Rotary Rocket vertical assembly building

Roton was a concept developed in the late 1990s as a fully reusable Single Stage to Orbit (SSTO) manned spacecraft. Roton was intended to reduce costs of launching payloads into low earth orbit by a factor of ten. Gary Hudson championed the design and formed the startup Rotary Rocket, Inc, headquartered in a 45,000-square-foot facility at Mojave Airport. A full-scale test vehicle made three hover flights in 1999, but the company ran out of funds and closed its doors in early 2001.