Wallops Flight Facility breaks ground on new command center

Construction may be already underway, but the ground was ceremoniously broken at the Wallops Flight Facility for their new Mission Launch Command Center, or MLCC on Friday.

The current command center was built in the 1950’s on an island about seven miles away from where the new one will be.

Bill Wrobel, the director of Wallops says, “The island is where we’re doing kind of all the direct mission related work. It’s important for us to kind of segregate with kind of the mission critical things, with things that can be handled a little more remotely.”

The new $5.6 million dollar MLCC and its over 14,000 square feet floor plan will be on Wallops’ main campus. This means it will be much less vulnerable to the elements than the old one.

It’ll be outfitted with the works through LEED, or Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design, to creating efficiency gains like minimizing the use of electricity.

Steven Kremer, the Wallops Range and Mission Management Office Chief says, “The cost to run that building for that tax payer every year is so low compared to what we have in our older building.”

The MLCC will also have three different control rooms.

Kremer goes on, “If we want to run multiple missions simultaneously out of that building we’re able to do that now. We can be supporting Antares missions in one room and prepping for a sounding rocket mission that’s a week later in the other room.”

We’re told this will allow Wallops to get more customers using their facility. The command center will serve as the hub for interfacing with and controlling rockets, their payloads and launch pad support systems during flight operations.

Kremer continues, “We’re getting ready to take advantage of these rich advances in technology and facilities advancements and provide something for the future of wallops.”

The new MLCC is expected to be finished by the second half of 2017.