Rotary Rocket

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In the late 1990s, engineer Gary Hudson led an effort to privately develop a manned single-stage reusable orbital launch vehicle for the bubbling LEO communications satellite market of the '90s. The company was called Rotary Rocket, did some spectacular things before it went under due to a lack of funding in 2001, and you can read more about it here:
Rotary Rocket

If you'd prefer the corporate propaganda version, you can find that here (give the video a minute to get rolling):

The last decade of the 20th Century was something of a fool's golden age for commercial spaceflight. Rotary Rocket was one of several start-up aerospace companies that soaked up tens (and sometimes hundreds) of millions of dollars before folding. At the time several spacecraft ventures, most notably Iridium, seriously planned constellations of hundreds of satellites to enable global high-speed broadband communication. Keep in mind that this was the same decade that was bookended by the collapse of the Soviet Union and 9/11, when the media couldn't think of anything better to cover than El Nino and the sex life of the American president. People weren't really thinking straight during that whole decade, and the comsat bubble was just one symptom.

The thinking at the time was that hundreds of satellites were going to need a ride to low Earth orbit fast, and it simply wouldn't be economical to launch them on expendable rockets that charge north of $10,000 per pound to orbit. The great scandal of the space industry is that this cost is driven almost entirely by low launch rates and the cost of the vehicle that's dumped into the ocean after each flight, and though the technology has existed for decades to enable high-cadence low-cost reusable flight to LEO, no one has been willing to invest the capital to mature this technology into an operational system. Impatient at the pace of the government space agencies and legacy contractors, the start-ups sought to change this.

Rotary Rocket set out to accomplish an extremely difficult feat with nowhere near enough cash to finish the job. While the concept of a single rocket stage flying to orbit, delivering payload, and returning to Earth for refueling and relaunch soon after is simple enough, the vagaries of physics make such a vehicle almost impossible to design or build. Such a machine needs to be more than 90% propellant on launch, with structure, engines, payload, guidance and control systems, recovery gear, and (in the case of Rotary's Roton vehicle) crew accommodations stuffed into just a few percent of the initial launch mass. Hitting this mass target requires every technological and engineering trick imaginable, and even then there's debate over whether it can actually be done. Still, Rotary tried. You have to admit, what they lacked in funds they more than made up for with guts.

The most interesting feature of Rotary's rocket was its recovery system, from which the company derived its name. Rather than glide to a runway with wings, parachute like a capsule, or rocket to a screeching halt Buck Rogers-style, Rotary planned to use a set of deployable rotor blades powered by miniature hydrogen peroxide-propelled rocket at their tips to slow the vehicle to a gentle, precise decent to a helipad. Does this strategy really make sense? Rotary claimed it granted their rocket a significant recovery mass reduction relative to wings, but the fact that no one else in a highly speculative industry has had much to say on the concept suggests that it was as much a marketing gimmick as a physics strategy.

Still, it afforded the company an opportunity for some jaw-dropping photo opportunities. Working with what they had, Hudson et. al. built a full-scale replica of the Roton to simulate the last phase of descending flight. Flying this test vehicle could best be described as "challenging." The pilot-friendliness of flying machines is quantified by the Cooper-Harper scale, with a 1 representing excellent controllability at all times and 10 meaning that control loss is inevitable during operation. Every pilot who flew the Roton simulation rated it a perfectly awful 10, but still, flight is exactly what Roton did:

Brian Binnie, who co-piloted each flight of the Roton test vehicle, would earn his gold astronaut wings five years later while at Scaled Composites, when he piloted SpaceShipOne beyond the edge of the atmosphere for its triumphant X Prize winning flight. Much of the Rotary Rocket team is still working, their intellectual property alive elsewhere in the NewSpace industry. It's a shame things didn't work out for Rotary, but at least they gave the problem a decent shot.