HOTOL was initially developed by the British during the 80s, back when the US was pushing the space shuttle. Unlike the shuttle, it was an horizontal take-off and landing concept that used ...

Proving that you can't keep a good technology down, Reaction Engines' Synergetic Air-Breathing Rocket Engine (SABRE) has a new lease on life after a British-led consortium announced Invictus, a new ...

So, HOTOL never got to fly in the real world, but modern technology can easily bring it back to life and, for all intents and purposes, that’s what animation specialist Hazegrayart did, ...

The HOTOL story goes back to August 1984 when BAe, the forerunner to today's BAE Systems, unveiled a satellite launcher concept that would see an unmanned automatic vehicle use runways of ...

The secret sauce of Hotol was heat exchanger technology, an attempt to cool the super-heated 1,000C air that enters an engine at hypersonic speeds. Without cooling this will melt aluminium, ...

Skylon had its origins in another SSTO RLV project called HOTOL by British Aerospace and Rolls Royce in the 1980s. When the British government declined to further invest in HOTOL in the late 1980s, a ...

The secret sauce of Hotol was heat exchanger technology, an attempt to cool the super-heated 1,000C air that enters an engine at hypersonic speeds. Without cooling this will melt aluminium, ...

But the designers behind HOTOL’s novel engines kept the project ticking over, and eventually evolved it into Skylon. The Shuttle ended up being a fairly conventional rocket.

The secret sauce of Hotol was heat exchanger technology, an attempt to cool the super-heated 1,000C air that enters an engine at hypersonic speeds. Without cooling this will melt aluminium, ...