A rocket’s red glare will become a more common sight in the skies of Washington, D.C. Rocket Lab USA, the startup whose lightweight Electron rocket has won a notable share of the small-satellite launch business, announced Monday that it will build a factory for its upcoming, larger Neutron rocket on Wallops Island, Virginia.
Wallops, a spot on Virginia’s Eastern Shore about 110 miles southeat of the nation’s capital that hosts a NASA facility, was already on Rocket Lab’s radar as an Electron launch site. The Long Beach, Calif., company—which today bases that vehicle at a site on New Zealand’s North Island—now expects to inaugurate Electron launches from Wallops this year.
Rocket Lab had also named Wallops as a launch site for Neutron, a 131-foot-tall vehicle designed to deliver 8 tons of payload to low Earth orbit and then return to land at its launch site. But it had yet to say where it would build this rocket, mostly by using robotic machinery for rapid layup of its carbon-composite structure.
“The entire launch vehicle will be manufactured at that facility,” Rocket Lab founder and CEO Peter Beck said in a Monday press conference. “There’ll be whole rockets rolling out of those sheds.”
The factory will employ up to 250 people and, with a mission control center, span some 250,000 square feet. Beck said that having the factory adjacent to the launch site will ease reprocessing each Neutron vehicle after it lands upright near the pad.
That mission profile evokes the vertical landings of SpaceX’s Falcon 9 first stage, except that Neutron will return with its payload fairing intact and closed after opening it at peak altitude to eject a second stage that will finish taking its cargo to orbit.
Beck did not offer an estimate for the first Neutron launch but told CNBC in December that Rocket Lab was aiming for a 2024 debut.
Rocket Lab will be the second major commercial tenant at Wallops. Northrop Grumman has used this site to launch its Antares rocket on cargo deliveries to the International Space Station since 2013. Space-enthusiast Washingtonians who have learned to look to the southeast to spot an Antares launch—they can be difficult to see in daylight but unmistakable at night—now have more launch-spotting opportunities to look forward to.
