Richard Varvill

Richard Varvill (born 1961) is a British engineer who served as Chief Designer, also called Technical Director, at Reaction Engines Limited, the company he co-founded in 1989. He was born in Hammersmith in west London, the son of a naval architect, and read mechanical engineering at the University of Bristol, where he completed an undergraduate apprenticeship at Rolls-Royce. He began his career with the Rolls-Royce Military Engine Division in its Advanced Projects group, working on preliminary ideas for what could have become the RB545 air-breathing rocket engine for the HOTOL spaceplane. At Reaction Engines he worked on the SABRE rocket engine, the successor to the RB545.