Nash is not dismayed. As the executive director of the Virginia Commercial Space Flight Authority, which owns the launchpad that the rocket sits on, he is enjoying a banner year—and enjoying the moment. Members of his staff weave through the crowd distributing information sheets and stickers. "We're having four launches in four months," he says. "We hope to have more."
The spaceport at Wallops Island, Va., is emerging as a hub of the launch industry. Wallops is larger and much better established than the newbie spaceports rising in places like New Mexico, Michigan, and Indiana. It was founded in 1945, well before NASA even existed, and is the oldest continuous rocket launch range in the United States. NASA nearly shut the place down in the mid-1990s, but today Wallops is home to a flurry of launch activity. After this mission, set to take off tonight at midnight, the spaceport is hosting an unmanned spacecraft shot to the International Space Station, its second of the year. In the fall it will launch a Pentagon satellite. Staff here regularly pop off sounding rockets, small vehicles that can take payloads to space but cannot reach orbit.
Wallops is dwarfed in size and attention by Cape Canaveral in Florida, which enjoys infrastructure dividends from the space-shuttle era such as long runways and huge buildings. Canaveral also neighbors very active Air Force launch sites and already provides for several prominent private space launch players. The pads there have the infrastructure and toughness to withstand heavier rockets.
"We have less capability but we're more flexible and more responsive," Nash tells PM, undeterred. That responsiveness is on display behind him as Wallops prepares for this $280 million lunar mission—its first deep-space launch. The spaceport authority upgraded Pad 0B for the LADEE moonshot by increasing the surface area with 4600 square feet of reinforced concrete, extending the gantry height to accommodate the Minotaur V, and supplying 500- and 200-ton cranes that can hoist sections of the rocket during its on-pad assembly.
Advances in power systems, propulsion, and communications could enable the creation of highly capable spacecraft that don't need massive rockets to loft them. The LADEE spacecraft inside the Minotaur V's nose cone is small for its type, constructed in an attempt by NASA's Ames to create smaller, cheaper spacecraft that are modular. Wallops is a beneficiary of that attempt, as the 7-foot-tall spacecraft can fit in a relatively small rocket. Smaller payloads are good news for Virginia's space industry.
Another advantage for Wallops: While the spaceport does not have a good path into geosynchronous orbit—for that destination, the closer to the equator the better—it offers the correct inclination to get to low Earth orbit (LEO), and that means access to the International Space Station.
And Wallops is well-positioned for the coming changes at NASA, thanks in part to actions by the agency and by state legislators. In late 1997 the FAA issued the Virginia Commercial Space Flight Authority a license to operate a commercial spaceport colocated at the NASA flight facility at Wallops Island. State legislators changed laws to ease insurance burdens. Regional congressmen made sure federal land was transferred to the state for launch-related activities.
The work seems to have paid off, for now. In early 2013 an Orbital Antares rocket lifted from this spaceport as part of a $1.9 billion NASA contract to resupply the ISS, a job Orbital shares with Elon Musk's SpaceX. SpaceX, which flies its rockets from the Florida coast, got to the ISS first in 2012, but two weeks from now, Orbital will try to dock its Cygnus capsule with the station, signaling that it, too, can replace U.S. and Russian government providers. The ISS delivery contract lasts until 2015, but NASA will issue more contracts to one or both companies throughout the life of the ISS, at least until 2020.
The success of Orbital means the success of the spaceport. "I like to say all our wagons are tied together," Bill Wrobel, flight facility director at Wallops, tells PM. "We all know that we have to do what we can to support each other.
The hope within NASA, and the wider space industry and community, is that there will be enough commerce in space to keep several spaceports afloat. But nothing is certain. If space tourism becomes a real industry, if NASA can maintain funding and discover how to perform fiscally lean missions, and if the ISS remains functional past 2020—then this scrappy spaceport could become much larger in stature.
"It's looking pretty good," Wrobel says, "if the missions continue to come."