I like to think an Aurora or two is flying around out there somewhere. The NASP was ambitious as a mach 25 vehicle (low earth orbit) and great strides were made to achieve that end. There were six enabling technologies to make that happen and I know at least three had been completed by 1997. I slipped up in a meeting once and called it Hyperspace, boy the laughs I got on that one. Streaking across the sky like a meteor sure seemed like Hyperspace to me. Thay called us Naspeteers, welcome to the club Dr. Schweikart. Thanks for the history and links everyone.
You are so right. The program DID get a) liquid hydrogen-—we made it, pumped it, stored it, and got it to be an effective fuel; b) VERY advanced materials, including some that are still classified; and c) computational fluid dynamics-—which can take SOME of the place of testing. But the biggie was the scramjet-—the rest of it was meaningless if we couldn’t get the scrammie to work.