6 ms·

UK government invests in Sabre air-breathing rocket engine

88 points by andydd 13y ago

eksith 13y ago
This is a dubious investment IMO. Rockets that have shrouds have been thrown about for a long time, but they have one fundamental weakness. The shroud only works while in the atmosphere. After that, it's dead weight (since no significant aerodynamic forces come into play further up). It's not quite the same as the SR-71 Blackbird engine which is a turbojet engine that morphs mid-flight into a ramjet. That's quite a spectacular piece of engineering especially since this was before the advent of computer-aided modeling. But the SR-71 was still very much an air breathing engine. The outer engine casing was still an essential part of its function. Don't get me wrong; I wish these guys success and I hope my assessment is incorrect, but I just don't see how added weight to win over gravity lower in the atmosphere would help in the upper atmosphere and in space.
- NickPollard 13y ago
  I don't know the maths involved, but the idea presumably is that they save more weight not carrying (as much) oxygen than they lose by adding the rest of the engine. By being able to draw oxygen from the air whilst in the atmosphere, they only need to store a smaller amount of oxygen for when they hit space. This is the main saving I believe.
  - pja 13y ago
    Indeed. O2 is much heavier than H2 so if you can scavenge the O2 out of the atmosphere on the way up then the amount you need to carry for the final burn in space is much smaller & the weight savings are huge. Consider that the Space Shuttle external fuel tank contained 650,000kg of O2 and only 100,000 kg of H2. Save 10% of your O2 needs and suddenly you've got 60,000 kg to play with. The Shuttle payload was only about 25,000 kg.
- chromaton 13y ago
  There's also the drag effects to worry about which pure rockets don't have to deal with. This engine could end up being useful in the long run, but the clear path to cheap access to space involves reusability, and a more complex motor works against that.
  - stcredzero 13y ago
    However, the ability to avoid staging is also a huge win.
- disputin 13y ago
  It'll be fine - "Mr Osborne himself has inspected the test rig"!? The UK gov will jump at any potential economy booster ('scuse) right now.
- cpleppert 13y ago
  There are a lot of weaknesses in the design that haven't been worked out regardless of the technical merit of the engine. Reusable vehicles are tremendously expensive and Sabre has to peform perfectly not only on the engine but the vehicle as well to get any return on its investment. Although the sabre is more efficient operating in the atmosphere than a conventional rocket engine the vehicle itself will have to spend the cost of having wings, strengthening the vehicle to operate in several orientations on ascent, operating in the atmosphere for longer than a conventional rocket(which costs fuel and requires the vehicle to be shaped in a way that just isn't as efficient as a conventional rocket), and being able to withstand reentry temperatures(more weight) not to mention not being able to get rid of dead weight on ascent. The reusable components of the engine also weigh a lot more as well. If you go through everything it doesn't look like that great a win; and that is if everything works perfectly. The space shuttle never came close to its projections and this vehicle is far more technically ambitious in every possible way. I just don't think that their projections of even $10-15 billion in development costs are even remotely realistic. Last time I checked their business plan suggested they could break even if satellite launch costs didn't come down and the volume of launches of large satellites increase.
timw6n 13y ago
A couple of months ago there was an excellent BBC4 documentary about Alan Bond and Reaction Engines called The Three Rocketeers[1], which I believe has been re-posted on the internet. http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01mqv45 http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01mqv45
- Element_ 13y ago
  It was an excellent documentary: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vZ_a21fPkYM http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vZ_a21fPkYM
3327 13y ago
The Brits are good engineers, and, compared to American juggernaut companies, specially in the defense and aerospace area, they manage to make innovation with very little. The US military spent millions all through the 1960's upto the late 1980's for a successful VTOL aircraft. Along came the brits with fractions of the budget with a great product the Harrier GR-1. There are some great arguments here, specially the savings in weight from Oxygen by pja. But I want to ask something different. Even if there is a slight chance for this idea to succeed shouldn't we/they invest in it anyway? Making breakthroughs in jet engine design takes years and extraordinary amount of effort and money. If the government doesn't take the risk, long term innovation would be very difficult. Plus even if it doesn't reach its intended goals many side technologies are generated even from a failed undertaking...
- arethuza 13y ago
  Also the TSR-2 - which was a fantastic aircraft design: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BAC_TSR-2 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BAC_TSR-2 "All modern aircraft have four dimensions: span, length, height and politics. TSR-2 simply got the first three right."
  - 3327 13y ago
    wow what a beauty !
- moogleii 13y ago
  It's hard to say how much of US defense/aerospace costs are due to..."overcharging" though. Also, it looks like the US had a hand in engine development for the initial experimental versions (P.1127). Costs were shared with West Germany as well (from harrier.org.uk). From the wiki: By the end of 1958, barely eighteen months after the start of the project, all the main features of the P.1127 were developed with one exception, the reaction control system - this was resolved by April 1959.[6] As the P.1127 had been developed at a time of deep UK defense cuts; Hawker had to seek commercial funding, significant engine development funding came from the U.S.[4][7] Wind tunnel tests conducted by NASA Langley Research Center using a sub-scale model showed acceptable flight characteristics.[4][8] I'm not sure how nimble and less wasteful NASA is, or even if it would be considered "cheap", but their X43A project costs were about 27 million 1958 British pounds ($230M US in 1997).
parley 13y ago
I seem to remember Elon Musk getting a question about SABRE at a post-talk Q&A a while back (probably in the UK, perhaps an inauguration ceremony of some institution), but now I can't find it. He was skeptical and had some constructive things to say, but I'm not a physicist so unfortunately I can't remember the specifics. If anyone else finds it, kindly reply with a link! EDIT: Found the video, but haven't yet found the specific time of the question. My connection is a bit slow, so jumping around in the stream isn't going so well. http://www.oxfordmartin.ox.ac.uk/videos/view/211 http://www.oxfordmartin.ox.ac.uk/videos/view/211 EDIT 2: Found it. Elon's reply is at 48:55.
- arethuza 13y ago
  Maybe he doesn't like it because it won't work on Mars? :-)
speeder 13y ago
Whoa, this is really awesome! For those that don't know, airbreathing engines are MUCH MORE efficient than conventional rocket engines. Not only in terms of weight saved from not having to lug around too much O2, but also because of the way it works inherently. I decided to make a space game once, with real world stuff on it, and settled for the Triton engine for my game spaceship, I did lots of research about rocket engines, and I was very sad when I compared them to airplane engines and it was clear how better they were, and yet useless in space. But I never had this idea of mixing both... It sounds so awesome that I cannot describe it. Also it allow some sci-fi stuff that is frequent but so far very broken (that is small fighter spaceship planes hybrids that can enter and leave atmosphere at will, that for now were usually handwaved by the author to explain that it has some weird super efficient rocket engine... with this tech that sort of stuff is less improbable)
- stcredzero 13y ago
  Not that much of a handwave, if you allow for energy storage as light and compact as antimatter. Engineering such a craft the size of a fighter might be quite difficult, though.
- benl 13y ago
  Are they really more efficient, for real world uses? The way I understand it, the argument goes something like this. To reach orbit you need to accelerate to very high speeds (Mach 25). To avoid crazy drag losses you therefore want to get out of the atmosphere as quickly as possible. So being able to use oxygen from the air on your way up is a marginal gain at best, and almost certainly not worth the extra complexity.
  - willvarfar 13y ago
    Maybe they make most sense for military missiles?
  - nemof 13y ago
    The primary benefit is weight reduction: http://www.reactionengines.co.uk/sabre_howworks.html http://www.reactionengines.co.uk/sabre_howworks.html This approach enables SABRE-powered vehicles to save carrying over 250 tons of on-board oxidant on their way to orbit, and removes the necessity for massive throw-away first stages that are jettisoned once the oxidant they contain has been used up, allowing the development of the first fully re-usable space access vehicles such as SKYLON.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
tobiasu 13y ago
How and where does the nitrogen boiler(?) get its energy too cool helium to -170C at a constant rate? Is it effective to chill what must be ginormous amounts of air to -150C? It's all nice that the heat exchanger works, but where does that heat go? There's a large discrepancy between the inlet air temperature (1000C vs 20C) in the article. Somehow my sense for violation of the laws of thermodynamics is tingling.
- pja 13y ago
  In the tests it's presumably just a continuous flow of pre-cooled liquid nitrogen from a tank & the heated N2 is probably dumped into the environment. The design for a flight-capable engine is supposed to dump the waste heat into the fuel I believe.
- arethuza 13y ago
  They have details on their web site: http://www.reactionengines.co.uk/sabre_howworks.html http://www.reactionengines.co.uk/sabre_howworks.html My reading of their explanation is that in a full system they would "pre-burn" some of the hydrogen and oxygen also used to power the main rocket motor to power the cooling of the helium that then cools the intake air. [NB I have no idea whether that would actually work or not - just trying to interpret what their own explanation is!]
  - tobiasu 13y ago
    Thanks for the link, this clears up a lot: http://www.reactionengines.co.uk/images/sabre/sabre_cycle_1024.jpg http://www.reactionengines.co.uk/images/sabre/sabre_cycle_10... There is no nitrogen in the system (not as consumable, anyway). Shoddy BBC reporting, as usual. The heat exchangers use chilled hydrogen fuel they have to take up anyway, before it is burned in the rocket motor. That makes a ton more sense.
    - arethuza 13y ago
      To be fair to the BBC, what they describe is the test setup that has actually run, not the design of the full engine - which they haven't built yet.
venomsnake 13y ago
I am a bit skeptical of any technology that uses helium. We just don't have viable ways to obtain reliably enough of the stuff reliably.
- maxerickson 13y ago
  It doesn't look like it consumes it. So we could probably build hundreds or thousands of these things without much trouble.
  - DuskStar 13y ago
    As far as I can tell, the production version will use LH2 instead of Liquid Helium to cool the incoming air. (after which the Helium will be burned for thrust, no need to cool it back down) It's a similar to how most rocket engine nozzles are cooled.
    - venomsnake 13y ago
      You mean Hydrogen will be burned? Noble gases have hard time reacting. Except xenon with fluoride and nitrogen but you want to be away when these bonds break.
      - DuskStar 13y ago
        Ow, that's a bad mistake. Yeah, the Hydrogen fuel will both be used to cool the incoming air and burned for thrust. Looking back at that comment - how did I make that many typos?!?
- arethuza 13y ago
  Well, there is an expensive plant in France that will be manufacturing helium from raw materials ;-) http://www.iter.org/ http://www.iter.org/
  - venomsnake 13y ago
    Nuclear fusion has always been 10 years away. Lets hope that they will succeed this time.
jotm 13y ago
Man, I really hope this engine works - they won't get a second chance if the prototype fails (which is a shame, since the concept is solid)... And that prototype plane/spaceship just looks cool as hell...
lifeisstillgood 13y ago
This made my day however: has passed an independent audit from European Space Agency experts, and Mr Osborne himself has inspected the test rig on the Culham science park in Oxfordshire. The ESA has verified the engine, but thank goodness, George Osbourne double checked it all, just in case those rocket scientists missed micro-fluctuations in heat transfer gradients. I mean they were probably all French anyway. George Osbourne (UK CFO/Treasury Secretary) is getting a lot of political flack, and having his name associated with UK home grown and based innovative technology is clearly something his press office wanted the BBC to know. Who were too lazy to cut the sentence.
- colinm 13y ago
  "Do you have one in green?"
  - lmm 13y ago
    What are you talking about? The only thing I can think of is British racing green, and that's a bit of a stretch.
    - ris 13y ago
      I suspect it's a reference to Osbourne probably wanting to make a weapon out of it.
- voicereason 13y ago
  You clearly have something against Osborne. The UK government are investing the money. Osborne is the Chancellor of the Exchequer, why is it strange that he would be mentioned in the article as having a look at it? He's only getting political flak from socialists and welfare claimants really - no surprise there.
  - JonnieCache 13y ago
    And those well known socialists, the IMF: http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2013/apr/18/george-osborne-imf-austerity http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2013/apr/18/george-osborn...
acd 13y ago
Sabre Air will eventually revolutionize internet communication so that it is possible to get internet access cheaply anywhere on earth. Commstellation a Canadian company are planning 72 micro satellites that will provide backbone capacity for cellphone towers. Latency will be in the 40 ms range. http://www.commstellation.com/ http://www.commstellation.com/ Currently smartphones become dumb phones as soon as you leave your country on vacation, in the future we will be able to connect to internet anywhere cheaply.
jpeg_hero 13y ago
The british are cute. that test rig looked like something the North Koreans would put together. this is no where near being a "real program"

88 points by andydd 13y ago

This is a dubious investment IMO. Rockets that have shrouds have been thrown about for a long time, but they have one fundamental weakness. The shroud only works while in the atmosphere. After that, it's dead weight (since no significant aerodynamic forces come into play further up). It's not quite the same as the SR-71 Blackbird engine which is a turbojet engine that morphs mid-flight into a ramjet. That's quite a spectacular piece of engineering especially since this was before the advent of computer-aided modeling. But the SR-71 was still very much an air breathing engine. The outer engine casing was still an essential part of its function. Don't get me wrong; I wish these guys success and I hope my assessment is incorrect, but I just don't see how added weight to win over gravity lower in the atmosphere would help in the upper atmosphere and in space.

NickPollard 13y ago
I don't know the maths involved, but the idea presumably is that they save more weight not carrying (as much) oxygen than they lose by adding the rest of the engine. By being able to draw oxygen from the air whilst in the atmosphere, they only need to store a smaller amount of oxygen for when they hit space. This is the main saving I believe.
- pja 13y ago
  Indeed. O2 is much heavier than H2 so if you can scavenge the O2 out of the atmosphere on the way up then the amount you need to carry for the final burn in space is much smaller & the weight savings are huge. Consider that the Space Shuttle external fuel tank contained 650,000kg of O2 and only 100,000 kg of H2. Save 10% of your O2 needs and suddenly you've got 60,000 kg to play with. The Shuttle payload was only about 25,000 kg.
chromaton 13y ago
There's also the drag effects to worry about which pure rockets don't have to deal with. This engine could end up being useful in the long run, but the clear path to cheap access to space involves reusability, and a more complex motor works against that.
- stcredzero 13y ago
  However, the ability to avoid staging is also a huge win.
disputin 13y ago
It'll be fine - "Mr Osborne himself has inspected the test rig"!? The UK gov will jump at any potential economy booster ('scuse) right now.
cpleppert 13y ago
There are a lot of weaknesses in the design that haven't been worked out regardless of the technical merit of the engine. Reusable vehicles are tremendously expensive and Sabre has to peform perfectly not only on the engine but the vehicle as well to get any return on its investment. Although the sabre is more efficient operating in the atmosphere than a conventional rocket engine the vehicle itself will have to spend the cost of having wings, strengthening the vehicle to operate in several orientations on ascent, operating in the atmosphere for longer than a conventional rocket(which costs fuel and requires the vehicle to be shaped in a way that just isn't as efficient as a conventional rocket), and being able to withstand reentry temperatures(more weight) not to mention not being able to get rid of dead weight on ascent. The reusable components of the engine also weigh a lot more as well. If you go through everything it doesn't look like that great a win; and that is if everything works perfectly. The space shuttle never came close to its projections and this vehicle is far more technically ambitious in every possible way. I just don't think that their projections of even $10-15 billion in development costs are even remotely realistic. Last time I checked their business plan suggested they could break even if satellite launch costs didn't come down and the volume of launches of large satellites increase.

timw6n 13y ago

A couple of months ago there was an excellent BBC4 documentary about Alan Bond and Reaction Engines called The Three Rocketeers[1], which I believe has been re-posted on the internet. http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01mqv45 http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01mqv45

Element_ 13y ago
It was an excellent documentary: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vZ_a21fPkYM http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vZ_a21fPkYM

3327 13y ago

The Brits are good engineers, and, compared to American juggernaut companies, specially in the defense and aerospace area, they manage to make innovation with very little. The US military spent millions all through the 1960's upto the late 1980's for a successful VTOL aircraft. Along came the brits with fractions of the budget with a great product the Harrier GR-1. There are some great arguments here, specially the savings in weight from Oxygen by pja. But I want to ask something different. Even if there is a slight chance for this idea to succeed shouldn't we/they invest in it anyway? Making breakthroughs in jet engine design takes years and extraordinary amount of effort and money. If the government doesn't take the risk, long term innovation would be very difficult. Plus even if it doesn't reach its intended goals many side technologies are generated even from a failed undertaking...

arethuza 13y ago
Also the TSR-2 - which was a fantastic aircraft design: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BAC_TSR-2 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BAC_TSR-2 "All modern aircraft have four dimensions: span, length, height and politics. TSR-2 simply got the first three right."
- 3327 13y ago
  wow what a beauty !
moogleii 13y ago
It's hard to say how much of US defense/aerospace costs are due to..."overcharging" though. Also, it looks like the US had a hand in engine development for the initial experimental versions (P.1127). Costs were shared with West Germany as well (from harrier.org.uk). From the wiki: By the end of 1958, barely eighteen months after the start of the project, all the main features of the P.1127 were developed with one exception, the reaction control system - this was resolved by April 1959.[6] As the P.1127 had been developed at a time of deep UK defense cuts; Hawker had to seek commercial funding, significant engine development funding came from the U.S.[4][7] Wind tunnel tests conducted by NASA Langley Research Center using a sub-scale model showed acceptable flight characteristics.[4][8] I'm not sure how nimble and less wasteful NASA is, or even if it would be considered "cheap", but their X43A project costs were about 27 million 1958 British pounds ($230M US in 1997).

parley 13y ago

I seem to remember Elon Musk getting a question about SABRE at a post-talk Q&A a while back (probably in the UK, perhaps an inauguration ceremony of some institution), but now I can't find it. He was skeptical and had some constructive things to say, but I'm not a physicist so unfortunately I can't remember the specifics. If anyone else finds it, kindly reply with a link! EDIT: Found the video, but haven't yet found the specific time of the question. My connection is a bit slow, so jumping around in the stream isn't going so well. http://www.oxfordmartin.ox.ac.uk/videos/view/211 http://www.oxfordmartin.ox.ac.uk/videos/view/211 EDIT 2: Found it. Elon's reply is at 48:55.

arethuza 13y ago
Maybe he doesn't like it because it won't work on Mars? :-)

speeder 13y ago

Whoa, this is really awesome! For those that don't know, airbreathing engines are MUCH MORE efficient than conventional rocket engines. Not only in terms of weight saved from not having to lug around too much O2, but also because of the way it works inherently. I decided to make a space game once, with real world stuff on it, and settled for the Triton engine for my game spaceship, I did lots of research about rocket engines, and I was very sad when I compared them to airplane engines and it was clear how better they were, and yet useless in space. But I never had this idea of mixing both... It sounds so awesome that I cannot describe it. Also it allow some sci-fi stuff that is frequent but so far very broken (that is small fighter spaceship planes hybrids that can enter and leave atmosphere at will, that for now were usually handwaved by the author to explain that it has some weird super efficient rocket engine... with this tech that sort of stuff is less improbable)

stcredzero 13y ago
Not that much of a handwave, if you allow for energy storage as light and compact as antimatter. Engineering such a craft the size of a fighter might be quite difficult, though.
benl 13y ago
Are they really more efficient, for real world uses? The way I understand it, the argument goes something like this. To reach orbit you need to accelerate to very high speeds (Mach 25). To avoid crazy drag losses you therefore want to get out of the atmosphere as quickly as possible. So being able to use oxygen from the air on your way up is a marginal gain at best, and almost certainly not worth the extra complexity.
- willvarfar 13y ago
  Maybe they make most sense for military missiles?
- nemof 13y ago
  The primary benefit is weight reduction: http://www.reactionengines.co.uk/sabre_howworks.html http://www.reactionengines.co.uk/sabre_howworks.html This approach enables SABRE-powered vehicles to save carrying over 250 tons of on-board oxidant on their way to orbit, and removes the necessity for massive throw-away first stages that are jettisoned once the oxidant they contain has been used up, allowing the development of the first fully re-usable space access vehicles such as SKYLON.

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

tobiasu 13y ago

How and where does the nitrogen boiler(?) get its energy too cool helium to -170C at a constant rate? Is it effective to chill what must be ginormous amounts of air to -150C? It's all nice that the heat exchanger works, but where does that heat go? There's a large discrepancy between the inlet air temperature (1000C vs 20C) in the article. Somehow my sense for violation of the laws of thermodynamics is tingling.

pja 13y ago
In the tests it's presumably just a continuous flow of pre-cooled liquid nitrogen from a tank & the heated N2 is probably dumped into the environment. The design for a flight-capable engine is supposed to dump the waste heat into the fuel I believe.
arethuza 13y ago
They have details on their web site: http://www.reactionengines.co.uk/sabre_howworks.html http://www.reactionengines.co.uk/sabre_howworks.html My reading of their explanation is that in a full system they would "pre-burn" some of the hydrogen and oxygen also used to power the main rocket motor to power the cooling of the helium that then cools the intake air. [NB I have no idea whether that would actually work or not - just trying to interpret what their own explanation is!]
- tobiasu 13y ago
  Thanks for the link, this clears up a lot: http://www.reactionengines.co.uk/images/sabre/sabre_cycle_1024.jpg http://www.reactionengines.co.uk/images/sabre/sabre_cycle_10... There is no nitrogen in the system (not as consumable, anyway). Shoddy BBC reporting, as usual. The heat exchangers use chilled hydrogen fuel they have to take up anyway, before it is burned in the rocket motor. That makes a ton more sense.
  - arethuza 13y ago
    To be fair to the BBC, what they describe is the test setup that has actually run, not the design of the full engine - which they haven't built yet.

venomsnake 13y ago

I am a bit skeptical of any technology that uses helium. We just don't have viable ways to obtain reliably enough of the stuff reliably.

maxerickson 13y ago
It doesn't look like it consumes it. So we could probably build hundreds or thousands of these things without much trouble.
- DuskStar 13y ago
  As far as I can tell, the production version will use LH2 instead of Liquid Helium to cool the incoming air. (after which the Helium will be burned for thrust, no need to cool it back down) It's a similar to how most rocket engine nozzles are cooled.
  - venomsnake 13y ago
    You mean Hydrogen will be burned? Noble gases have hard time reacting. Except xenon with fluoride and nitrogen but you want to be away when these bonds break.
    - DuskStar 13y ago
      Ow, that's a bad mistake. Yeah, the Hydrogen fuel will both be used to cool the incoming air and burned for thrust. Looking back at that comment - how did I make that many typos?!?
arethuza 13y ago
Well, there is an expensive plant in France that will be manufacturing helium from raw materials ;-) http://www.iter.org/ http://www.iter.org/
- venomsnake 13y ago
  Nuclear fusion has always been 10 years away. Lets hope that they will succeed this time.

jotm 13y ago

Man, I really hope this engine works - they won't get a second chance if the prototype fails (which is a shame, since the concept is solid)... And that prototype plane/spaceship just looks cool as hell...

lifeisstillgood 13y ago

This made my day however: has passed an independent audit from European Space Agency experts, and Mr Osborne himself has inspected the test rig on the Culham science park in Oxfordshire. The ESA has verified the engine, but thank goodness, George Osbourne double checked it all, just in case those rocket scientists missed micro-fluctuations in heat transfer gradients. I mean they were probably all French anyway. George Osbourne (UK CFO/Treasury Secretary) is getting a lot of political flack, and having his name associated with UK home grown and based innovative technology is clearly something his press office wanted the BBC to know. Who were too lazy to cut the sentence.

colinm 13y ago
"Do you have one in green?"
- lmm 13y ago
  What are you talking about? The only thing I can think of is British racing green, and that's a bit of a stretch.
  - ris 13y ago
    I suspect it's a reference to Osbourne probably wanting to make a weapon out of it.
voicereason 13y ago
You clearly have something against Osborne. The UK government are investing the money. Osborne is the Chancellor of the Exchequer, why is it strange that he would be mentioned in the article as having a look at it? He's only getting political flak from socialists and welfare claimants really - no surprise there.
- JonnieCache 13y ago
  And those well known socialists, the IMF: http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2013/apr/18/george-osborne-imf-austerity http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2013/apr/18/george-osborn...

acd 13y ago

Sabre Air will eventually revolutionize internet communication so that it is possible to get internet access cheaply anywhere on earth. Commstellation a Canadian company are planning 72 micro satellites that will provide backbone capacity for cellphone towers. Latency will be in the 40 ms range. http://www.commstellation.com/ http://www.commstellation.com/ Currently smartphones become dumb phones as soon as you leave your country on vacation, in the future we will be able to connect to internet anywhere cheaply.

jpeg_hero 13y ago

The british are cute. that test rig looked like something the North Koreans would put together. this is no where near being a "real program"