[anymouse]

I got to see a DC-X flight, the one where a ground ignition of vented hydrogen gas blew a chunk of the DC-X off, yet it continued flying and did an emergency landing on unprepared Gypsum ground. Once again, Pete Conrad showed nerves of steel, piloting the DC-X in an off-nominal situation.

Blame Clintoon and his cronies for sabotaging DC-X and other technology that came out of the SDIO/BMDIO organization.

But Rotary Rocket's problems were their own making. They spent their money on building a fancy hanger, instead of flight hardware. The Rotary Rocket legacy lives on with Burt Rutan's Scaled Composites and XCOR.

[Spktyr]

Amen to that.

Rotary Rocket might have gone down the tubes all by themselves, eventually, but their demise was *greatly* hastened and assured by the hack job NASA did on them with the press. The situation was still very salvagable until that point.