Learn More About Wallops about Wallops Flight Facility. The next launch from Wallops is targeted for late October 2022. Wallops is NASAs only owned and operated launch range, launching suborbital rockets, scientific balloons, and more to support science & technology. NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility provides agile, low-cost flight and launch range services to meet government and commercial sector needs for accessing flight regimes worldwide from the Earth’s surface to the moon and beyond. Sporadic-E layers on Earth can cause unpredictable disruptions to radio communications. While the main purpose of SpEED Demon was to test the instrument package and risk reduction on some new technologies for usage on subsequent rocket missions, scientists are excited that they were able to launch into a Sporadic E layer in the ionosphere, the electrified upper portion of Earth's atmosphere that's made of ionized gas called plasma. We'll be looking at the performance of all instruments to get us ready for the 2024 launch,' said Aroh Barjatya, SpEED Demon principal investigator and director of the Space and Atmospheric Instrumentation Lab at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Daytona Beach, Florida. Preliminary analysis shows that we flew through a Sporadic E event on the downleg and the data looks great. The SpEED Demon instruments will be further improved based on results from this launch and will subsequently fly on a science mission targeted for summer 2024 from the Kwajalein Atoll in the Marshall Islands and possibly many other sounding rocket opportunities. This time around the small satellite launcher will be sending a pair of earth-imaging satellites to low-earth orbit for Capella Space. The purpose of the SpEED Demon mission was to test new instrumentation along with heritage instruments that have flown on other sounding rocket missions, but not together. The first Rocket Lab launch from Wallops took place January 24. The experiment was not planned to be recovered.

The Terrier-Improved Malemute carried the Sporadic-E ElectroDynamics Demonstration mission, or SpEED Demon, to an apogee of 100 miles before descending and landing in the Atlantic Ocean.

Wallops launch