Single Stage to Orbit: Politics, Space Technology, and the Quest for Reusable Rocketry

Winner of the Michael C. Robinson Prize for Historical Analysis given by the National Council on Public History

While the glories and tragedies of the space shuttle make headlines and move the nation, the story of the shuttle forms an inseparabe part of a lesser-known but no less important drama—the search for a reusable single-stage-to-orbit rocket. Here an award-winning student of space science, Andrew J. Butrica, examines the long and tangled history of this ambitious concept, from it fir...