Source: The Daily Press, Hampton, VA
For more than 50 years, NASA Wallops has been internationally recognized as having the world’s premier suborbital research launch site and the world’s foremost suborbital research launch team. Today Wallops Island is in transition from what was, and still is, a significant NASA sounding rocket program to a full-fledged international commercial spaceport. This time next year, commercial space launch contractor Orbital Sciences Corp. will lead an international team consisting of Americans, Russians, Ukrainians, Italians, Canadians, Spaniards, French, Dutch, Germans and Japanese in building a booster rocket and payload capsule that will fly from the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport at Wallops Island to the International Space Station to leave supplies and cargo, and to depart with whatever needs disposal by its international tenants on-orbit.
The launch of the Taurus-2 booster with the Cygnus spacecraft will mark significant change for Wallops from the dark October days of 15 years ago when the first commercial rocket, the Conestoga, departed the space island launch complex only to explode 46 seconds into the first flight. The Taurus-2 must be on the money if space commerce is to take root permanently in Virginia. New billions of dollars of space cargo delivery contracts may be in the offing if the international launch team of Taurus scores well with international space cargo delivery. There is growing confidence that the launch team will meet the critical milestones to do just that.
Wallops Island — the new space island — is the place to speculate about the budding dawn of a commercial space future, such as the one proposed by Bigelow Aerospace’s attorney Mike Gold on a recent visit to Wallops (“Bigelow Aerospace eyes Wallops Island,” April 10).
Robert Bigelow, the owner of a commercial space applications enterprise and a real estate mogul, seeks to build privately owned inflatable space stations and provide people from around the globe to conduct microgravity research. Bigelow already has two unmanned stations orbiting the Earth daily, now launched from the Dombarovkiy missile base, near Yasniy, Russia. He has publicly pledged $500 million of his personal wealth to develop the on-orbit business model and potential partnering with United Launch Alliance, the makers of the well-proven Lockheed Martin Atlas-V booster.
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