Ignoring Space Commerce News On Wallops Island
Rocket Lab Opens Launch Complex 2, Confirms U.S. Air Force Payload as First Electron Mission from U.S. Soil, RocketLab
“Rocket Lab, the global leader in small satellite launch, has today officially opened Launch Complex 2, the company’s first U.S. launch site, and confirmed the inaugural mission from the site will be a dedicated flight for the U.S. Air Force. Located at the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport on Wallops Island, Virginia, Rocket Lab Launch Complex 2 represents a new national launch capability for the United States. Construction on the site began in February 2019, with the site completed and ready to support missions just 10 months later. Designed to support rapid call-up missions, Launch Complex 2 delivers responsive launch capability from home soil for U.S. government small satellites. The ability to deploy satellites to precise orbits in a matter of hours, not months or years, is increasingly important to ensure resilience in space. At a press conference held at NASA Wallops Flight Facility today, the U.S. Air Force’s Space Test Program has been announced as the first customer scheduled to launch on an Electron vehicle from Rocket Lab Launch Complex 2. The dedicated mission will see a single research and development micro-sat launched from the site in Q2 2020.”
Keith’s note: In case you have not been paying attention. NASA has been promoting commercial space – a lot. There was an announcement today by RocketLab at Wallops Island, Virginia regarding the opening of its new commercial launch facility. The facility is located on the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport (M.A.R.S.) directly adjacent to NASA Wallops. Great news, right? You’d think that NASA and M.A.R.S. would want to tell people about it. Guess again. No mention is made on its home page or on its news page but they did tweet about it – so its not like there was any prohibition on mentioning the event. Wallops is just too lazy to update its website. No mention is made on the M.A.R.S other than an old post from several months ago. website either. And NASA HQ seems to be totally uninterested – again, despite the agency’s big push for commercial space. Just sayin’
Keith; It actually does appear to be on the M.A.R.S. website See: https://www.vaspace.org/ind…
I suspect that the NASA website only carries the Offical NASA activities and doesn’t concentrate on the purely commercial side. The M.A.R.S. side seems to carry the commercial side info. At a guess NASA may support information on commercial activity, but only to the extent it supports NASA missions. After all there is an element of competition to be considered here. Official NASA vs. that crass commercial stuff.
That is an old story months ago about an upcoming milestone . Besides everyone is outside on a sunny day in shortsleeves. That is not what the weather was like yesterday.
I don’t think NASA’s disinterest is about competition with commercial space. It’s simply media relations people who are familiar with their job description and what their annual performance reviews cover. They get paid to make sure the public knows about all the great things their employer is doing. They do not get paid to tell the public what their employer’s neighbor is doing, even if it’s related and something the public might be interested in. That’s also why the JPL web pages don’t cover planetary science missions run by APL, or ESA or JAXA (unless it’s about a JPL employee’s involvement in the mission.) And that’s why NASA’s astrobiology web site is so focused on the things which NASA’s astrobiology program is doing, not astrobiology in general.
Although I do wish the commercial spaceport on Wallops Island hadn’t decided to go with a cute acronym. It’s hard to report on Rocket Labs launching a military satellite from MARS without getting funny looks. And possibly getting flagged as a source of fake news or as being in the same league as the Weekly World News.
Huh?
Simply put, the media relations people at NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility are paid to tell the public all the great things NASA is doing on Wallops Island. The people down the road working for the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport are the ones paid to tell the public all the great things MARS is doing on Wallops Island. It doesn’t take competitive feelings for the NASA people to leave Rocket Lab’s LC-2 coverage to MARS and Rocket Labs. Now, when NASA flies a mission on a Rocket Labs flight out of Wallops, I would expect NASA to cover it. But maybe not NASA Wallops, unless they were directly involved in that mission.
(If you want another analogy, United Airlines doesn’t send me email about how great Lufthansa’s first class service is. Even those they are partner airlines, code-share each other’s flights, and their frequent flyers would potentially be interested. They don’t get paid to give their partners free advertising.)