Wallops Flight Facility

NASA's Wallops Flight Facility, located on Wallops Island on Virginia's Eastern Shore, is one of the oldest rocket launch sites in the world — established in 1945 as the Pilotless Aircraft Research Station by the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA), NASA's predecessor — and today operates as a multi-user spaceport supporting orbital launches, suborbital sounding rockets, scientific balloon flights, and aeronautical research for NASA and commercial customers.

Wallops' primary orbital launch capability is anchored by Northrop Grumman's Antares medium-lift rocket, launched from the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport (MARS) Pad 0A. Antares is the launch vehicle for Northrop Grumman's Cygnus commercial cargo spacecraft under NASA's Commercial Resupply Services (CRS) contracts, delivering pressurized and unpressurized cargo to the International Space Station. Cygnus missions fly from Wallops on a northeastern trajectory, leveraging Wallops' location for ISS-compatible orbital inclinations. Following Russian engine supply disruptions post-2022 (Antares originally used Ukrainian/Russian RD-181 engines), Northrop Grumman announced transitioning Antares to domestic engines and launched CRS-20 from Kennedy Space Center using a Falcon 9 while the Antares upgrade was completed.

Wallops also hosts Rocket Lab's Launch Complex 2 (LC-2), the company's U.S. launch site for Electron small rockets — providing launch capacity for U.S. government payloads, particularly National Reconnaissance Office missions, that require domestic launch from U.S. soil. LC-2 launched its first Electron mission in 2023, complementing Rocket Lab's primary LC-1 site in New Zealand.

The Wallops sounding rocket program is the world's busiest, launching 20-30 scientific sounding rockets annually for NASA, NOAA, universities, and international partners to altitudes from 50 km to 1,300 km for atmospheric research, microgravity experiments, and instrument testing. The facility's scientific balloon program lifts payloads to 40 km stratospheric altitude for astronomical, atmospheric, and cosmic ray research lasting days to weeks.