NASA Sparks Aerospace Innovation

Leaders from Maryland’s aerospace, business and government community gathered Aug. 12 at Salisbury University for the third annual Wallops Industry Day to discuss the future of expanding the capabilities of the NASA Wallops Flight Facility with the goal of launching more missions from the site.

Industry partners are working to come together in support of the long-term plan for Wallops by bringing industrial development, local talent, and further resources to the region. The launch site is located in Virginia, but many of the employees come from the Eastern Shore.

Coleman McCord, the CEO and Director of Launch Site Development for Firefly Aerospace, a company involved with launches at Wallops, said the site could unlock capabilities from scientific exploration to national defense.

“As an industry, we’re looking at kind of growing that base from really just a handful of orbital launches a year or two. What we would like to see collectively with everyone else [is] where launches become commonplace, from Wallops,” McCord said. 

McCord added that the organization isn’t ready to release specific dates or how often they expect launches to occur, but they are “well into our pad development,” and are excited to complete that project.

The CEO said Wallops already has a regulatory framework in place due to NASA using the site for decades for launches and orbital testing.

Scott Bissett, deputy program director for creative defense for the MACH-TB 2.0 program, which does testing at Wallops, explained the U.S. is constrained with the current capability of launch facilities across the country. He added that expanding can open up the possibility of launching more missions safer and faster with less constraints. 

Bissett said Wallops is already trending towards the vision industry partners have for it

“Wallops has seen a lot of change in the last decade. I think it’s really coming into its own, and just really just picking up the [mission] cadence that’s been talked about for years. And we’re actually starting to see it happen. I think the cadence went up last year with, the MACH-TB 2.0 program. We’re really ramping up, onboarding. I think it’s 14 missions by the end of this year with the goal of launching a half dozen or more solely for our program from Wallops, let alone the other commercial companies,” Bissett said.