The Sabre engine is being developed by UK firm Reaction Engines and could herald a new era of space flight, opening up access to space as never before and slashing long-haul flight times.
Sabre will make it possible to build a "single-stage-to-orbit" spaceplane because it can operate both as an air-breathing jet engine and a rocket engine. Reaction Engines calls its spaceplane Skylon.
Alok Jha meets Stuart Clark – the astronomy journalist and writer behind the Guardian's Across The Universe blog – to discuss the revolutionary technology and the implications of the UK government's £60m investment in Reaction Engines announced last week.
To round up this week's big science news stories, Alok is joined by Observer science editor Robin McKie, Guardian science correspondent Ian Sample and cosmo-chemist Dr Natalie Starkey. The team discusses the breakthrough in "genome editing" that could one day lead to a chromosome therapy for Down's syndrome, and what the latest data from the Curiosity rover on Mars can tell us about the Red Planet's original atmosphere before a planetary cataclysm struck four billion years ago.
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