An Orbital ATK Antares rocket successfully launched a Cygnus cargo spacecraft packed with supplies and equipment for the International Space Station Nov. 12.
Vector, an Arizona-based company that has done test flights from California and Georgia, announced Oct. 19 it plans to make its first orbital launch from a Virginia site as soon as next summer.
A Virginia-owned launchpad damaged in October when Orbital ATK’s Antares rocket exploded moments after liftoff is almost fixed, but the company is at loggerheads with the state and the federal government over who should pay the last $2 million owed in repairs.
Tucked away in the $1.1 trillion omnibus spending bill the U.S. House of Representatives passed Thursday night (Dec. 11) is $20 million for repairs at the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport on Wallops Island, Virginia.
After the failure of an Orbital Sciences Corp. Antares rocket caused as much as $20 million in damage to a state-owned launch pad, Virginia’s two U.S. senators said they may seek federal funds to cover repair costs.
The Antares launch site on Wallops Island suffered some damage from the Oct. 28 Antares launch failure, but escaped major damage.
Should Orbital convert its Antares rocket into an all-solid-fuel vehicle, the company will have to overhaul its launch infrastructure on Virginia’s eastern shore and figure out how to comply with a NASA launch safety rule written to protect area bystanders from broken glass.
Planet Labs sent triple cubesats Dove 3 and Dove 4 into polar orbit on a Dnepr rocket from Russia’s Yasny launch site.
The Wallops launch facility is getting ready to send a second small satellite into orbit this year.
Second of nine pressurized cargo-supply modules Thales Alenia is building for Orbital Sciences Corp. arrives at the company's Wallops Island, Va., facility.
Military radars would be compromised if the Biomass radar flew over them.
WASHINGTON — Orbital Sciences Corp., one of two companies under contract to fly cargo to the international space station for NASA, has been cleared by the U.S. space agency to begin launch pad operations at the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport (MARS) on Wallops Island, Va.
WASHINGTON — Orbital Sciences Corp., under a new agreement with the state of Virginia, formally committed to 10 launches of its yet-unflown Antares rocket from the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport (MARS) on Wallops Island, Va.
NASA has tapped Millennium Engineering and Integration Co. of Arlington, Va., to provide launch range and institutional safety support at the agency’s Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia under a five-year contract worth as much as $25 million, the U.S. space agency announced Aug. 31.
Florida’s space industry “is losing any sense of fair play” as it seeks to undermine Virginia as a competitor in commercial human spaceflight by influencing an environmental study of upgrades at NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility, Jack Kennedy, a former member of the Virginia General Assembly, writes in an Oct. 10 op-ed in the Richmond Times-Dispatch.
U.S. lawmakers are set to consider legislation to remove restrictions on a 32-acre parcel near NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility so it can be developed into a research park — a measure that, unlike most land transfer bills, is far from routine business, The Washington Post reports.
