National Aerospace Plane

In his 1986 State of the Union speech to the U.S. Congress, President Ronald Reagan called for a "new Orient Express" -- this time not a train but a hypersonic airplane capable of Mach 25, which would let it fly from Washington, D.C. to Tokyo, Japan in only two hours.  The Rockwell X-30 was the most promising design for the National Aerospace Plane (NASP), as the project was called, but no full-size plane was ever built, as Congress was in a budget-cutting mood and cancelled the NASP in 1993.  This model at the Virginia Air and Space Center in Hampton shows the National Aerospace Plane in the red/white/blue "United States of America" livery commonly seen in concept art.