After nearly 30 years of service, the Space Shuttle fleet is due to enter retirement with the last ever mission scheduled for takeoff on July 8, 2011. In its lifetime, the world's first Reusable ...

It’s difficult not to be impressed by the towering rockets used around the world to launch spacecraft into orbit. From the colossal Saturn V rockets developed in the 1960s to the SpaceX Falcon 9, one ...

Aerospace engineers have dreamed of a spaceship that can launch like a plane, get to orbit, and land on a runway since the 1960s. A British company, Reaction Engines Limited, wants to make that dream ...

"As young as 12 I was building my own rockets," says Alan Bond, inventor of the Skylon spaceplane and Sabre, the revolutionary engine that could herald a new era of space travel. "[But] only really ...

UPDATE : There is an update on the Falcon 9 Block 5 rocket which should have a 24 hour turnaround with no refurbishment resue and will be reusable about a dozen times. Ashley used a reference document ...

Roger Longstaff, engineer at Reaction Engines Ltd (REL), said that the company intends to test its amazing “pre-cooler” technology in June, 2011. An REL spokesperson announced that they had secured ...

Reaction Engines has announced that is has successfully tested the key pre-cooler component of its revolutionary SABRE engine crucial to the development of its SKYLON spaceplane. The company claims ...

Skylon is a British space plane under development by the U.K.-based Reaction Engines, Ltd. The space plane concept vehicle consists of a slender fuselage containing propellant tankage and payload bay, ...

[Photo: Reaction Engines] This is the Skylon spaceplane. It’s a revolutionary new concept that can take off like a plane before rocketing off into space. The European Space Agency just passed a ...

Who wouldn’t want to have breakfast on the French Riviera, take a walk along the Great Wall of China in the afternoon, and then cap off the evening by staring at stars above the Alaskan wilderness?

The Skylon has, in a way, been some three decades in development already–stretching almost back to the days of Apollo, curiously also the model for NASA’s future spacecraft. But European and British ...