sensors.
You also learn a lot more from failures than successes, so the iterative "test, boom, next" approach they're taking is valid.
"They have to get to production and in the mean time, their iterative design process has gone through nearly 200 qualified engines. They still have engines going out during flight where they need to pin down the reason for."
They haven't actually flow any V3 engines yet and it will still be a while. Until then they are still prototyping the engines and manufacturing process so 'throwing away' engines that aren't production isn't costing time. Based on serial numbers they have made around 500 v2 engines of which they still have 200 unused so plenty more to use plus whatever they got back from IFT-5 though I would imagine they aren't going to reuse those.
"I have to wonder why they haven't built a scaled version of Starship they could launch with a Falcon to test thermal protection designs "
Do you know the cost of effort of that ? Why distract yourself when they have been flight testing TPS since SN8 back at the end of 2020.
You may have some technical knowledge but you seem very lacking in business knowledge.
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.
"but best experienced in a dead flat calm,"
Yes, something many of the CalMac ferries[*] rarely see, especially through Winter :-)
* using your reply to help illustrate to Mr Badger why CalMac are better sticking to (broken) boats rather than hovercraft which would be out of service far more often due to wave heights.
In the case of the eastern solent crossing from Portsmouth to the Isle of Wight, during storms, as the wind speed gets progressively higher, the first service to get cancelled will be the Hovercraft service from Southsea, followed by the passeger service from Portsmouth Harbour. With the last service to stop being the car ferry.
Both were covered in Geek's Guide...
https://www.theregister.com/2017/09/15/geeks_guide_hovercraft_museum/
This could have had a completely different use case though. High speed long distance passenger flights between major city airports, e.g. Sydney - LAX in 1 hour instead of 14. While Starship could do that it doesn't look like they're going to, and a spaceplane has the advantage of being able to fly out to sea before noisily breaking the sound barrier, and can use existing long runways. And due to the much shorter flight time and considerable unpowered glide, fuel costs could have been lower than for a conventional aeroplane too, making tickets cheaper.
HOTOL and its descendants would only carry a tiny number of passengers. Using less fuel that an A380 is nothing to boast about when your carrying 1/100 sad many people.
After all, Concorde got to New York in half the time of a 747, so tickets on it should half been half the price of 747 ones, right?
"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."
How?
SpaceX has to raise large chunks of money a couple of times a year to support their operations. Starship is still a non-starter. It doesn't work and Elon has already stated that it can't lift the promised 100t to LEO. Version 2 will be 100t to LEO, but they aren't prototyping that yet. At the same time, it's mainly SpaceX with their Starlink product that needs the capability. The Falcon 9 is spending 2/3rds of its time lifting Starlink. It's now a good rocket, but not crazy great. F9H works, but doesn't fly very often. F9H is optimized for a large mass but not a really big payload volume. The last flight required expending all three cores to get Europa Clipper on it's way to Jupiter.
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
"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.
Not so, my Internet-scraping friend. May I refer you to "Vikings at Waterloo" by Davis S. Brooks and published by the Rolls-Royce Heritage Trust.
Power Jets was deemed a research outfit and Whittle was forced to subcontract the actual metal-bashing. The initial contractor was British Thomson-Houston (BTH). When relations turned sour, it was Whittle who approached Rover through personal contact. However because Whittle was a serving RAF officer, his patent belonged to the Ministry and this gave them complete control. At first they refused, but eventually did an about-face and let the manufacturing contract for Whittle's next prototype directly to Rover, behind Whittle's back after he had laid plans to make it himself. Rover in turn subcontracted the difficult bits - the fuel system and combustion chamber - to Lucas.
In the end the jet engine was not Rover's core business and they were only too glad to do a swap with R-R for a more familiar internal combustion engine.
However the dream did not die and over the 20 years or so after the war they made the world's first gas turbine powered car and a couple of follow-ups.
Certainly don't believe that. Whittle's designs were horrendously overcomplicated, with the air actually flowing forward through the combustion cans in a misguided bid to keep the engine as short as possible. Didn't take Rover long to come up with a slightly longer straight-through design they could actually manufacture. I think R-R inherited both at different stages of development.
Centrifugal compressor turbines were better for the materials and metallurgy available at the time. Compared to axial compressors they were easier to make and run, having a longer service life and more reliable than the axial ones that Ohain was developing. Nothing to do with Rover.
"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."
Masten's assets were bought by Astrobotic. Dave Masten is still a member of the team in Mojave, CA. The projects there have been mainly landers for which they've had lots of success doing. I was hoping Xcor would have been able to complete their craft before they had to shut down. I was up for a job there at one time and I suspect that I didn't get a start due to them seeing the writing on the wall. I still talk with a few people that were there from time to time.
Don't forget John Carmack's Armadillo Aerospace. They and Masten were the prize winners for the Northrup Grumman Lunar Lander Challenge in 2008/9. There's cool video on YT. I remember seeing footage of Armadillo doing take offs and landings in the car park of an industrial estate.
Also sadly gone.
I liked Carnack* and saw several of his presentations. His blog was a fascinating account of the minutiae of making rocket engineering work. IIRC they used a monolithic Linux core running an app that could function in different modes, both as autopilot and to validate the flight data, flying a virtual lander based on the input data for the flight to confirm it would do what it was programmed to do, like a video game with real hardware.
In person he made a memorable impression, when I discovered what I thought was a plot device in Ally McBeal was a real thing. Seemed like a nice guy. Not so sure about his more recent work though.
*I'm quite fond of Armadillos as well
If it really <were> "extremely close to success", I very much doubt if the major investors in the project would have chosen now to withdraw their support and not come up with the extra funding to bail the company out. The major investors were of course Rolls Royce and BAe - clearly they did not see the technology as being close enough to success, or possibly no longer see it as having a viable future.
Remember discovering the SABRE engine concept through his novel of the same name, it's a very interesting idea. Ironically in the novel much of the tech that went in to the SABRE (They called the spaceplane SABRE as well as the engines) was acquired from companies that went bust trying to develop a prototype or had decided it was a white elephant and had published their work openly.
It simply took them too long to get anything visceral working. There were models and mock-ups but nothing tangible that could be put to use. They dealt in dreams, not products.
Rotating detonation engines seem much more promising and are already being put into practice and will soon find their way into missiles, which is what this is all about. Or did anyone really believe Reaction Engines would produce a hypersonic passenger plane?
To be honest I'm somewhat surprised they lasted this long.
"Or did anyone really believe Reaction Engines would produce a hypersonic passenger plane?"
I'm not sure about their original intentions when they formed REL, but certainly in recent years (at least the last decade), they've said they were developing an engine, not a full flight ready airframe. They stated they didn't have the skills for that and I'm pretty sure there was NEVER a plan for a hypersonic passenger plane. Maybe concepts for one (amongst other concepts) where they would supply engines, but certainly never one they would build.
“A company for carrying on an undertaking of great advantage, but nobody to know what it is.”
And now that the technology has been tested, in 2019, 2020, and 2021, as reported in the article, reality has eclipsed the hopes of the investors, and the company is wound up.
Someone will get a bargain with the IP, maybe they will be able to do something with it.*
Should that someone were to turn out to be a PRC Corporation with clear connections to the CCP and PLA the shemozzle might become rather more interesting (as in those proverbial times.:)
* There might be an "interesting" hypersonic weapon angle with a single use SABRE engine.
You could ask the F1 teams that use it. Do you think they'd use if it didn't work?
The technology works fine, both the frost control technology and the mfg technology that produces, then joins the 20Km of 0.1mm diameter tubing needed to make it work.
Reaction had both an engine design and an outline of a vehicle design (Skylon) that they used to stress test the engine design. Their target was deliver 15tonnes to low earth orbit as a fully commercial venture. IE operators buy a completely automated vehicle* (there baseline was 200 orbital launches) that could self-ferry the payload to Kourou on LH2, then reload LH2, take on LO2 and fly to orbit. They had materials selections for both the TPS and structure that could do the job and (a key subsystem) brakes that could cope with a fully loaded launch abort on the runway.
If ESA took it on then it could be called "Ariane 7" and if the French buy the IP (about the only way it would be accepted) it might yet happen.
The problem is that they were also completely up front in saying this vehicle would take whoever built it about £15Bn to build it. About the cost of 5 silicon chip production lines, or about 1/4 of HS2. It is very challenging to raise that kind of money in the UK, which (believe it or not) has the most advanced VC market in Europe. IMHO letting BAE buy in for £20m (valuing the company at about £100m) was a mistake. IF they'd bought in at £200m they'd have been much more invested and the overall company would have been valued at £1Bn, a very substantial "startup."
*Once the design had proven it was reliable they had a 30 person passenger module, including human pilots. BTW Skylon was designed to be statically stable, unlike the Shuttle, so a human pilot could really fly it from takeoff to orbit and from M23 back to the ground, as opposed to the Shuttle's computer-fails-you-all-die system.
Yes, it is a sad state of affairs which I bemoan.
In saying that, Hypersonic Flight is merely yesterdays Jet Boots and Fusion.
I was promised all as a wee lad, many, many deacdes ago. Every decade there was a new story about 'Hypersonic this n ' that... complete with 'artists conceptions'....zzzz
So, sad as it is, it isn't as sad as me not having my Jet Boots - 'cos I was promised them in the Brave New Dawn, which is rapidly becoming the Tired Old Sunset.
Next...
"Starship is still a non-starter. It doesn't work"
IFT-5 did meet its testing targets ?
"Version 2 will be 100t to LEO, but they aren't prototyping that yet."
Block 2 is already built and cryo testing was last week, on track for IFT-7 early in 2025 potentially.
"The Falcon 9 is spending 2/3rds of its time lifting Starlink. It's now a good rocket, but not crazy great."
Aside from having one the best launch records and only one of 2 western launchers to be human rated, one of which is no longer going to be produced.
"F9H works, but doesn't fly very often. "
Indeed, because there aren't many payloads that need its capability. Its been mentioned before, it take a decade or more to to design payloads. Who would design a payload that couldn't be launched ? And that is also a problem for Starship, there aren't too many payloads that will need its capability. However it is supposed to launch F9 payloads at a fraction of the cost, we will if that actually happens.
"The last flight required expending all three cores to get Europa Clipper on it's way to Jupiter."
The last flight launched a payload that was designed for SLS, a launcher that cost 10x as much. Europa Clipper is also the 2nd latest mass to leave LEO after Apollo missions.
Several comments here attribute the failure of Reaction Engines Ltd. (REL) to a lack of HMG support. This is not what happened. HMG announced a £60 million grant to REL in 2013, whuch was to build and test a SABRE engine, and to encourage further investment. However, in 2015 a boardroom coup replaced technocrats with venture capitalists who had no knowledge of, or interest in, spaceflight. Although REL had a cooporation agreement with European industry ready to sign in 2015 the chairman vetoed it, believing that he could make billions by selling the technology to the USA. In the end REL was destroyed by hubris and greed, NOT a lack of HMG support!
At least now SABRE can join the storied ranks of aircraft like TSR2 and the Avro Arrow, which will forever be wonderful ideas, killed off just before they succeeded by perfidious and short-sighted government/investors/industry. And because they never had to exist in reality, they will always be the best thing since sliced bread, and on the verge of reaching 120% of all their stated design goals, on time and under budget!
Darn this boring reality!
And the UK Govt or some other European fund could not scrap few tens of mil for keeping afloat this groundbreaking technology research team? Which has already put ultra efficient heat exchangers into applications. Absurd.
Some US dept has decided already technology is strategic for military applications I am sure. And some US fund will gobble it up for cheap. But so should have had the consortium involved in the Tempest program.
<......."And some US fund will gobble it up for cheap.".....>
I doubt it - they have been trying to make this idea work for over 30 years, and clearly BAe don't think further development has a future, otherwise they would have continued to fund it.
There comes a time when you have to accept that it isn't going to happen and cut your losses.
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