Re: Skylon SSTO



Ian Woollard wrote:

And unlike Concorde which could barely limp across the Atlantic, this one looks like it can do more or less antipodal travel at Mach 5(!)

Think of the ticket price.
The 747 won the Atlantic war- it went at less than half as fast as Concorde but the tickets were far, far, more economical.
All that Concorde managed to do was fill a very niche market; if there had been more demand for that fast of crossings, they would have built more Concordes.


It may well never get funded, but if it was it would probably sell- there's *way* more routes it can tackle and the extra speed means that the aircraft can do more trips per day (so the amortised costs of the aircraft come down from the airlines point of view; they really like that since it does good things for their ROI, Concorde was too slow for that.)

I think the turn-around time on this is going to be more like a SR-71 than a airliner; you are talking about something that's going to get get at least red hot during flight. You are going to want to give it a real good going over between flights, because it's going to be in a flight environment where even a slight failure or flaw can be fatal.

Pat
.

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