From the time Gary Hudson was a boy of seven, all he wanted to do was to travel into space. Between 1970 and 1996, he founded and disbanded five rocket companies in pursuit of that dream. In 1997, he launched the sixth. Rotary Rocket was formed to develop and build the Roton, a manned, single-stage-to-orbit, fully reusable rocket that would zoom any one of us to and from space. Revolutionary in concept, the Roton was built by a half-brilliant, half-crazy team as obsessed with its goal as Hudson. In these pages journalist Elizabeth Weil tells the true story of the Roton: at once the tale of its creator, the engineers who would build it, the pilots who would fly it, the possibilities it would unleash--and what actually happened when at last it left the ground.