Stuff Matters: Genius, Risk and the Secret of Capitalism. Harry Bingham
guidance systems for nuclear missiles. No. As I saw it, my readers deserved a proper rocket scientist, the sort who wants to take tourists into space, revolutionize rocket design, mess around with ridiculously dangerous fuels and plant colonies on Mars.
Reaction Engines ticks those boxes, and then some. To get cheap access to space, you need single-stage, reusable rockets. As it stands today, in the absence of such a technology, the cheapest available commercial launch costs around $100 million. A single launch of the NASA space shuttle costs about $700 million. Because booking cargo space on board a rocket is so expensive, a satellite becomes incredibly expensive too, because a vast amount of quality assurance has to be done to make sure that the satellite will function precisely as intended for a very long time. If the cost of access to space were to fall, then the amount of over-engineering and quality assurance involved in making satellites would also fall. The cost of communications would come down. Atmospheric monitoring would become cheaper and simpler. And so on. In a small but real way, the world would become a better place.
The trouble is that there’s simply no way to load enough fuel on a rocket to carry it into space and bring it back again. The fuel load becomes so heavy that you have to add more fuel to lift the extra fuel and before you know it the maths has spiralled off into infinity and the job just can’t be done.
The fuels involved, however, aren’t hydrocarbons – even jet fuel doesn’t pack enough of an energy punch. Rockets burn a mixture of hydrogen and oxygen. Since there’s already a whole lot of oxygen in the atmosphere, if you can find a way to capture some of it on the way up, then you need to carry a whole lot less to start with, and all of a sudden the maths becomes doable again. What you need, in fact, is a hybrid, an engine that’s half ‘air-breather’ and half rocket,* able to switch from one mode to the other as soon as the outer atmosphere is reached. Reaction Engines reckons it has just such a hybrid and it’s busy with the detailed work of going from concept through to manufacture-ready design. The engine is called the SABRE and would power a launch vehicle to be known as SKYLON.
While I was beginning to think that the company’s technologies might just about be strong enough for me to present to my reader, I still had doubts. Cheap satellites and colonies on Mars are all well and good, but was this company ever going to produce a genuinely iconic, era-defining product? Did its stuff look cool, as well as sound cool? Did it have other interesting projects or was this just a one-idea outfit?
Well, there too and no matter how high I was determined to set the bar, the company made the grade. Its air-breathing rocket is, in principle, capable of travelling through the atmosphere at hypersonic speeds – that is, at speeds of around Mach 5.5, so fast that Concorde would seem like very third rate transport. A hypersonic aircraft capable of carrying 300 passengers should be able to fly from London to Sydney in around two and a half hours, except that, as the company literature glumly admits, it might be better to set aside four hours to allow for air traffic control delays. If such an aircraft were chased by an F-22 fighter plane with afterburners on full (an impossibility, in fact, since an F-22 doesn’t have the range), you’d have time to pass through customs, ride a cab to your hotel, take a shower, order dinner, dispose of your soup, and be halfway through your kangaroo à l’australienne before the fighter plane was even radioing ahead for a landing slot.
As for looks – well, Reaction Engines’ rockets look like an 8-year-old boy’s idea of the coolest thing in the entire world. Imagine a very elongated cigar shape, pointed at both ends and with just enough wing to nudge you into noticing that there are hardly any wings there at all, and you have the design exactly. If the jumbo jet was the transport icon of the twentieth century, then Reaction Engines might just be developing the transport icon for this one.
As for the fertility of its ideas, it was hard to fault the company there either. Not being an engineer myself, I don’t understand half the things the company does, but I do know that when the ‘Current Projects’ tab on a company’s website lists eight major projects, the last but one of which is entitled simply ‘Orbital Base Station’, then I know I’ve found a winner. I made some phone calls, and before too long I was on my way to see the company’s managing director and chief technologist.
His name was Bond, Alan Bond.
If I was expecting something out of an old Sean Connery movie, then the business park where the company had its head-quarters was hardly disappointing. Showing my identity documents at the gate, I drove slowly through a campus where the signs all said things like ‘FCS Forensics’, ‘ABSL Space Products’, or ‘Culham Electromagnetics and Lightning’. One large and windowless building was adorned with a sign that simply read ‘nuclear fusion’. All that was needed to complete a Connery-era stage set was a mag-lev monorail, some tanks full of bubbling liquid and lots of bad guys in easily identifiable bad-guy suits.
Alas – or fortunately, depending on taste – these thoughts were quickly dispelled. Alan Bond came bounding to meet me at the door to his offices. ‘What’s the time? Eleven. Ha! You’re just in time for cake.’ In a scene that was more Wallace and Gromit than Doctor No, the company’s finest bundled into a conference room to raid the tea trolley and carry away piles of stodgy baked goods. Over tea and (in Bond’s case) a squidgy appley-creamy thing, he started to tell me about his career and his company.
His interest in space began at the age of about 4, when he first encountered the ‘Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star’ nursery rhyme. He asked his father – a fitter – what stars were and his father took him outside to introduce him to the concept of outer space. The boy was entranced. At age 8, he came across the exploits of Dan Dare, ‘Pilot of the Future’. A lifetime’s obsession was born.
He studied maths, joined the aerospace company Rolls Royce and began to learn what real engineering was all about. Still in love with the idea of space, he managed to get himself assigned to the most interesting projects going. He worked on the RZ2 rocket engine that powered Blue Streak nuclear missiles and (later) satellite launchers. He became section leader of the cryogenic performance office, which meant messing around with the complex thermodynamics of burning liquid hydrogen with liquid oxygen.
He was good enough at what he did that for four years he found himself working for a British weapons programme, which he can’t say much about even now and couldn’t talk about at all at the time. He also worked with the British Interplanetary Society to design a plausible unmanned starship. Since the design involved helium-based nuclear fusion, and since a shortage of helium on earth was to be overcome by sending robot factories to Jupiter to extract the stuff from the Jovian atmosphere, and since those factories were to operate for twenty years while suspended from hot air balloons, then it’s probably not unfair to suggest that the notion of ‘plausible’ in interstellar transport design is still somewhat elastic.
To his relief, his stint at the weapons programme ended. Bond messed around in the world of nuclear fusion for a while, then became closely involved with a British Aerospace/Rolls Royce programme to design an air-breathing, single-stage, reusable satellite launch vehicle, named HOTOL. It was the project which Bond had been dreaming about. In the inevitable way of such things, the engineers worked hard, drew up designs, came across problems…and the government and the project’s two commercial backers got cold feet and withdrew. It was Bond’s moment of truth, the equivalent for him of those lumps of glittering stone brought to Knox D’Arcy by a trio of wild-eyed miners.
He had two choices. He could do what he’d spent his life doing up to this point, working with some of the world’s most technologically advanced companies and agencies, doing the things that they wanted him to do. Or he could do what he had wanted to do ever since he’d first encountered Dan Dare: he could strike out on his own to design and build a spaceship. Reason and good sense pointed in one direction. Passion and conviction pointed in the other. There was no contest. Bond had money in the bank from having sold a crucial patent to Rolls Royce. Using that cash, and in the company of two rocket-scientist colleagues, Bond set up Reaction Engines.
For a while the company lived hand to mouth, selling bits of consultancy, living off capital, but at the same time managing to revise the old HOTOL design in a number of crucial respects. The