Alan Bond (engineer)

Alan Bond (born 1944) is a British mechanical and aerospace engineer best known for advanced propulsion and spaceplane concepts. He worked on liquid rocket engines at Rolls-Royce, including the RZ.2 and RZ.20, and took part in flight trials of the Blue Streak missile at Woomera. He then spent about twenty years at the UK Atomic Energy Authority's Culham Laboratory on nuclear fusion research, while studying how fusion might power interplanetary travel, and he was the leading author of the British Interplanetary Society's Project Daedalus report on a fusion-powered starship. In the 1980s he was one of the creators of the HOTOL space plane, contributing a precooled jet engine design that became the Rolls-Royce RB545. In 1989 he formed Reaction Engines Limited with Richard Varvill and John Scott-Scott, where he served as managing director and where the Skylon space plane and the SABRE engine were developed. He retired from the company in late 2017.