Northrop Grumman | Exo News

Virginia’s Wallops Island Spaceport Seeks to Increase Launch Activity

June 28, 2021
ExoNews Editor

Article by Jeff Foust June 13, 2021 (spacenews.com)

• When the chief executive of the of the Virginia Commercial Space Flight Authority which operates the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport (MARS) at Wallops Island on the Virginia Coast, Dale Nash, decided to retire, the authority convened a search committee to select Nash’s successor. On June 10th, Virginia Governor Ralph Northam and the chairman of the board of the authority Jeff Bingham announced that Roosevelt “Ted” Mercer Jr., a retired Air Force major general, will be the next chief executive and executive director of the Virginia Commercial Space Flight Authority starting August 1st.

• In his 32 years in the Air Force, Mercer held a variety of space-related roles including commanding the 30th Space Wing at Vandenberg Air Force Base and serving as deputy director of operations for Air Force Space Command. Mercer retired from the Air Force in 2008. Mercer has since served as director of the Interagency Program Office for the Federal Aviation Administration’s ‘NextGen’ program to modernize management of the national airspace system.

• Northam said of Mercer: “Under his leadership, Virginia is poised to maximize the investments we have made in our world-class spaceport and launch into the future as a leader in space exploration, research and commerce.” Indeed, Mercer said that growing the spaceport’s launch business was second only to looking out for the needs of spaceport personnel. Mercer plans to “get aggressive” about bringing more customers to the MARS spaceport.

• The two existing MARS launchpads currently accommodate Northrop Grumman’s two Antares launches a year sending Cygnus cargo spacecraft to the International Space Station, and occasional launches of Minotaur rockets for various government missions.

• But another player has recently begun to operate at Wallops Island – Rocket Lab. The company built a launchpad for its Electron rocket, and in March, it announced it would launch its new medium-class Neutron rocket from Wallops as well. Getting both Electron and Neutron flying regularly from MARS could dramatically increase launch activity. Electron is designed to launch as frequently as once a month, while Neutron may launch six to eight times a year. “Between the Northrop Grumman launches and the Rocket Lab launches, we could be easily doing 20, 25 launches a year within a couple of years,” Nash predicted.

• Certification of an autonomous flight termination system required by NASA will delay the Electron, however. The first Electron launch from Wallops, originally scheduled for 2020, could slip to as late as November.

• Mercer wants to attract additional launch companies to Wallops. “The opportunity to grow in the next one to five years is extraordinary,” he said, citing interest in small satellites from both companies and government organizations like the Pentagon’s Space Development Agency. “I want MARS to be the place of choice for some of these companies that want to get their satellites into orbit.”

• MARS will have to complete with other spaceports for that launch business, in particular Florida’s Cape Canaveral Space Force Station and Kennedy Space Center. Mercer suggested he would be open to building additional launch infrastructure at MARS if there is demand for it. Nash said NASA’s master plan for Wallops includes the ability to add two or three more launchpads, which could potentially accommodate larger launch vehicles than Antares and Neutron. The state of Virginia has more than $250 million in building the Wallops Island facility.

• But Mercer noted that there are limits to how large MARS could grow. “Will we ever become a Cape Canaveral? Probably not because of limits on the infrastructure that can be built there. …[B]ut we want to expand as much as we can… That will allow more customers to come to this range.”

WASHINGTON — The new head of Virginia’s commercial spaceport on Wallops Island says he wants to increase launch activity at the site, while acknowledging that there are limits as to how big it can grow.

Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam (D) announced June 10 that Roosevelt “Ted” Mercer Jr., a retired Air Force major general, will be the next chief executive and executive director of the Virginia Commercial Space Flight Authority, which operates the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport (MARS) at Wallops Island. Mercer will

**MARS launch facility on Wallops Island**

take over Aug. 1 when the current head of the authority, Dale Nash, retires.

“Under his leadership, Virginia is poised to maximize the investments we have made

in our world-class spaceport and launch into the future as a leader in space exploration, research and commerce,” Northam said of Mercer in a statement.

Mercer held a variety of space-related roles in his 32 years in the Air Force, including commanding the 30th Space Wing at Vandenberg Air Force Base and serving as deputy director of operations for Air Force Space Command. Mercer retired from the Air Force in 2008 and, in

2016, became director of the Interagency Program Office for the Federal Aviation Administration’s NextGen program to modernize management of the national airspace system.

The authority convened a search committee to select Nash’s successor, which led them to Mercer. “This committee has unanimously selected the best candidate possible to take the helm of Virginia Space,” Jeff Bingham, chairman of the board of the authority, said in a briefing. “Our new CEO and executive director is uniquely qualified to ensure that we deliver on our objectives and work to become increasing active and competitive over the next decade.”

MARS hosts only a few orbital launches a year currently. Northrop Grumman conducts an average of two Antares launches a year from Pad 0-A, sending Cygnus cargo spacecraft to the International Space Station. Neighboring Pad 0-B hosts occasional launches of Northrop Grumman Minotaur rockets, including a Minotaur 1 launch of a National Reconnaissance Office mission scheduled for June 15.

Mercer said at the briefing that growing the spaceport’s launch business was a top priority, second only to looking out for the needs of spaceport personnel. “One of the cleanest ways we can begin to grow this business, without doing much in terms of infrastructure, is simply get aggressive about getting out and bringing more customers to our launch port and to our range,” he said.

A big factor in the future of MARS is Rocket Lab. The company built Launch Complex 2, a launchpad for its Electron rocket, next to Pad 0-A. In March, it announced it would launch its new medium-class Neutron rocket from Wallops, using the existing Pad 0-A. That rocket will also be manufactured at a facility to be built nearby.

READ ENTIRE ARTICLE

FAIR USE NOTICE: This page contains copyrighted material the use of which has not been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. ExoNews.org distributes this material for the purpose of news reporting, educational research, comment and criticism, constituting Fair Use under 17 U.S.C § 107. Please contact the Editor at ExoNews with any copyright issue.

“Earth to Earth” Space Travel With Supersonic Airliners

January 8, 2021
ExoNews Editor

Article by Thomas Burghardt December 26, 2020 (nasaspaceflight.com)

• The future of ‘Earth to Earth’ commercial transportation in the 2020’s appears to lie in two alternatives: ‘suborbital flights’ which fly above the official American boundary of space at 80 kilometers altitude, and ‘supersonic aircraft’ that stay within the Earth’s atmosphere. The suborbital craft will get you there faster (arriving anywhere on Earth in under an hour), while the supersonic aircraft will get you there safer. SpaceX and Virgin Galactic are the only two companies flying humans into space today.

• The CEO of SpaceX, Elon Musk, developed the suborbital flight concept in 2017 to transport large payloads to Mars for colonization. By attaching additional ‘Raptor engines,’ the ‘Starship’ craft’s launch system is also able to transport cargo – and eventually passengers – suborbitally from one place to another on Earth without the need for the ‘Super Heavy’ booster rocket (which is required to push the Starship craft fully into space). Test flights of the suborbital Starship system could begin in 2022.

• Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic’s ‘SpaceShipTwo’ is another suborbital craft flying in lower Earth orbit. The spacecraft is carried into the upper atmosphere by piggy-backing on a larger airplane and launches from there. Virgin Galactic and its manufacturing partner, Scaled Composites (a wholly owned subsidiary of Northrop Grumman), plan to develop a next generation version of SpaceShipTwo (‘SpaceShipThree’?) to provide suborbital trans-continental spaceflights for passengers once it has proven itself with cargo flights.

• Astra is another spacecraft company that has plans to conduct Earth-to-Earth suborbital cargo transportation using its ‘Rocket 3’ design, possibly beginning in 2022.

• Boom Supersonic rolled out its ‘XB-1’ prototype supersonic aircraft in November 2020. It plans to develop its supersonic passenger airliner, ‘Overture’, in 2021, and plans to be operational – carrying up to 88 passengers at ranges up to almost 5000 miles – by 2029. Both Japan Airlines and the Virgin Group have placed orders for the Overture craft. Notwithstanding, Virgin Galactic recently unveiled a partnership with Rolls-Royce to develop its own supersonic aircraft capable of Mach 3, with a passenger capacity of up to 19 people.

• Aerion Supersonic, with headquarters in Melbourne, Florida (just south of Space Force station Cape Canaveral), is developing its ‘AS2 Supersonic Business Jet’, in partnership with Boeing and General Electric. It is designed to carry up to 10 passengers at speeds up to Mach 1.4.

• Both hypersonic suborbital space travel and supersonic atmospheric flight methods produce sonic booms. Supersonic aircraft produce sonic booms along the entire flight path. (This contributed to the demise of the Aérospatiale and the Concorde supersonic craft.) Rockets, on the other hand, only cause audible sonic booms during landing. The shockwaves created during a rocket launch move upwards and away from any observers to hear them.

• Aside from sonic booms, rockets will produce potentially dangerous noise levels and ‘blast danger areas’ during launch, especially those on the scale of SpaceX’s Starship and Super Heavy booster. Companies such as SpaceX plan to solve this by launching and landing far offshore from population centers, which will require additional transportation between the spaceport and the destination city. Lockheed Martin’s Skunk Works division is developing the ‘X-59 QueSST’ (Quiet Supersonic Technology) for NASA’s Low-Boom Flight Demonstration Program, to decrease the intensity of the supersonic shockwave so as not to disturb populated areas. Test flights for the X-59 are scheduled to begin in 2023 to inform legislation on approving supersonic air travel over populated areas.

• A safety advantage that winged aircraft have over propulsively landed rockets is the ability to glide in the event of an engine failure. These new supersonic airliners and spaceplane concepts are designed to be able to glide towards a controlled emergency landing. Vehicles which rely on their engines to land safely, such as Starship, do not have this contingency.

• The costs of space launches and the limited capacity on supersonic airliners will mean higher ticket prices. Will the appeal of shorter travel time outweigh the increased price? Some vehicles, such as Blue Origin‘s New Shepard rocket or Virgin Galactic’s own SpaceShipTwo, cater to ‘space tourists’ who will book a flight just to experience high speed air travel or suborbital spaceflight. They may even opt for a ticket on SpaceX’s Crew Dragon or Starship craft to experience low orbit space.

• Companies developing suborbital and supersonic commercial craft are also conscious of their carbon footprint. Their engines are designed to remove as much carbon from the atmosphere as is emitted by the flight system, to achieve ‘carbon neutrality’. SpaceX’s ‘Starship Mars’ is designed to capture methane on Mars in order to refuel the craft for its return trip to Earth.

Commercial spaceflight companies are preparing to enter a new market: suborbital flights from one place to

another on Earth. Aiming for fast transportation for passengers and cargo, these systems are being developed by a combination of established companies, such as SpaceX and Virgin Galactic, and new ones like Astra.

Technical and business challenges lie ahead for this new frontier, and an important piece is the coming wave of supersonic aircraft which could offer safer but slower alternatives to spaceflight. These two different approaches could face off in the 2020s to be the future of transportation on Earth.
(Lead image via Mack Crawford for NSF/L2)

Suborbital space travel

The most prevalent concept for suborbital Earth to Earth transportation comes from none other than Elon Musk and

SpaceX. Primarily designed for transporting large payloads to Mars for the purpose of colonization, the next generation Starship launch system offers a bonus capability for transporting large amounts of cargo around Earth.

Musk first presented this idea in 2017, envisioning suborbital spaceflights between spaceports offshore from major cities. These launch and landing facilities would be far enough to reduce the disruption of rocket launch noise levels and sonic booms produced by landing vehicles, connected to land by a high speed form of transportation such as speedboats or a hyperloop.

Originally, these Earth to Earth flights were expected to use both stages of the Big Falcon Rocket (BFR) rocket, since evolved and renamed to the Starship spacecraft and Super Heavy booster. In 2019, Musk revealed that these suborbital flights could instead utilize only the Starship vehicle with no booster, achievable for distances of approximately 10,000 kilometers or less. In order to meet thrust requirements, a single stage suborbital Starship would include an additional two to four Raptor engines.

**Aerion Supersonic‘s ‘AS2 Supersonic Business Jet’**

Given the inherent danger of rocket powered space travel, the Starship system will complete many, possibly hundreds of flights before flying passengers, with the first Earth to Earth test flights beginning as early as 2022.

Another side effect of the Starship Mars architecture, which requires that methane be captured from Martian resources to refuel spacecraft and return to Earth, is that the same propellant production processes can be used on Earth to make Starship operations carbon neutral.

The idea of carbon neutrality, removing as much carbon from the atmosphere as is emitted by the system, is a crucial part of ensuring that future transportation systems do not contribute to the harmful effects of climate change. Musk has confirmed that carbon neutrality is an important goal of the Starship program.

SpaceX is not the only major commercial spaceflight company with a suborbital transportation concept. Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic also has a vision of space travel around Earth. SpaceX’s Crew Dragon flying astronauts to Low Earth Orbit, and Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo flying crew on suborbital trajectories above the official American boundary of space at 80 kilometers altitude, are the only two commercial companies actively flying humans to space today. A successor to SpaceShipTwo is planned that could provide trans-continental spaceflights for passengers.

While no technical details of a “SpaceShipThree” have been announced by Virgin Galactic, it is fairly likely that the vehicle would be air launched, similar to the SpaceShipOne and SpaceShipTwo suborbital spaceplanes. SpaceShipThree was originally intended to be a orbital vehicle, developed jointly by Virgin Galactic and Scaled Composites.

READ ENTIRE ARTICLE

Virginia Rocket Launch Site is About to Grow With the Most Successful Startup Since SpaceX

October 15, 2020
ExoNews Editor

Article by Christian Davenport October 2, 2020 (washingtonpost.com)

• Over the Chesapeake Bay Bridge, down past Chincoteague toward the southern tip of the Eastern Shore, sits an isolated spit of shoreline near a wildlife refuge. Wallops Island, Virginia is home to one of the most unusual and little known rocket launch sites in the country.

• Wallops Island contained a naval air station during World War II. In the late 1950s, with the dawn of the Space Age, the air station morphed into the Wallops Flight Facility, serving as a test site for the Mercury space program. The facility has now reinvented itself yet again as a modern commercial space industry rocket hub launching national security missions for Rocket Lab, and is soon to launch missions to the International Space Station for Northrop Grumman. The Wallops facility is poised to become the second busiest launch site in the country, behind Cape Canaveral, which itself is on track to launch 39 rockets into orbit this year.

• Over the last 25 years, the state of Virginia has pumped $250M into the ‘Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport’. In addition, NASA has made $15.7M in upgrades to the site, including a mission operations control center, which opened in 2018. The state also contributed $15M to repair a launch pad after an Antares rocket exploded in 2014.

• Perhaps the most successful space upstart since Elon Musk’s SpaceX, Rocket Lab first considered Cape Canaveral. But Wallops was the winner because it had a facility nearby where the company could process its payloads, get the satellites ready for launch and then mate them to a rocket quickly. “The whole facility is designed for rapid launch,” said Rocket Lab CEO, Peter Beck. “And that’s a real requirement out there right now from our national security and national defense forces, to have an ability to respond to threats quickly.”

• At 60 feet tall, Rocket Lab’s ‘Electron’ rocket may be about a quarter of the size of SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket. But the company hopes it will be a workhorse, launching once a month from Wallops, in flights that should be visible up and down the Mid-Atlantic. The Electron rocket has already had 14 successful launches to orbit from its launch site in New Zealand, earning a reputation for quick turnaround in an industry where getting rockets ready to fly was once a months-long endeavor. The Pentagon and NASA have taken notice.

• NASA has hired Rocket Lab to launch a small satellite to the Moon in 2021 to gather data about the thin lunar atmosphere, as a precursor for human missions. Instead of launching large, expensive satellites that stay in orbit for years and are targets for potential adversaries, the Pentagon is interested in putting up swarms of smaller, inexpensive satellites that could be easily replaced. Both NASA and DARPA are looking at Rocket Lab’s Wallops facility as a launch base having the desired short turnaround time between launches.

• While the number of launches at Wallops now is relatively low, the cadence could grow dramatically, especially as Rocket Lab gets going. And Gen. John “Jay” Raymond, chief of space operations for the US Space Force, has made it clear the department wants to rely heavily on the private sector. “We have developed a significant amount of partnerships in the national security space business,” said General Raymond during a recent event. “We share some of those partners. We share an industrial base.”

• Wallops wants to capitalize on the growth says Dale Nash, CEO and executive director of Virginia Space. “[W]e can get a few more launchpads close together in here.” “We’re urbanizing.” “One launch a month will not be a big deal.” “Once a week, once we get going, won’t be a big deal either. … We have the capability to grow to 50 or 60 launches a year.”

• Richard Branson has also gotten into the small rocket business with ‘Virgin Orbit’ that would launch a small rocket by dropping it from the wing of a 747 airplane. But while the space industry has made strides, there are still more failures than successes, especially in the early attempts to build small rockets. Rocket Lab has been the unlikely success story. Founded by Peter Beck in 2006, it today has a significant backlog of launches.

• Initially, Beck said, the company planned to ditch its rockets in the ocean, as had been the practice for decades. But like SpaceX, Rocket Lab intends to recover its first stages so they can be reused for future flights for greater efficiency. But instead of flying the boosters back to land and then firing the engines to slow it down, as SpaceX does, Rocket Lab is going to have its booster deploy a parachute to slow it down as it falls back through the atmosphere. Then it would have a helicopter retrieve it with a grappling hook.

• In addition to the NASA moon mission, Beck has long been intrigued with Venus, and planned to send a probe there to look for signs of life. The Venus mission, tentatively scheduled for 2023, would be largely self-funded and launch most likely from New Zealand. “If you can prove that there is life on Venus, then it’s fair to assume that life is not unique but likely prolific throughout the universe,” tweeted Beck.

WALLOPS ISLAND, Va. — Over the Chesapeake Bay Bridge, down past Chincoteague toward the southern

tip of the Eastern Shore, sits an isolated spit of shoreline, near a wildlife refuge, that is home to one of the most unusual, and little known, rocket launch sites in the country.

Born as a Navy air station during World War II, it has launched more than 16,000 rockets, most of them small sounding vehicles used for scientific research. But the Wallops Flight Facility, which at the dawn of the Space Age played a role as a test site for the Mercury program, is about to reinvent itself at a time when the commercial space industry is booming and spreading beyond the confines of Florida’s Cape Canaveral.

After the Federal Aviation Administration last month granted Rocket Lab, a commercial launch company, a license to fly its small Electron rocket from the facility, Wallops could soon see a significant increase in launches as the company joins Northrop Grumman in launching from this remote site. While Rocket Lab is largely focused on national security missions, Northrop Grumman launches its Antares rocket to send a spacecraft to the International Space Station on cargo resupply missions at a rate of about two a year, including a picture-perfect launch from the Virginia coast Friday at 9:16 p.m. Northrop also launches its Minotaur rocket from Wallops.

Rocket Lab wants to launch to orbit as frequently as once a month from Wallops, which would make the facility the

second busiest launch site in the country, behind Cape Canaveral, which is on track to fly 39 rockets to orbit this year.

Hoping to give birth to another rocket hub on the Eastern Seaboard, the state of Virginia has over the last 25 years pumped some $250 million into what it calls the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport, most of that coming in the last decade, said Dale Nash, the agency’s CEO and executive director of Virginia Space. NASA has also made some significant upgrades to the site, including a $15.7 million mission operations control center, which opened in 2018.

The state also contributed to the $15 million it took to repair a launchpad after an Antares rocket exploded in 2014.

The efforts paid off when Rocket Lab, perhaps the most successful space upstart since Elon Musk’s SpaceX, announced last year it would launch its Electron rocket from here. Once NASA signs off on the company’s autonomous flight abort system, it should be cleared to launch, with a mission coming potentially before the end of the year.

Initially, Rocket Lab looked at Cape Canaveral, of course. But there are already a lot of big companies stationed there — Boeing, the United Launch Alliance and SpaceX. Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin is renovating a pad there while building a massive manufacturing facility nearby. (Bezos owns The Washington Post.)

“We ran a competitive process,” Peter Beck, Rocket Lab’s chief executive, said in an interview. In the end, Wallops was the winner because it had a facility nearby where the company could process its payloads, get the satellites ready for launch and then mate them to a rocket quickly.

“The whole facility is designed for rapid launch,” Beck said. “And that’s a real requirement out there right now from our national security and national defense forces, to have an ability to respond to threats quickly.”

READ ENTIRE ARTICLE

Tag: Northrop Grumman

Virginia’s Wallops Island Spaceport Seeks to Increase Launch Activity

“Earth to Earth” Space Travel With Supersonic Airliners

Virginia Rocket Launch Site is About to Grow With the Most Successful Startup Since SpaceX