The SABRE engine is capable of operating as a jet engine and a rocket engine, powering aircraft at up to five times the speed of sound

Reaction Engines Ltd, a UK-based company, has been successful in its series of tests of the key component for its new engine, the synergistic air-breathing rocket engine (SABRE) that will enable aircraft to fly anywhere on the earth in less than four hours, or directly into space and back to deliver satellites and other cargo.

The SABRE engine is capable of operating as a jet engine and a rocket engine, powering aircraft at up to five times the speed of sound within the atmosphere or directly into the earth’s orbit at 25 times the speed of sound. Its groundbreaking technology—an air pre-cooler—is designed to cool continuously the incoming airstream from over 1,0000 Celsius to minus 1500 Celsius in less than 1/100th of a second (six times faster than the blink of an eye), effectively doubling the current technical limits of jet engine speeds.

The tests, undertaken at the Reaction Engines’ facility in Oxfordshire, integrated the ground-breaking flight-weight pre-cooler technology with a jet engine and a novel helium cooling loop, demonstrating the crucial new technologies in the SABRE engine. This marks another major advance towards the creation of vehicles like Skylon—a revolutionary reusable space vehicle that will be powered by SABRE engines, designed primarily to transport satellites and other cargo into space.