The stimulus for President Reagan’s “Orient Express” came from Scott Crossfield, an aviation pioneer and the first man to fly at hypersonic speeds in the airplane-launched X-15 test aircraft. Crossfield believed that we could develop a Mach 25 airplane and actually was hoping that he would be the first test-pilot to fly it. He wrote to the President in 1985, and Reagan got very interested in such a capability for a very different reason than flying around the world in less than an hour. At the time, President Reagan was assembling his Star Wars program that was expressly designed to overwhelm the Soviet Union in terms of defense capabilities. While there were many weapons-based capabilities already in the Star Wars portfolio, a Mach 25 hypersonic airplane was a real stretch-goal, but one that clearly had weapon potential. So Reagan bought into the program and showcased it in his State of the Union address. Crossfield was asked if such a plane could go from the US to Asia in a few minutes and when he said yes, the speechwriter nicknamed it the “Orient Express”.
While no one can prove that the Star Wars effort and the NASP program was really what led to the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early nineties, it certainly contributed to their realization that it was futile to continue the arms race with the United States. And so, all of us who worked on developing the aerospace plane feel that we contributed to something that changed the world. Our motto was “The sky is not the limit,” because we were literally trying to fly beyond the atmosphere into outer space. And the paradigm that was created during the NASP program, that we can change the world, has stayed with most of us ever since.
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