Reaction Engines crashes into administration

The aerospace company that for decades promised to make Britain a pioneer in hypersonic travel has collapsed into administration after failing in a last-ditch effort to secure funds.
About 170 of the 208 staff at Oxfordshire-based Reaction Engines were made redundant on Thursday by administrators from the accountancy firm PwC. In recent weeks, Reaction’s directors and management had been in talks to secure a £20 million lifeline from existing investors, including the United Arab Emirates’ Strategic Development Fund, and the leading British aerospace and defence groups, BAE Systems and Rolls-Royce.
Sarah O’Toole, a restructuring and insolvency specialist with PwC, said: “It is with great sadness that a pioneering company with a 35-year history of spearheading aerospace innovation has unfortunately been unable to raise the funding required to continue operations. We know this is a deeply uncertain and unsettling time for the company’s talented and dedicated employees.”
Reaction Engines was set up in 1989 to develop the Hotol (Horizontal Take-off and Landing) spaceplane championed by BAE, Rolls-Royce and the UK government throughout the 1980s. The Hotol plan promised a vehicle that could fly straight to orbit thanks to a hybrid jet/rocket engine, and land at conventional airports.
Its promoters claimed it would offer cheap access to space, and ultra-rapid transport across the globe, with travel from London to Sydney in just four hours. When official support waned, with the UK unable to persuade other European governments to join the programme, engineer Alan Bond set up Reaction to try to solve some of the technical challenges, in particular devising a suitable engine.
Reaction came close to running out of of funds several times, but was sustained by cash infusions from, at different times, BAE, Rolls-Royce, the Ministry of Defence, the UK’s National Security Strategic Investment Fund, the UAE investment fund, and several City fund managers, including Artemis, Schroders, Baillie Gifford, and the now defunct Woodford Investment Management.
Reaction’s key technology tried to tackle one of the chief obstacles to making engines work at hypersonic speeds greater than Mach 5. At that velocity, the incoming air is hot enough to melt engine components. Reaction had developed a cooler that could cut the temperature in fractions of a second. It undertook a successful demonstration of a Mach 3.5 engine in the US earlier this year.
Its demise comes just as other countries, notably China and the US are pouring public and private money into hypersonic research.