About 24 hours before an Antares launch, the rocket comes out of the Horizontal Integration Facility lying on its side. A wheeled transporter-erector rolls it through the salt air of Wallops Island to Pad 0A, sets it down on the launch mount, and then slowly tilts it vertical against the sky. A few miles north, in Chincoteague, every restaurant is filling up. Across the marsh, snow geese keep doing what snow geese do. This is the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport, a state-owned commercial launch site on land leased from NASA - the only place in the United States where a Virginia agency runs a road to orbit, and the most consistently overlooked spaceport in the country.
In 1995 the Virginia General Assembly created the Virginia Commercial Space Flight Authority - also called Virginia Space - to develop a commercial space industry in the Commonwealth. The idea came out of Old Dominion University's Batten College of Engineering, and Dr. Billie Reed, a longtime ODU professor, was installed as the first executive director. Two years later Virginia Space signed a Reimbursable Space Act Agreement with NASA that let it use land on the southern end of Wallops Island for launch pads. The FAA granted it an orbital launch license. The Virginia Space Flight Center was born as a partnership of NASA, ODU, and Virginia Space. In 2003, Governors Robert Ehrlich of Maryland and Mark Warner of Virginia signed an agreement making MARS a joint venture across state lines - a bi-state commercial spaceport, which remains an unusual political achievement.
Pad 0A is the workhorse. Its original tower was demolished in September 2008 and the pad rebuilt for Northrop Grumman's Antares - a medium-lift rocket carrying Cygnus cargo modules to resupply the International Space Station. The modifications added a Horizontal Integration Facility for mating launcher and payload, plus a wheeled transporter-erector that rolls the assembled rocket out about 24 hours before launch. There is also a tall water tower for sound suppression and pad cooling. After the Cygnus NG-19 launch in August 2023, Pad 0A went offline for an upgrade to support the new Antares 330, a rocket with roughly twice the thrust of its predecessor. The wider first stage needs a wider transporter; the longer rocket needs a longer HIF. The complex will also support Northrop Grumman's future Eclipse, a vehicle built with Firefly Aerospace that uses an Antares 330 first stage with a liquid-fueled second.
Pad 0B has been quieter and weirder. It came online in 1999 and got a mobile service tower in 2004. It is used by Northrop Grumman's solid-fueled Minotaur family - rockets built largely from decommissioned ICBM motors that the U.S. government keeps in inventory. Minotaur launches from Wallops have grown infrequent, with multi-year gaps. But Pad 0B's most striking moment was its only Minotaur V launch in September 2013, when it sent NASA's LADEE spacecraft to lunar orbit - the Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer, a small probe that studied the Moon's tenuous atmosphere for about seven months before its planned crash. That was the first - and so far only - beyond-Earth mission launched from Wallops. A small spaceport, but it reached the Moon.
In October 2018, Rocket Lab announced MARS as the home of its second launch site. The New Zealand-American company already had Launch Complex 1 in Mahia, New Zealand, and wanted American soil for U.S. government missions. Construction on Launch Complex 2 began in February 2019. The pad was finished in 2020 but the first launch slipped - some of it pandemic delays, some of it certification of a new NASA-developed flight safety system. The first Electron lifted off LC-2 on January 24, 2023, carrying three Hawkeye 360 satellites to orbit. The mission name was "Virginia is for Launch Lovers" - a play on the state's tourism slogan. Several orbital launches have followed, along with suborbital missions by HASTE, the Electron variant configured for hypersonic test payloads.
In October 2023, construction began on a new pad between 0A and 0B. This is Launch Pad 0D - also called Launch Complex 3 - and it hosts Rocket Lab's Neutron, a medium-lift, partially reusable rocket designed to compete with SpaceX's Falcon 9. The pad was completed and officially opened in August 2025, with Neutron's first flight targeted for mid-2026. Wallops is becoming dense with launch infrastructure: a NASA range that has supported sounding rockets since the 1940s, a state-owned commercial spaceport with three active or planned commercial pads, and the Atlantic stretching east toward the open ocean - the geometry that makes the site work for launches that need to fly safely downrange. From the beach on Chincoteague the launches look like a column of orange fire rising over the marsh, then tilting east and disappearing into low cloud. Then the sound arrives - a deep, rolling thunder that takes a long second to reach you - and the snow geese, briefly, stop doing what snow geese do.
MARS is at 37.83N, 75.49W on the southern tip of Wallops Island, just south of Chincoteague and east of the Delmarva Peninsula. Recommended viewing 3,000-5,000 ft (outside active launch windows only) to take in the cluster of launch pads, the Wallops Flight Facility runway, and the surrounding Assateague Island / Chincoteague Refuge geography. Nearest airports: Wallops Flight Facility (KWAL) immediately adjacent, Accomack County (KMFV) about 10 nm west-southwest. CRITICAL: Restricted airspace R-6604 covers Wallops Island for routine NASA operations and is heavily active during launch windows. Always check NOTAMs and TFRs before flying anywhere near KWAL.