So it began engaging private industry as a key to achieving its vision for the future of spaceflight. It needed direct access to American ingenuity. NASA envisioned a faster, more efficient, more economical way of getting around space. The era of a centralized government agency getting abundant funding from Congress to advance space exploration was over. The success of private space-tech companies is just what NASA envisioned when it decentralized itself after the shuttle program ended, hoping to draw in private tech businesses that would accelerate space development.Īfter the last shuttle landed in 2011, with Atlantis touching down at Kennedy Space Center in Florida, NASA lost its way. “I very much agree with that,” says Pierce. Which leads to one question: With all the assets and tech resources that have come to Virginia, and the concentration of space-tech companies growing in Northern Virginia, can this state find a place alongside the Gulf Coast as a new “space coast?” What NASA requires for new space missions-critical technologies like computing, nanotechnology, biotechnology, communications, networking, robotics, and materials-is the exact kind of work that has been fueling NoVA’s modern tech economy, led by the companies that flocked to Northern Virginia in a post-9/11 defense-technology boom.Īs a result, the latest innovations in space exploration and tourism are taking off in the state. It’s that kind of potential for rapid growth from local space companies that could determine NoVA’s role in the future of the space industry. That is definitely where I see Wallops going in the next three to five years.” Rocket Lab, a small rocket manufacturer based in Long Beach, California, opened its second launch facility at Wallops in September 2020, and is on pace to do twelve launches a year there. “Wallops is really going to be a center point for a lot of these small companies to come in and do their first launch, prove out their systems, do it safely, and be able to provide that FedEx delivery that you hear about of rapid and agile delivery of payloads to orbit. “I think that is part of our value,” says David Pierce, director of Wallops. It’s an important magnet for new space companies, having positioned itself as providing low-cost access to low-Earth orbit for small payloads such as satellites. The Wallops Flight Facility, a NASA site on the east coast of Virginia, near Chincoteague Island, has launched 16,000 rockets since opening in 1945. Space tech startups are taking off all over our region-often literally. While the national eye has been on launches from Texas, New Mexico, and Florida, Jeff Bezos might want to consider bringing his space company to Northern Virginia, right along with Amazon. By the time Elon Musk’s historic SpaceX flight took off on September 15, with four non-astronauts inside a capsule built and launched by private industry, space exploration took a giant leap toward becoming just another day in the life of a new generation of space travelers. But when Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and Virgin Galactic founder Richard Branson took suborbital flights just nine days apart from each other in July, they represented more than just rich guys playing space cowboys-they hinted at what might one day become the everyday. This summer, people around the globe watched the billionaires-in-space race unfold.
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