credit Flight / caption: HOTOL was cancelled later that year
Hyperbola has gained access to declassified files about the UK Horizontal Take-Off and Landing (HOTOL) spaceplane that was first announced in August 1984. One of the files' papers is a memo to the then UK prime minister Margaret Thatcher about the Ronald Reagan administration's interest in participating in an international venture to develp a HOTOL spaceplane. In the extended portion of this blog you can see a key part of that memo, in which it says a prototype HOTOL "could be flying as early as 1990"
You can find Flight's cutaways and articles about HOTOL here. Next week Flightglobal.com will have a news analysis article about the declassified files and the links between HOTOL and the new UK rocket engine technology programme
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on February 20, 2009 10:28 PM | Reply
That could be the mythical(?) Aurora. The timescale and the size of the alleged budget hole and the sonic boom track in 1991 roughly lines up with what could be possible. Or not ;-)
on February 23, 2009 9:32 AM | Reply
No. As you will see from the article I am working on at the moment, the UK-US co-opeation didn't occur in the end. I have heard from those who have been close to the HOTOL team that president Ronald Reagan's 1986 speech (http://reagan2020.us/speeches/state_of_the_union_1986.asp) that led to the X-30 project was thought to have been triggered by the UK HOTOL proposals. Although NASA sources also report that (http://history.nasa.gov/monograph31.pdf) X-30 had its origins in the DARPA Copper Canyon programme. IMHO all hypersonic SSTO projects are simply disguised hypersonic missile programmes. And their primary use is anti-ICBM and anti-ship (aircraft carrier).
on February 25, 2009 7:10 PM | Reply
There's also the Blackstar stuff. That was described as a mothership with a rocket slung underneath. I think I can make a convincing case that they could have used, and would have wanted to use, and would have been able to use, HOTOL-style tech for the mothership; but I'm reluctant to speculate further in case I get it right ;-)
Whether they actually did, maybe we'll find out in another 5 years or so.
on February 26, 2009 10:11 AM | Reply
I think you'll find that the £3 million for the two-year proof of concept study was spent from early 1986 onwards but the £25 million hurdle for the follow-on feasibiilty study that probably needed to be green lit in early 1987 was never approved as months before the November 1987 ESA meeting that approved the development of Ariane 5 it would have been known that that was the outcome. I am guessing that the proof of concept study probably also confirmed people's worst fears about the scale of the engineering task they had set themselves.