It's stupid of me to bite but just FYI that picture is of the Challenger explosion and "Disintegration of the vehicle began after an
O-ring seal in its right
solid rocket booster (SRB) failed at liftoff." So the carrying of hydrogen + oxygen was not the cause of the accident and, presumably, the event would have been fatal with or without the main fuel tank.
It's really the ability to operate repeatedly like an aeroplane without throwing bits off that makes Skylon of interest - it can be tested progressively and each flight is not a from-scratch untested vehicle. Mr Varville said in his talk that the failure rate of rockets is about a million times more than that of a civil aircraft. The idea of Skylon is to bring space launch closer to that civil aircraft reliability. So essentially if you want to see more explosions then by all means carry on launching expendable rockets.