Re: "I'll put my money on a Skylon."
skylon is all good as long as the SABRE engines fail in 2020, BAE Systems has some loose change hanging around, the british government handed over £120m, NASA and US Airforce joined the party
the public design of skylon is a joke, the real skylon with EM Drive should be more like http://www.fiddlersgreen.net/aircraft/Lockheed-F19/IMAGES/Lockheed-F-19-Stealth-Fighter-Title.jpg
so you can have nano tube force fields in toughened graphite hull you can fix with polymer from a tube, for small space debris not picked up on the topological radar system that is generating real time debris in the 3d star map navigation system
a easy engine would be frontier elite dangerous, its all "1:1", if you put your vector math in from control gyroscopes, and able to keep adding your scanned planets into the database until you need DNA data storage
submarine radars can easily pick up a gold fish 100 miles aways,
the design would also need to be curved for solar storms to pass by smoothly, flying along in a brick will kill you through radiation and debris having nowhere to go, and then fold down the rear fins when in space