SKY-HIGH HOPES FOR FUTURE OF WALLOPS; VA., MD. OFFICIALS FORESEE BUSY NICHE FOR LAUNCH FACILITY
BYLINE: Frank D. Roylance, Sun reporter
The Dec. 11 blastoff of one of the most powerful rockets ever launched from NASA's Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia could also boost the region's ambition to become a commercial spaceport.
With good weather, the morning flight of the 69-foot, four-stage Minotaur I rocket should be visible for hundreds of miles as it rises to place two satellites into an orbit 254 miles high.
If it's successful, the spacecraft will be the first in 21 years to reach orbit from Wallops Island, just south of Assateague Island. The last attempt, in 1995, ended in a spectacular, explosive failure 48 seconds after liftoff.
The December launch will also be the inaugural flight from the little-known Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport (MARS).
The commercial launch pad was built on NASA property in 1998 by the Virginia Commercial Space Flight Authority. Maryland joined the venture in 2004 to help spur growth of the aerospace and launch service industries on both sides of the state line.
Launch preparations at MARS have generated as many as 100 jobs in the area, according to Aris Melissaratos, Maryland's secretary of business and economic development. And he hopes that's just a beginning.
"We'll see it grow," he said.
The Air Force says it has contracted for two more Minotaur launches from MARS in 2007, and others are in development for liftoff in 2009.
"I believe there's the potential for launches out of Wallops that would resupply the International Space Station after the [space] shuttle has outlived its usefulness," Melissaratos said.
That could eventually mean six to eight launches per year with heavy-lift rockets - Delta-class vehicles more than three times the size of the Minotaur 1, said Spaceport Manager Rick Baldwin.
"That's quite a change," he said. "It would be a phenomenal benefit for the Eastern Shore of Maryland and Virginia, and both states in total."
But first, MARS' inaugural customer, Orbital Sciences Inc. of Dulles, Va., will have to get the Minotaur's two satellites into orbit.
One is an 814-pound Air Force "micro-satellite" called TacSat2. Its $18 million mission is to demonstrate that the Air Force can design a satellite, build it and get it launched and operational - all in just 15 months.
Today's military satellites can take 10 years or more from concept to launch, at a cost in the billions. And they soon become technologically obsolete.
Eleven TacSat experiments will test gear for telescopic photography; precision navigation, ground communications, detection of radar, radio and hand-held communications, and identification of ships at sea, according to an Air Force Research Laboratory spokesman.
Also hitching a ride will be the 22-pound GeneSat1, a biological experiment developed by NASA's Ames Research Center in California. It will carry harmless E. coli bacteria in a miniature laboratory designed to study genetic changes in space - a concern for humans on long-duration space flights.
The fate of the two satellites will hinge on the performance of the hybrid Minotaur launch vehicle, configured by Orbital.
Its first two stages are Minuteman intercontinental ballistic missiles, retired from the nation's nuclear arsenal under arms reductions treaties and reassigned to orbit government payloads.
The third and fourth stages are off-the-shelf Pegasus XL rockets, normally launched from high-flying aircraft to put small satellites into orbit. The entire 69-foot "stack" can lift up to 1,500 pounds to low Earth orbit.
In five launches, none has failed. "It's an innovative way to ... produce a very low-cost rocket that's reliable and available today to launch government satellites," said Orbital spokesman Barry Beneski.
The Wallops Flight Facility is best known for its work with sub-orbital rockets and balloons, mostly for government-sponsored military, science and weather research. More than 15,000 rockets have been launched there since the first blastoff in July 1945.
Of the total, only 27 have been orbital missions, according to Wallops spokesman Keith Koehler.
Four of 21 ground-launched satellites failed to reach orbit, he said. Six other spacecraft have been launched by aircraft flown offshore from Wallops' airfield, the most recent in 1999.
The most recent orbital launch attempt from a pad at Wallops was on Oct. 23, 1995. METEOR-1 blasted off atop a 52-foot, 100-ton Conestoga 1620 rocket - the first commercial rocket ever launched from Wallops and the biggest ever.
Liftoff looked perfect. But 48 seconds into the flight, one of the 52-foot rocket's six strap-on boosters malfunctioned, and a NASA range safety officer pushed the button that blasted the remaining motors apart. Smoky debris rained down from several miles above the ocean.
No one was hurt, but the mishap ended the $75 million commercial venture and pulverized 14 on-board experiments designed by government, commercial and university researchers.
The Wallops Flight Facility has been a part of the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt since 1982. It currently launches about 40 rockets per year, Koehler said, but its fortunes have waxed and waned with the space program, the aerospace industry and NASA's budget. At one point in the mid-1990s, the government considered closing it.
But officials at the Virginia Commercial Space Flight Authority argued for its survival. At the time, they saw economic development potential in the demand for the commercial launch of small- to medium-sized payloads, chiefly for the portable telephone industry.
"But there was a race between space-based and terrestrial solutions," Baldwin said. Cell towers won out over satellite phones. "That certainly changed the market dramatically."
So, the Virginia authority switched its marketing focus to rapid-response, low-cost access to orbit for payloads under 10,000 pounds, plus cargo services for the International Space Station.
Those markets have been slow to develop, too, but might be about to bear fruit. As more countries put spacecraft into orbit, the Pentagon has grown concerned about the vulnerability of the billion-dollar communications, navigation and spy satellites that give U.S. armed forces an edge over their adversaries.
So U.S. military planners are looking for ways to put new satellites into orbit more quickly and cheaply. That effort led directly to the TacSat project.
At the same time, NASA has been looking for private companies to resupply the International Space Station using unmanned cargo rockets once the space shuttle fleet is retired in 2010. So this fall MARS began a $500,000, federally funded study to see how it might help fulfill that mission.
In addition to its proximity to Washington, key high-tech and aerospace companies and other NASA facilities, Wallops Island could be uniquely situated to supply the space station, according to MARS boosters.
To accommodate its Russian partners, NASA agreed to construct the station in an orbit accessible from Russian launch facilities as far north as 51.6 degrees north latitude. That's as far north as Calgary, Alberta, or Kiev in the Ukraine.
Consequently, to reach the station from Cape Canaveral, NASA has to chase it on the northeastward, or "ascending," leg of its orbit, flying up the East Coast and over Europe.
Wallops' northerly location, Baldwin said, would allow supply rockets to chase the space station on a more energy-efficient trajectory along the "descending," southeastward leg of the station's orbit. The rocket would also do its climb over the empty Atlantic.
Wallops is also one of just five federally licensed sites for commercial launches to orbit, and the Virginians were the first to recognize its commercial potential. The state organized the Virginia Commercial Space Flight Authority in 1995, acquired a federal launch license in 1997 and built a $3.6 million commercial launch pad in 1998.
With the state line less than 15 miles from Wallops' gate, Maryland officials eventually proposed a marriage in 2002, after Sen. Barbara A. Mikulski helped to bring together the states' newly elected governors - Robert L. Ehrlich Jr. and Mark Warner. They signed the merger agreement in 2004.
Maryland's contribution has been $150,000 a year toward MARS' administrative costs, Melissaratos said. More important, perhaps, was the added political weight of Maryland's congressional delegation.
When the new, Democratic-controlled Congress takes over in January, Mikulski will become chairwoman of the appropriations subcommittee that oversees NASA's budget.
By joining forces behind MARS, the two states hope to attract more business and bring high-paying aerospace jobs to the Eastern Shore, diversifying an economy long dependent on the water, the beach and agriculture.
"Industry itself will drive it," Melissaratos said. "If they succeed on the first [launch], many more will come."
Even with the risk of a very public failure, he said, "it's good to have it go on in our neighborhood."
For more on the TacSat2 launch, visit www.wff.nasa.gov/tacsat2/