for a hypersonic space plane--still at least a decade away-- the X-30.
But no such mundane designation would satisfy Andrei Petrovich Androv,
devoted disciple of the ancients. He had long believed the Americans
were high-tech vulgarians with no poetry in their soul, no sense of
history.
Across the towering tail assembly of both aircraft was an insignia that
symbolized the joining of two of the world's great superpowers, a
double ax. And along their titanium-composite fuselage was lettered a
single word, in Cyrillic characters. Andrei Androv had insisted on that
name, in celebration of the first human ever to soar above the earth,
the dream of ancient man. Now, he had declared, four thousand years
later, there was another dream, his dream, a hypersonic vehicle that
could loft man directly into space from anywhere on the planet.
He had dreamed that dream. And the Mino Industries Group had permitted
him to pick the name for the creation that would realize it, for the
miracle that would master time and space, the earth itself . . .