I think that there's good science at RE, but they're facing a huge engineering task if they're to realise either Skylon or SABRE (or for that matter, Lapcat/Scimitar). Given the size of their staff, and the disparity between the funding they've secured and the funding they'll need, I think that it's highly unlikely that they'll successfully complete these projects.
re: Buran, my assumption has always been that it's parallel evolution rather than theft; if you want to build a reusable spaceplane with that general set of constraints, you'll end up with something that looks like the Shuttle.
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Date: 2007-11-14 09:35 am (UTC)re: Buran, my assumption has always been that it's parallel evolution rather than theft; if you want to build a reusable spaceplane with that general set of constraints, you'll end up with something that looks like the Shuttle.