A rocket now poised on a launch pad at NASA's Wallops Island, Va., space center holds more than its package of scientific experiments.
It's also carrying the hopes of a Maryland aerospace company, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and Virginia development officials who hope it will blast open a gateway to space on Virginia's sleepy Eastern Shore.
The rocket and its METEOR-1 satellite, scheduled to fly tomorrow evening, would be the first commercial spacecraft launched into Earth orbit from Wallops and the first of any kind sent into orbit there since 1985.
NASA and Virginia state officials hope the flight will stimulate more commercial launch business at Wallops, a development drive the state has dubbed "Spaceport Virginia."
"When everybody sees the thing soaring through the clouds that is really proof of the concept, that the Spaceport idea works," said Wayne Woodhams, assistant director for the Center for Commercial Space Infrastructure at Old Dominion University. The center is the operating agent for Virginia's new Commercial Space Flight Authority.
Liftoff was scheduled for 6 p.m. tomorrow for the 2,000-pound METEOR satellite and its cargo of 14 experiments. It is the first launch for the satellite and its 100-ton Conestoga rocket. Two attempts in August were delayed by winds and mechanical problems.
The entire vehicle was designed and assembled by EER Systems Inc., a privately owned aerospace company based in Seabrook in Prince George's County.
NASA officials say the rocket's climb toward space should be visible as far north as Ocean City, about 40 miles away.
If all goes as planned, the spacecraft will reach an orbit 250 miles above the Earth 9 1/2 minutes after liftoff. Twenty to 30 days later, EER controllers in McLean, Va., will separate a "recovery module" containing six of the experiments and return them to Earth, splashing down in the Atlantic about 100 miles east of Wallops. The other eight experiments will remain in orbit for up to two years.
Wallops is too small for the safe launch of large rockets, said NASA spokesman Keith Koehler. Although its launch crews have put a few satellites into orbit with small rockets, Wallops' specialty has been suborbital flights -- up into space, then falling back into the ocean -- for scientific and meteorological projects. Forty to 70 go up each year.
