Unlike growing older and a late-season Orioles swoon, I’ve learned that rocket launches are not a sure thing. There are too many things that can go wrong: a software glitch, a hardware glitch, a glitch in the weather. But unless you live next to Kennedy Space Flight Center in Cape Canaveral, how often do you get to see the flames and smoke and hear the roar of a real rocket launch? In fact, in addition to NASA’s most famous launching site, there are only two other places to see an official rocket launch on the U.S. mainland: California’s Vandenberg Air Force Base and the NASA Wallops Flight Facility near Chincoteague, Va.

So it was with anxious expectation that I drove the three hours from my Baltimore home to Virginia’s Eastern Shore last December to witness the first launch from a pad at Wallops Island since 1995. (That venture didn’t go so smoothly, as the 52-foot, 100-ton rocket malfunctioned and was blown apart for safety reasons several miles above the Atlantic Ocean.) Most of the 15,000 launches at Wallops since its founding in 1945 have involved small, sub-orbital rockets and weather balloons. Just twenty-seven have involved missions to space.

I arrived late Sunday afternoon for the 7 a.m. Monday launch and checked myself into the Cedar Gables Seaside Inn, a four-room, contemporary B&B overlooking the marshes of Oyster Bay. I planned to wake at 5:30 a.m., plenty of time to pick out a prime viewing spot on the beach at Chincoteague National Wildlife Refuge. The refuge lies seven miles from the launch site, several miles further than the NASA Wallops Visitors Center, another vantage point open to the public. But the refuge offers the rare opportunity to watch the rocket rise into the dark Western sky, while viewing the sunrise over the beach to the East.

As a kid, I had assembled and launched my fair share of model rockets, and, as I fell asleep that night, it was with visions of a two-foot-tall Estes Skyhook rocketing into the sky.

Cedar Gables’ innkeeper, Claudia Kesseler, kindly agreed to meet me at 5:30 the next morning at the bottom of the stairs with a couple of breakfast sandwiches.

I hoped she also had a thermos of Tang—an astronaut’s favorite breakfast drink—to go with them.

The morning’s launch was the inaugural flight from the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport (MARS), a Virginia-Maryland joint venture built on NASA property in 1998 to help spur the growth of the commercial aerospace industry. If all went well, it would go a long way toward proving that MARS could handle commercial launches. It was also an important mission for MARS’s first client, and the rocket’s designer, Orbital Sciences of Dulles, Va. The company had fabricated the sixty-nine-foot, four-stage Minotaur I rocket, adapting, as its first two stages, a retired Minutemen intercontinental ballistic missile.

The idea of re-purposing a Cold War relic to launch satellites would save the company and its own clients millions. The Minotaur’s payload consisted of two satellites: one, a tiny twenty-two-pound sphere, GeneSat-1, which contained a NASA biological experiment involving E. coli bacteria; the other was an 814-pounder called TacSat-2, designed by the Air Force in just fifteen months at a cost of $18 million. (This is far less money and time than the ten years and billions of dollars it normally takes to launch a military satellite.) All parties involved had much to prove. 

The weather report called for a flawless morning: mid-50s and a glorious sunrise just after the scheduled lift-off. And indeed, as I looked out of my room at the early morning calm over Oyster Bay, I could see several clammers getting their small boats ready in the dark. The sky to the East was just beginning to turn from black to medium blue. As she promised, Claudia met me at the bottom of the stairs—but not with a breakfast sandwich. Instead, she delivered the news that the rocket launch had been postponed. I felt like Jim Lovell when he missed his chance to land on the moon during the Apollo 13 mission.

Sure enough, the NASA Wallops information phone line—recorded at 2 a.m. (only NASA scientists are awake that early)—confirmed that the problem was a software glitch on one of the satellites and that I should call back in the afternoon to find out the new launch date and time. So, I was faced with a quandary: Do I wait around for another day or head home? After long deliberations with my conscience, my wife, and my editor, I ended up heading home. And it was a good thing, too. The launch didn’t go off until Thursday of that week. But this time, it went off without a hitch, its bright trail visible for hundreds of miles along the Eastern Shore.

Several employees at the Chincoteague Wildlife Refuge filled me in on what I had missed: “It was a gorgeous morning and we were all huddled around in groups,” deputy refuge manager, Kim Halpin, told me. “My husband was out on the beach road with my daughter filming, when suddenly one of the lakes loaded with snow geese flushed off the pool. It must have been 10,000 birds! My daughter said, ‘Is that the rocket?’ Somehow, the birds must have known something was up, because then we saw the rocket go up.”

Refuge officer Doug Beaudreau was listening to the countdown on a visitor’s radio scanner. “As soon is it hit zero, you just saw a bright glow in the distance and then a cloud of smoke,” he says. “After that, it slowly started rising. It went up several hundred yards and only then you heard the noise—a loud rumble like you’d hear on TV…It must have been a ten- to fifteen-second delay. It was all over pretty quick. Once it got up it was gone, but it was definitely something to see if you’ve never seen it before.”

The next launch from Wallops is scheduled for April 21 and despite some bad luck with past rocket launches, it’s definitely something I’d like to see. Besides, Wallops is a lot closer to Baltimore than Cape Canaveral.

RESOURCES

For information on April’s launch from Wallops Island Flight Facility (and another scheduled for October), see http://www.nasa.gov. For information on accommo-dations and attractions in and around Chincoteague, see chincoteague.com or call the town’s chamber of commerce at 757-336-6161.