Wallops Island, Va. - - There isn't much to see yet at the grandly named Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport, just the skeleton of an old launch gantry on a piece of oceanfront leased from the federal government.
But promoters expect something remarkable to blossom on this sun-baked spit of sand and scrub on the Eastern Shore.
David Smith, a state official from Virginia, which joined with Maryland six years ago to operate a commercial spaceflight center with the lofty acronym MARS, says the area is on track to become "the Cape Canaveral of the North."
For now, though, it's the Wal-Mart of spaceports.
"They can do more with a dollar than anyone else within NASA," said Robert Strain, director of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's Goddard Space Flight Center, which operates the Wallops Flight Facility where MARS is based.
The facility operates out of a one-room former gas station on NASA property, not far from a busy highway that takes beach-bound visitors to the southern end of Assateague Island. It employs six people.
Spaceport officials like to tout their cut-rate location, a barrier island just off the Delmarva Peninsula. From here, they say, it's a shorter shot to the orbiting International Space Station, which means lower bills for rocket fuel. Insurance is cheaper, too, since flights go almost entirely over water (trajectories from Florida cross Europe and the Middle East).
MARS' new $10 million rocket assembly building, soon to go up near a new launch pad, is so modestly sized that 50 of them could fit into the Kennedy Space Center's Vehicle Assembly Building in Florida with room to spare. The Mid-Atlantic spaceport's sole rocket provider fashions launch vehicles, in part, from fuel tanks and engines developed for intercontinental ballistic missiles by the United States and its Soviet bloc adversaries and decommissioned after the Cold War.
"These guys have to live by their wits," Strain said, getting work wherever they can. "It keeps them more clever."
A flourishing space complex on the Maryland-Virginia coast remains a shaky prospect in a time of economic recession, tight budgets and uncertainty about the next stage of America's human space flight program. But events over the past year, which have drawn little attention outside the space industry and the local community, have nudged the future closer.
