A rocket that looks like a cross between a giant ice cream cone and a helicopter lifted eight feet off the ground last week, adding strength to hopes that reusable rockets may one day transport humans and cargo to space as routinely as airplanes do to cities.

Rotary Rocket Companys conical launch vehicle, called the Roton, used its four propeller blades to lift it to a height of eight feet, hover for a few seconds, and land gently enough to keep all systems intact.

This Roton is only a tester; the real thing would launch like a traditional rocket -- burning fuel -- but land vertically, using the propellers to slow its speed. The lift-and-land test was done to assess the feasibility of the final stage of the landing, which the company says is the most difficult of all.

"The last six inches are the exciting ones," says Rotary Rocket spokesman Geoffrey Hughes. "We've demonstrated that you can land this thing."

The Roton was piloted on July 23 by a team of two retired Navy commanders, Brian Binnie and Dr. Marti Sarigul-Klijn, who are also, respectively, the company's flight test director and chief engineer.

The mini-lift off makes Rotary Rockets the first of a new batch of reusable rocket companies to build a vehicle and get it off the ground. While reusable rockets have been around for decades in some form, Rotary and its competitors, including Kistler Aerospace Corp. and Kelly Space & Technology, are promising launches so cheap that they could revolutionize the space flight landscape.

If launches will be as inexpensive as these companies say they'll be -- Rotary says it can fly profitably selling space on the rocket for $1,000 per pound, as compared with up to $10,000 per pound on the shuttle -- blasting off could become routine enough for microgravity manufacturing and space tourism industries to develop.

"We want to bring space travel to ordinary people," Hughes says. The company claims it will eventually be able to provide an outer space vacation for the price of a luxury car.

The trick to low cost blast offs are manifold, and Rotary Rockets claims to have them all: full reusability, cheap fuel (the Roton uses kerosene instead of the more expensive liquid hydrogen), and uncomplicated operation. The Roton goes from the ground to orbit in a single stage, unlike other rockets which require a second post-launch blastoff to make it up.

Further, the company says the Roton is built to fly profitably carrying only around half its capacity. Most other rockets stay grounded until they're filled.

"They're designed for the wrong paradigm," Hughes says. "They can only operate loaded, and you can't do that all the time. Our vehicle is designed with the commercial aircraft paradigm in mind. We can fly profitably with load factors of 50 percent or less."

So what's holding back the Roton? Rotary Rockets is now set to work on the Roton's engine, but the more pressing issue is a lack of money. The company says it needs to raise $150 million to build and launch a prototype vehicle.

"Rocket science is rocket science, but rocket finance is by far the hardest part of the equation," he said.