The Roton rocket was an early (and hilarious) attempt at making re-usable rockets. From Wikipedia:

Rotary Rocket Company was a rocketry company that developed the Roton concept in the late 1990s as a fully reusable single-stage-to-orbit (SSTO) crewed spacecraft. [...] The Roton was intended to reduce costs of launching payloads into low earth orbit by a factor of ten.