NASA Web App Lets You Control Space & Time in 3D

NASA Web App Lets You Control Space & Time in 3D

  12:54:00 AM    Science Lover

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NASA has released its “Eyes on the Solar System” 3D environment, a free web browser-based application that lets you navigate a 3D version of the solar system. The app uses video game technology to let you control your point of view from anywhere in our solar system, speeding up time so you can see the motion of the planets, their satellites and NASA spacecraft.

We tried the Eyes on the Solar System app (download here), which first requires a download of the Unity Web Player for Mac and PC. Once you’ve done that, you can fly around beautifully produced models of all the planets, asteroids and the Sun. Or you can enter custom modules created by NASA that highlight missions such as Juno, the recently launched probe that’s currently on a five-year mission to Jupiter.

According to NASA:

“This is the first time the public has been able to see the entire solar system and our missions moving together in real time,” said Jim Green, director of NASA’s Planetary Science Division at the agency’s Headquarters in Washington. “It demonstrates NASA’s continued commitment to share our science with everyone.”

You can even keep tabs on the current locations of NASA spacecraft, with the help of NASA’s actual mission data. Don’t forget to click the Full Screen button for the full effect. Fantastic stuff.



Get the app here.

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Future of U.S. manned spaceflight looks bleak

Future of U.S. manned spaceflight looks bleak

  1:09:00 AM    Science Lover

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When Atlantis takes off from Kennedy Space Center, it will be the last time NASA launches astronauts aboard a government-built spacecraft for perhaps the rest of this decade.

Space shuttle Atlantis astronauts conduct a launch
dress rehearsal at Kennedy Space Center in Florida. |
Red Huber/Orlando Sentinel/MCT

The agency that put Apollo in the history books faces the biggest crisis since its formation in 1958. Plans to replace the shuttle with a government-run rocket are beset by budget and design issues. Attempts to bring commercial-rocket companies into the game are promising but far from certain.

And a country once willing to put 4 cents out of every federal dollar into NASA now spends about half a cent, as America struggles with more-earthbound concerns such as unemployment and health care.

"After a half-century of remarkable progress, a coherent plan for maintaining America's leadership in space exploration is no longer apparent," Apollo astronauts Neil Armstrong, Jim Lovell and Gene Cernan wrote in an op-ed this spring.

The reasons-NASA mismanagement, congressional parochialism and an influential aerospace industry-are not new. These problems have plagued NASA for years, but they're magnified by the end of the 30-year-old shuttle program.

Consider what happened to Constellation, the program President George W. Bush and NASA chose to replace the retiring shuttle and return U.S. astronauts to the moon by 2020.

Its intent was "safe, simple, soon," and the design reflected as much: an Apollo-like capsule atop what amounted to a bigger version of a shuttle booster rocket.

But the project was not either simple or soon. Its problems ranged from cost overruns to technical troubles such as violent shaking of the rocket - and last fall Congress and President Barack Obama canceled Constellation after five years and about $13 billion spent.

The result was nothing new to NASA.

According to an analysis by former NASA official Scott Pace, now at George Washington University, NASA has spent more than $21 billion during the past two decades on space-transportation programs, such as the X-33 space plane and Constellation.

"If you look at the pattern as a whole, it's a failure of leadership," said Pace, who added that the blame lies with administrations going back to Bill Clinton's.

Another space expert, Howard McCurdy of American University, said the constant failures speak to the difficulty of keeping a multiyear program going as Republicans and Democrats-with different budget priorities and industry allies- trade control of the White House.

Between administrations, these things get reconsidered to death," McCurdy said. "We spend our time redesigning the problem rather than building" a space vehicle.

Equally cumbersome is the influence of Congress, where NASA policy is dominated by lawmakers who have a vested interest in protecting their home states and industries.

As part of the deal to cancel Constellation, lawmakers settled on a new rocket intended to protect workers in Texas, Alabama and Florida while helping regular NASA contractors in the aerospace industry.

The new plan all but requires NASA to reuse pieces of the shuttle and Constellation to build a new rocket-benefiting established companies such as Lockheed Martin and Alliant Techsystems while essentially ruling out competition or the use of newer technology.

"You are always going to have that parochial problem," said former U.S. Rep. Bart Gordon, D-Tenn., former chairman of the House science committee. "It's hard to ask someone from Houston or Canaveral to vote against the interests or their constituents ... but you can't let it drive the train, or you wind up undermining the agency."

Under the current direction, NASA will continue building the capsule it aimed to complete under Constellation while flying it on a vehicle that will resemble the current shuttle configuration - minus the planelike orbiter.



But despite this reliance on decades-old technology, NASA has said that the money set aside - $14 billion during the next five years - isn't enough to build a rocket capable of flying to the International Space Station by the 2017 deadline set by Congress.

NASA's budget issues stand in the way.

For example, a presidential commission in 2009 noted that Constellation failed in part because it didn't get the funding it was promised. But NASA also has a long history of busting budgets and deadlines. The Government Accountability Office, a congressional watchdog, has kept the agency on its list of "high-risk" budget violators since 1990.

NASA advocates worry that this track record and increased austerity in Washington mean NASA could get even less money in the future, as tea-party-backed lawmakers push for greater cuts, especially with the shuttle no longer there as a shield to protect the agency's budget from being raided.

The House appropriations subcommittee with oversight of NASA introduced legislation this week that would set NASA's 2012 budget at $16.8 billion - nearly $2 billion less than Obama's request and at least $1 billion less than what NASA has received in recent years.

As it stands, NASA will fly its astronauts to the space station aboard Russian spacecraft until it can develop an alternative - government-run or otherwise.

One scenario, pushed by the Obama administration, would have NASA contract with commercial companies, such as SpaceX and Sierra Nevada, to fly crew and cargo to the station.

But though there have been some early successes - SpaceX in December became the first private company to launch a capsule into space and return it safely to Earth-a commercial company has yet to deliver cargo to the station.

A GAO report this year noted that NASA's commercial-cargo plans are almost two years behind schedule and will cost $300 million more than expected.

The problems aren't lost on NASA Administrator Charles F. Bolden.

In an email to staff last week, he wrote that "some say that our final shuttle mission will mark the end of America's 50 years of dominance in human spaceflight." These critics, he added, "must be living on another planet."

But he offered little to counter those critics, other than: "At NASA, failure is not an option."

A recent poll by the Pew Research Center noted that support for NASA still remains high; nearly 60 percent said it was essential for the U.S. to be a world leader in space exploration.

But these polls over time have reflected support a mile wide and an inch deep, and it remains to be seen how NASA would stack up against other budget priorities.

In Florida, the future of NASA isn't simply a matter of national pride. About 7,000 shuttle workers will lose their jobs once the program ends, and the prospects of many of these positions quickly returning is grim.

Rep. Bill Posey, R-Fla., who represents many Kennedy Space Center workers, attributed the erosion of NASA to public and a lack of leadership in the White House. But like Bolden and others, he has few solutions other than a bill urging NASA to return to the moon by 2022.

"It's something we take for granted, like our freedom," said Posey, who put the onus on Obama to fix the situation. "We need leadership in space. . . . If NASA is going to survive, it's going to need more-spirited outreach to Congress and the public."

Obama largely has stayed above the fray, although he has visited Kennedy Space Center twice during his presidency.

Most recently, in late April, he and his family got a guided tour from Janet Kavandi, a veteran of three shuttle missions. Afterward, Kavandi said the first family was very inquisitive-particularly Obama's daughter Sasha, then 9.

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LCROSS Impact Analysis Indicates Water On Moon

LCROSS Impact Analysis Indicates Water On Moon

  1:30:00 AM    Science Lover

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The argument that the moon is a dry, desolate place no longer holds water.

The visible camera image showing the ejecta plume at about 20 seconds after impact. (Credit: Image courtesy of NASA)

Secrets the moon has been holding, for perhaps billions of years, are now being revealed to the delight of scientists and space enthusiasts alike.

NASA has opened a new chapter in our understanding of the moon. Preliminary data from the Lunar CRater Observation and Sensing Satellite, or LCROSS, indicates that the mission successfully uncovered water during the Oct. 9, 2009 impacts into the permanently shadowed region of Cabeus cater near the moon's south pole.

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Satellites Unlock Secret To Northern India's Vanishing Water

Satellites Unlock Secret To Northern India's Vanishing Water

  9:50:00 PM    Science Lover

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Using satellite data, UC Irvine and NASA hydrologists have found that groundwater beneath northern India has been receding by as much as 1 foot per year over the past decade – and they believe human consumption is almost entirely to blame.

The map shows groundwater changes in India during 2002-08, with losses in red and gains in blue, based on GRACE satellite observations. The estimated rate of depletion of groundwater in northwestern India is 4.0 centimeters of water per year, equivalent to a water table decline of 33 centimeters per year. Increases in groundwater in southern India are due to recent above-average rainfall, whereas rain in northwestern India was close to normal during the study period. (Credit: I. Velicogna/UC Irvine)

More than 109 cubic kilometers (26 cubic miles) of groundwater disappeared from the region's aquifers between 2002 and 2008 – double the capacity of India's largest surface-water reservoir, the Upper Wainganga, and triple that of Lake Mead, the largest manmade reservoir in the U.S.

People are pumping northern India's underground water, mostly to irrigate cropland, faster than natural processes can replenish it, said Jay Famiglietti and Isabella Velicogna, UCI Earth system scientists, and Matt Rodell of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center.

"If measures are not soon taken to ensure sustainable groundwater usage, consequences for the 114 million residents of the region may include a collapse of agricultural output, severe shortages of potable water, conflict and suffering," said Rodell, lead author of the study and former doctoral student of Famiglietti's at the University of Texas at Austin.

Study results will be published online Aug. 12 in the journal Nature.

Groundwater comes from the percolation of precipitation and other surface waters down through Earth's soil and rock, accumulating in aquifers – cavities and layers of porous rock, gravel, sand or clay. In some subterranean reservoirs, the water may be thousands to millions of years old; in others, water levels decline and rise again naturally each year.

Groundwater levels do not respond to changes in weather as rapidly as lakes, streams and rivers do. So when groundwater is pumped for irrigation or other uses, restoration of original levels can take months or years.

"Groundwater mining – that is when withdrawals exceed replenishment rates – is a rapidly growing problem in many of the world's large aquifers," Famiglietti said. "Since groundwater provides nearly 80 percent of the water required for irrigated agriculture, diminishing groundwater reserves pose a serious threat to global food security."

Data provided by India's Ministry of Water Resources had suggested that groundwater use across the nation was exceeding natural replenishment, but the regional rate of depletion had been unknown.

In the new study, the hydrologists analyzed six years of monthly data for northern India from twin satellites called GRACE – NASA's Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment – to produce a chronology of underground water storage changes.

GRACE detects differences in gravity brought about by fluctuations in water mass, including water below the Earth's surface. As the satellites orbit 300 miles above Earth, their positions change – relative to each other – in response to variations in the pull of gravity. They fly about 137 miles apart, and microwave ranging systems measure every microscopic variance in the distance between the two.

"With GRACE, we can monitor water storage changes everywhere in the world from our desk," said Velicogna, also with NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. "The satellites allow us to observe how water storage evolves from one month to the next in critical areas of the world."

Groundwater loss in northern India is particularly alarming because there were no unusual trends in rainfall – in fact, it was slightly above normal during the study period. The researchers also examined data on soil moisture, lake and surface reservoir storage, vegetation and glaciers in the nearby Himalayas to confirm that the apparent groundwater trend was real. The only influence they couldn't rule out was human.

"For the first time, we can observe water use on land with no additional ground-based data collection," Famiglietti said. "This is critical because in many developing countries, where hydrological data are both sparse and hard to access, space-based methods provide perhaps the only opportunity to assess changes in freshwater availability across large regions."

About GRACE: The Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment is a partnership between NASA and the German Aerospace Center. The University of Texas Center for Space Research, Austin, has overall mission responsibility. NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory developed the twin satellites. The German Aerospace Center provided the launch, and GeoForschungsZentrum Potsdam, Germany, operates GRACE.

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Magnetic Tremors Pinpoint The Impact Epicenter Of Earthbound Space Storms

Magnetic Tremors Pinpoint The Impact Epicenter Of Earthbound Space Storms

  2:22:00 AM    Science Lover

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Using data from NASA's THEMIS mission, a team of University of Alberta researchers has pinpointed the impact epicenter of an earthbound space storm as it crashes into the atmosphere, and given an advance warning of its arrival.

Artist's concept of a solar storm breaking through the earth's magnetic field. (Credit: NASA)

The team's study reveals that magnetic blast waves can be used to pinpoint and predict the location where space storms dissipate their massive amounts of energy. These storms can dump the equivalent of 50 gigawatts of power, or the output of 10 of the world's largest power stations, into Earth's atmosphere.

The energy that drives space storms originates on the sun. The stream of electrically charged particles in the solar wind carries this energy toward Earth. The solar wind interacts with Earth's magnetic field. Scientists call the process that begins with Earth's magnetic field capturing energy and ends with its release into the atmosphere a geomagnetic substorm.

"Substorm onset occurs when Earth's magnetic field suddenly and dramatically releases energy previously captured by the solar wind," said David Sibeck, project scientist for the Time History of Events and Macroscale Interactions During Substorms (THEMIS) mission at NASA Goddard Spaceflight Center in Greenbelt, Md.

Physicists Jonathan Rae and Ian Mann lead the University of Alberta research team that recently located a substorm's epicenter of the impact. The team uses ground-based observatories spread across northern Canada and the five satellites of the THEMIS mission to detect magnetic disturbances as storms crash into the atmosphere. Using a technique the researchers call "space seismology," they look for the eye of the storm hundreds of thousands of miles above Earth.

"We see the benevolent side of space storms in the form of the Northern Lights," said Mann. "When electrically charged particles speed toward Earth and buffet the atmosphere, the result is often a dancing, shimmering light over the polar region." But there is also a hazardous side. Earth's atmosphere protects us from the damaging direct effects of the radiation from space storms, but in space there is nowhere to hide. High-energy, electrically charged particles released by space storms can damage spacecraft. On Earth, disturbances caused by the particles and the electrical currents they carry can interrupt radio communications and global positioning system (GPS) navigation, and damage electric power grids.

Rae and Mann's team has also determined that the magnetic tremors show that the space storm impact into the atmosphere has a unique epicenter, with the eye of the storm located in space beyond the low-Earth orbits of most communication satellites.

Guided by Earth's magnetic field, the magnetic tremors rocket through space toward Earth. These geomagnetic substorms trigger magnetic sensors on the ground as they impact the atmosphere. The effects of these storms, and the most spectacular displays of the Northern Lights, follow a few minutes later.

The objective of NASA's pioneering multi-spacecraft THEMIS mission is to determine what causes geomagnetic substorms. In addition to a well-instrumented fleet of five spacecraft, THEMIS operates a network of ground observatories stretching across Canada and the United States to place the spacecraft observations in their global context. All night long, every night, the observatories take 3-second time resolution snapshots of the aurora and measure corresponding variations in Earth's magnetic field strength and direction every half second.

An analysis of the auroral movies and magnetic variations by Dr. Jonathan Rae from the University of Alberta pinpointed just when and where one substorm explosively released its magnetic energy. "Undulating auroral features and ripples in Earth's magnetic field began at the same time and propagated away from Sanikulaq, Nunavut, Canada at speeds on the order of 60,000 miles per hour, much like the blast wave from a gigantic explosion," said Sibeck. Dr. Rae and his team presented the results on May 25 at the American Geophysical Union meeting in Toronto.

Probing the eye of a space storm and recognizing the advance warning signs are crucial for researchers trying to understand and predict space weather. Key questions about when and how space storms start are still challenging researchers on the THEMIS team. Like forecasters on Earth who predict severe weather, the University of Alberta researchers are using their "space seismology" technique to investigate methods to forecast space storms.

THEMIS is a NASA-funded mission and involves scientists from Canada, the United States, and Europe. Current Canadian activity is funded by the Canadian Space Agency.

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Surprising Changes In Black Hole-powered 'Blazar' Galaxy

Surprising Changes In Black Hole-powered 'Blazar' Galaxy

  9:09:00 AM    Science Lover

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In the heart of an active galaxy, matter falling into a supermassive black hole somehow creates jets of particles traveling near the speed of light. For active galaxies classified as blazars, one of these jets beams right toward Earth. (Credit: NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center Conceptual Image Lab)

An international team of astrophysicists using telescopes on the ground and in space have uncovered surprising changes in radiation emitted by an active galaxy. The picture that emerges from these first-ever simultaneous observations with optical, X-ray and new-generation gamma-ray telescopes is much more complex than scientists expected and challenges current theories of how the radiation is generated.

The galaxy in question is PKS 2155-304, a type of object known as a "blazar." Like many active galaxies, a blazar emits oppositely directed jets of particles traveling near the speed of light as matter falls into a central supermassive black hole; this process is not well understood. In the case of blazars, the galaxy is oriented such that we're looking right down the jet.

PKS 2155-304 is located 1.5 billion light-years away in the southern constellation of Piscis Austrinus and is usually a detectable but faint gamma-ray source. But when its jet undergoes a major outburst, as it did in 2006, the galaxy can become the brightest source in the sky at the highest gamma-ray energies scientists can detect -- up to 50 trillion times the energy of visible light. Even from strong sources, only about one gamma ray this energetic strikes a square yard at the top of Earth's atmosphere each month.

The four identical telescopes of the High Energy Stereoscopic System in Namibia detect faint atmospheric flashes caused by the absorption of ultrahigh-energy gamma rays. Credit: H.E.S.S Atmospheric absorption of one of these gamma rays creates a short-lived shower of subatomic particles. As these fast-moving particles rush through the atmosphere, they produce a faint flash of blue light. The High Energy Stereoscopic System (H.E.S.S), an array of telescopes located in Namibia, captured these flashes from PKS 2155-304.

Gamma rays at lower energies were detected directly by the Large Area Telescope (LAT) aboard NASA's orbiting Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope. "The launch of Fermi gives us the opportunity to measure this powerful galaxy across as many wavelengths as possible for the first time," says Werner Hofmann, spokesperson for the H.E.S.S. team at the Max-Planck Institute for Nuclear Physics in Heidelberg, Germany.

With the gamma-ray regime fully covered, the team turned to NASA's Swift and Rossi X-ray Timing Explorer (RXTE) satellites to provide data on the galaxy's X-ray emissions. Rounding out the wavelength coverage was the H.E.S.S. Automatic Telescope for Optical Monitoring, which recorded the galaxy's activity in visible light.

Between August 25 and September 6, 2008, the telescopes monitored PKS 2155-304 in its quiet, non-flaring state. The results of the 12-day campaign are surprising. During flaring episodes of this and other blazars, the X- and gamma-ray emission rise and fall together. But it doesn't happen this way when PKS 2155-304 is in its quiet state -- and no one knows why.

What's even stranger is that the galaxy's visible light rises and falls with its gamma-ray emission. "It's like watching a blowtorch where the highest temperatures and the lowest temperatures change in step, but the middle temperatures do not," says Berrie Giebels, an astrophysicist at France's École Polytechnique who works with both the H.E.S.S. and Fermi LAT teams.

"Astronomers are learning that the various constituents of the jets in blazars interact in fairly complicated ways to produce the radiation that we observe," says Fermi team member Jim Chiang at Stanford University, Calif. "These observations may contain the first clues to help us untangle what's really going on deep in the heart of a blazar."

The findings have been submitted to The Astrophysical Journal. The H.E.S.S. team includes scientists from Germany, France, the United Kingdom, Poland, the Czech Republic, Ireland, Armenia, South Africa and Namibia. The Fermi mission is an astrophysics and particle physics partnership, developed by NASA in collaboration with the U.S. Department of Energy, along with important contributions from academic institutions and partners in France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Sweden, and the United States.

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Kepler mission blasts off in search of Earth-like planets

Kepler mission blasts off in search of Earth-like planets

  8:46:00 PM    Science Lover

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An artist’s rendition of Kepler

NASA’s Kepler mission, which will search Earth-like planets, was successfully launched from Cape Canaveral on Friday at 3:49 pm GMT.

Kepler – named after the German 17th century astrophysicist – is designed to find the first Earth-size planets orbiting stars at distances where water could pool on the planet’s surface. Liquid water is believed to be essential for the formation of life.

“It was a stunning launch,” said Kepler Project Manager James Fanson of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California.

“Kepler will help us understand if our Earth is unique or if others like it are out there,” he added.

Engineers acquired a signal from Kepler at 12:11am on Saturday, after it separated from its spent third-stage rocket and entered its final sun-centred orbit, trailing 1,500 kms behind Earth.

The spacecraft is generating its own power from its solar panels.

“Kepler now has the perfect place to watch more than 1,00,000 stars for signs of planets,” said William Borucki, the mission’s principal investigator at NASA’s Ames Research Centre at Moffett Field, California.

Engineers have begun to check Kepler to ensure it is working properly, a process called “commissioning” that will take 60 days.

After that, the first planets to roll out on the Kepler “assembly line” are expected to be the portly “hot Jupiters” – gas giants that circle close and fast around their stars.

Neptune-size planets will most likely be found next, followed by rocky ones.

Earth-sized planets, however – orbiting stars like our sun at distances where surface water could exist – would take at least three years to discover and confirm.

Ground-based telescopes also will contribute to the mission by verifying some of the finds.

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Astronaut to try flying carpet in space!

Astronaut to try flying carpet in space!

  1:15:00 AM    Science Lover

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Image via Wikipedia

Astronaut Koichi Wakata gestures after a check-up at NASA

A Japanese astronaut going to space this month will try to fly on a carpet, use eyedrops in zero gravity and meet a series of other off-beat challenges, a space agency official said on Thursday.

Koichi Wakata will perform 16 tasks chosen from 1,597 suggested by hundreds of people, from nursery school pupils to a 90-year-old man, the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) official said.

Wakata will try “a magic carpet that floats in the air” after reaching the Japanese laboratory Kibo at the International Space Station (ISS) later in March for a stay of more than three months.

He will also attempt to fold clothes, do push-ups and backflips, arm-wrestle another astronaut and “shoot liquid out of the straw of a drink container

Image via Wikipedia

to see what happens”, the space agency said.

In another initiative, JAXA has invited companies to rent an astronaut by the hour in the ISS space lab to perform desired tasks, which could include advertisements or science experiments.

The hourly charge for an astronaut is 5.5 million yen (Rs 29 lakh approx) - plus an extra fee of 3.3 million yen (Rs 17 lakh approx) per kilogramme to transport any required items into space.

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The rocket that thinks it’s a jet!

The rocket that thinks it’s a jet!

  8:27:00 PM    Science Lover

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A reusable spaceplane that can take off from a conventional aircraft runway, carry over twelve tonnes to orbit and then return to land on the same runway could be less than a decade away.

UK-based Reaction Engines Limited (REL) – the firm behind the ‘Sabre’ air-breathing rocket engine, which will power the Skylon spaceplane – is currently working on various tests and demonstrations that will bring this spacecraft one step closer to reality.

But what is Sabre?

The Sabre is a unique hybrid engine that can “breathe” air when in the atmosphere, like a jet engine, and become a rocket engine when in space.

In air-breathing mode, air is first cooled before being compressed and fed to the rocket engine, where it is burnt with hydrogen fuel.

When in rocket mode, the hydrogen is burnt with liquid oxygen.

“Traditional throw-away rockets – costing more than $100 million per launch – are a drag on the growth of this market,” said Alan Bond, Managing Director of REL.

“The Holy Grail to transform the economics of getting into space is a truly reusable spaceplane capable of taking off from an airport and climbing directly into space, delivering its payload and returning safely to Earth,” he explained.

Testing all systems

In tests, the spacecraft builders will look at three key areas in the engine.

The first area, conducted by REL, concerns a new pre-cooler that cools the incoming air as it enters the engine.

During the programme, a prototype pre-cooler will be constructed using the actual module design for the flight engines. This will be tested on the company’s B9 jet engine-powered experimental facility in the UK.

The second area is the cooling of the combustion chamber, where the propellants are mixed and burnt, producing water vapour at around 3,000 degrees Celsius.

The Sabre engine uses the air or liquid oxygen as the cooling fluid – a key and unusual design feature, as most rocket engines use the hydrogen fuel for cooling instead.

UK-based EADS Astrium, an aerospace subsidiary of the European Aeronautic Defence and Space company (EADS), will conduct this work along with DLR, Germany’s national research centre for aeronautics and space, using demonstration chambers fired at a DLR facility.

The third area, led by the University of Bristol, will explore advanced exhaust nozzles that can adapt to the ambient atmospheric pressure. Also, a new water-cooled chamber will be constructed and test fired.

“Years of research by REL on the Skylon vehicle and its unique Sabre engine mean that we have an inside track on realising our goal,” Bond said.

“Once the tests are complete, Skylon could reduce the cost of getting into space by a factor of ten and improve the reliability by a thousand,” he added.

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