Reaction Engines, a British company has developed an air-breathing hydrogen engine that could the future of air and space travel.

The company is based in Oxfordshire, and has just secured a €1m (£926,000) grant from the European Space Agency (ESA) to advance its Sabre propulsion system.

Sabre burns liquid hydrogen, like a conventional rocket engine, but unlike a rocket, Sabre does not also require a supply of liquid oxygen to operate inside the Earth’s atmosphere; instead it grabs, cools and compresses its own supply from the air itself.

Although developed for the Skylon pilotless-spaceplane project (artists impressions above), Sabre could be central to a new generation of hydrogen-fuelled aircraft.

Oil based jet fuel is clearly going to become less available within the next 10 to 20 years, and liquid-hydrogen fuel can be created from water, using electrolysis, and the Sabre’s only exhaust gas is steam.

The entire vehicle is re-usable, and does not require expensive, exotic materials for its construction. The British-designed Skylon requires only a small supply of liquid oxygen (for operation at heights above 25km) and is light enough to take off from a standing start on an ordinary runway.

“We could conduct a test flight in 2018 and be in operation by 2020,” said Mark Hempsell, the future programmes director at Reaction Engines.

But first the engine has to be perfected. The ESA cash brings Sabre’s total seed money to about £6m — peanuts compared with the estimated £4.3 billion spent by America’s Nasa on similar hydrogen-engine projects.

The Americans have little to show for their investment, however. Reaction Engines has working prototypes of two of Sabre’s key components: the pre-cooler that handles the rush of incoming air, and the turbo-compressor that condenses it before feeding it to the engine.

Hempsell said: “Hydrogen is the fuel of the future for aeroplanes. It’s green and it’s efficient — although you can’t force hydrogen engines onto existing planes. The trick is to start designing on a blank slate, as we have done with Skylon.”

This type of aircraft could have an incredible range of approximately 20,000 km at both subsonic and supersonic speeds and at it’s possible cruising speed of Mach 5, or about 3806 miles/6,125 kilometers per hour, would cut the average 22 hour flight from Brussels to Sydney down to 4.6 hours – with no carbon emissions. That’s assuming of course the hydrogen isn’t created using processes that generate CO2.