Groucho Marx once said that 80% of success was just showing up. In a program with such lofty goals as sending a jet aircraft into orbit, one might hope to define success in more demanding terms. Yet in many ways, the National Aerospace Plane program, which originated in the early 1980s with the intention of designing and fabricating a jet aircraft that could fly fast enough to attain orbital velocity, is considered a success by many of the participants. This is a book on the hypersonic revolution that contains case studies in the history of hypersonic technology. More specifically that quest for the Orbital Jet