![]() There, it began launching rockets with scale models of aircraft on top. In 1945, NASA’s predecessor organization, the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA), established the Pilotless Aircraft Research Station on Wallops Island. NASA Wallops Flight Facility, Accomack County Research and Rockets It all started with suborbital sounding rocket launches. The community is expanding as MARS adds more commercial space flights, including an upcoming mission to the moon. An estimated additional 4,152 people work in the surrounding area as a direct result of activity at Wallops. “It’s between commercial entities vying for commercialized space.”Īltogether, Wallops directly employs 1,940 people. “The space race today isn’t between countries,” Pierce says of the significance of the commercial nature of the spaceport. The Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport (MARS), a commercial space launch facility, has made its home at Wallops since its establishment in 1995. The facility serves not just NASA, but tenants that include the Navy, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and the Federal Aviation Administration. “We think our facility is a unique national asset - for NASA and the nation,” says NASA’s Dave Pierce, director of the Wallops Flight Facility. It’s NASA’s only launch range, which is the authority responsible for flight safety and approval for launches (Cape Canaveral’s launch range falls under the 45th Space Wing of the Space Force), and it’s a significant economic engine for the region. It’s a lesser-known, but no less critical, launch site up the coast on Virginia’s Eastern Shore: the Wallops Flight Facility. No, this isn’t Cape Canaveral on the Florida coast. It was the 13th cargo mission to the orbiting outpost to lift off from this spaceport on the Eastern Seaboard of the United States. Onboard were 7,500 pounds of equipment and supplies bound for the International Space Station. With the Atlantic Ocean tumbling against a beach just a stone's throw away, a flight director counted down to liftoff.Īt “Ignition,” the rocket’s two first- stage engines erupted fire.Ī second later, the pad’s hold-down clamps released the rocket, and it thundered into the sky. ![]() On a chilly, cloud-streaked day in February, a 133-foot-tall rocket sat on a launchpad, venting steam from its liquid oxygen tanks.
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