To the north, the main campus of NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility serves as home base for a range of aircraft used to conduct earth science research. On the mainland, the Wallops Geophysical Laboratory appears as a line of four white dots. A causeway and bridge connect the island with the Delmarva peninsula.
A variety of launch-related infrastructure is visible along the coast, including rocket storage and assembly buildings, launch pads, and protective sea walls. The Operational Land Imager (OLI) on Landsat 8 captured this image of Wallops Island and the surrounding area on May 3, 2014. Both the Antares and Cygnus were built by Orbital Sciences Corporation, a Virginia-based aerospace company. The Antares will carry an unmanned Cygnus spacecraft loaded with 3,293 pounds (1,493 kilograms) of supplies to the International Space Station. Weather permitting, the Antares or its contrail will be visible in Washington, DC, after 90 seconds in Philadelphia after 120 seconds in New York City after 150 seconds and in Boston after 210 seconds. At that time, a thirteen-story Antares rocket is scheduled to lift off from launch pad 0A. Residents from South Carolina to Massachusetts should have an opportunity to see one of these larger rockets if they look toward the island starting at 12:52 p.m. While most involved modestly-sized meteorological and sounding rockets, the completion of launch pad 0A at the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport (MARS) in 2011 has made it possible to launch larger and more powerful rockets. Since then, more than 14,000 rockets have lifted off.
On July 4, 1945, NASA’s predecessor-the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA)-launched the first rocket from Wallops, making the island one of the oldest launch sites in the world. Today, the island is the site of a thriving spaceport that launches several commercial and government rockets each year. Loaded with nearly 8,000 pounds of research, crew supplies, and hardware, Northrop Grumman’s Cygnus cargo spacecraft will launch on the company’s Antares rocket from Virginia Space’s Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport at NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia.More than seventy year ago, wild ponies roamed the marshes and beaches of Wallops Island, a barrier island on Virginia’s Eastern Shore.
Wallops island rocket launch schedule 2020 how to#
How to view the Northrop Grumman CRS-14 launch The launch may be visible, weather permitting and depending on other local conditions (such as elevation), to residents up and down the East Coast of the United States. Viewing is dependent upon weather conditions and other factors, such as elevation and the extent to which one’s view of the horizon is obstructed. The numbers in each colored circle represent the number of seconds after liftoff that the launch might become visible in the associated region. Photo Credit: NASA Wallops/Patrick Black Map of the Mid-Atlantic showing predictions for visibility of the NG CRS-14 launch from NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia. 1, 2020, at NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia. A Northrop Grumman Antares rocket loaded with the company’s Cygnus resupply spacecraft is seen on the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport’s Pad-0A, Thursday, Oct. The five-minute launch window opens at 9:38 p.m. NASA commercial cargo provider Northrop Grumman is targeting tonight for the launch of its 14th resupply mission to the International Space Station. The countdown has started for the launch of Northrop Grumman’s Antares rocket carrying a Cygnus spacecraft with nearly 8,000 pounds of cargo and supplies for the International Space Station.
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