Blue Origin’s New Shepard rocket will take a crew to suborbital space for the first time in nearly two years later this month, the company announced on Tuesday. The NS-25 mission will launch from Blue’s launch site in West Texas on May 19. The launch window opens at 8:30 a.m. The six-person crew includes Ed […]
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NASA is kicking off a formal environmental assessment of its facilities on Wallops Island, Virginia, to increase the number of authorized rocket launches at the site by almost 200%, according to slides and recordings of an April 29 internal meeting viewed by TechCrunch.
The proposed changes could help ease congestion at the country’s other spaceports, which have felt the strain of a rapid increase in launch capacity due primarily to SpaceX. That strain is projected to only worsen as companies including Rocket Lab, Relativity, Blue Origin and others aim to bring new rockets online in the next few years.
Wallops expansion has likely been on the minds of NASA officials for some time. After Rocket Lab conducted its first Electron launch from there in 2022, agency officials told the media that interest from private companies looking to launch from the site was “high.” And while these plans would eventually be made public as part of the EA process, this is the first time the scale of the proposed changes has been published.
The Wallops Island Southern Expansion Environmental Assessment (WISE EA), as the agency calls the undertaking, will study the potential consequences of a massive increase in annual launches from 18 to 52. The study will also consider other critical changes to the site, like water barge landings of rockets’ first stages and on-site storage of liquid methane, a novel rocket fuel. To fully understand the affects of these changes, NASA will be working with contractors who will conduct acoustic analyses, and look at air emissions impacts and impacts to marine and local wildlife.
The analysis will also consider the construction of up to four new launch pads and the installation of a suborbital launcher conducting up to 30 firings per year.
The increase in launches and new fuel mixes allowed are particularly notable. Today, of the 18 annual launches authorized at WFF, only six can involve liquid-fueled rockets, with the other 12 being solid-propellant rockets. The engines that power Electron, Rocket Lab’s launcher that flies out of Wallops, use a combination of liquid oxygen and RP-1, a highly-refined kerosene.
The new analysis would authorize 52 launches per year and allow a fuel mix that also includes methalox, a rocket fuel composed of liquid oxygen and liquid methane. Methalox has become the propellant system of choice for next-gen rockets including SpaceX’s Starship, Rocket Lab’s Neutron, Relativity Space’s Terran R and Blue Origin’s New Glenn.
A slide showing proposed changes. Image Credits:
One driver of the proposed expansion is the increased launch cadence from these companies. (While Relativity has not publicly disclosed any plans to launch from Wallops, the company, along with Rocket Lab, were listed as the two “participating agencies”.)
The Wallops site has become particularly important to Rocket Lab’s plans to bring Neutron to market by the end of this year. In 2022, the company announced it had selected WFF as the future home for Neutron’s first launch pad and production facility, effectively staking a claim in the future of the island. Rocket Lab’s recovery plans for Neutron also include the booster landing on downrange, on a barge at sea.
One of the slides in Miller’s presentation shows a launch forecast for WFF through 2032. It is unclear whether the data on the slide was provided by private companies or whether it’s from NASA’s internal estimates, and NASA did not immediately respond to TechCrunch’s request for comment, but it charts around five annual Neutron flights per year through 2030. It also charts about five launches of Firefly and Northrop’s MLV by that date.
Image Credits: TechCrunch
Environmental assessments are essential: they ensure NASA and its commercial partners are following environmental regulations related to air emissions, acoustic impacts, and affects on local wildlife. They also provide a critical venue for input from stakeholders, including the public. Having an environmental assessment in place is vital for companies like Rocket Lab, as well as Firefly Space and Northrop Grumman, which are together developing a medium launch vehicle.
NASA completed a programmatic environmental impact statement (PEIS) for the Wallops site in 2019, but as agency official Shari Miller said during the call, the anticipated growth of activity on the island “exceeds the numbers that were analyzed” for that document. Some proposed actions weren’t discussed at all in the 2019 document, like a water barge landing of a rocket. Miller said NASA is simultaneously undertaking what’s known as a “written re-evaluation” of the 2019 assessment to understand if additional environmental assessments is needed to allow for the storage of liquid methane and to authorize static fire tests of methalox engines at WFF. That would authorize those actions for two years, and importantly, act as a sort of temporary measure to facilitate Rocket Lab’s rollout of Neutron. The full WISE EA would extend for a full ten years.
Because of the scope of the various environmental assessments, the full EA process is projected to take around eighteen months, per one slide, with the final document published in December 2025.
Mars exploration has been always been the exclusive purview of national space agencies, but NASA is trying to change that, awarding a dozen research tasks to private companies as a prelude to commercial support for future missions to the Red Planet.
It’s the second time in a month that the agency has shown its desire for commercial support in Mars missions, having more or less scrapped the original Mars Sample Return mission in favor of a to-be-determined alternative likely by private space companies.
A total of nine companies were selected to perform twelve “concept studies” on how they could provide Mars-related services, from payload delivery to planetary imaging to communications relays. While each award is relatively small — between $200,000 and $300,000 — these studies are an important first step for NASA to better understand the costs, risks, and feasibility of commercial technologies.
The companies selected are: Lockheed Martin, Impulse Space, and Firefly Aerospace for small payload delivery and hosting services; United Launch Alliance, Blue Origin, and Astrobotic for large payload delivery and hosting services; Albedo, Redwire Space, and Astrobotic for Mars surface-imaging services; and SpaceX, Lockheed Martin, and Blue Origin for next-gen relay series.
Nearly all the selected proposals would adapt existing projects focused on the moon and Earth, NASA said in a statement. The twelve-week studies will conclude in August, and there’s no guarantee that they would lead to future requests for proposals or contracts. That said, it’s similarly unlikely that future contracts would appear without a study having previously been done by a company vying for it.
The companies were sourced from a request for proposals put out by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory earlier this year. According to that solicitation, the idea is to develop a new paradigm for Mars exploration, one that delivers “more frequent lower cost missions” via partnerships between government and industry.
The plan is similar to the agency’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services program, which provides large contracts to private companies to deliver payloads to the moon. And like CLPS, which helped bankroll the first successful private lunar lander (among others), these latest awards also show that the agency is increasingly comfortable working with smaller, earlier-stage startups working on unproven tech.
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