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On Saturday, April 6, at 4:45 AM in the morning, the rollout begins of Orbital Sciences Corporation's ANTARES LAUNCH VEHICLE to the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport's Pad-0A at NASA's Wallops Flight Facility on Wallops Island, in Accomack County, Va. Pad operations to raise the rocket to a vertical position will begin at about 6 a.m. will take technicians two to three hours to complete. The launch team is preparing for a 3 PM ET, Wednesday, April 17, 2013 launch date to test the newly configured rocket for Earth orbit with NanoSatelltes as payload. The launch window for Antares' test flight is between April 17 and 19 at 3pm each subsequent back-up day, as now planned. Loudoun County-based Orbital Sciences Corporation is testing the Antares rocket and Cygnus cargo logistics spacecraft under NASA's Commercial Orbital Transportation Services (COTS) program. A demonstration flight of Antares and Cygnus to the International Space Station is planned for later this year. Following the successful completion of the COTS demonstration mission to the space station, Orbital will conduct eight cargo resupply flights to the orbiting laboratory through NASA's Commercial Resupply Services contract through at least 2016. The Commonwealth of Virginia is investing 50-million between 2012-2017 in the state's commercial spaceport operations after nearly 20-million in launch pad investment infrastructure to support the launch projects. NASA will use one of the launch pads to loft the LADEE space satellite to orbit the moon in a civil mission set for August 2013.
The launch manifest of commercial, civil and military rockets from Virginia is expected to expand over the balance of the decade to become the launch site of preference for multiple commercial launch carriers, perhaps human commercial space crews.
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