Spaceport investment paying off for virginia

THERE ARE PLENTY of reasons why Orbital Sciences Corp. chose the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport for its launching pad last week - starting with familiarity and location.

But it could only settle at Wallops Island because the facility is still there, available to send rockets into space. For that, the company can thank the forward-thinking and investments of the governments of Virginia and Maryland, not to mention a university named Old Dominion.

Sadly, the debate over the importance of such long-term financial dedication is often an academic one in Virginia, lost amid the backbiting over roads and prisons. To its credit, during the most recent legislative session, the General Assembly approved $16 million in bonds to expand the spaceport to handle larger rockets.

The capital investment makes up for the fact that Maryland, which begins several miles north of Wallops Island, actually contributes more state money to the annual effort at the spaceport: $150,000, to Virginia's $100,000.

The payoff for the investment in Wallops is clear. Orbital's decision taps Virginia over Florida, and will lead to 125 new jobs, 50 on the Eastern Shore, and could mean somewhere between four and six launches of the company's 140-foot Taurus rockets every year.

Virginia gets a bigger piece of the highest of high-tech industries. Add that to a burgeoning modeling and simulation business in northern Suffolk - reinforced by ODU's programs in the discipline - and the impact becomes clear: Investment in education can lead to good jobs, and even new industries.

It can, that is, if Richmond is inclined to look beyond the next quarter, or the next biennial budget.

Here's the history: NASA was considering closing its facility at Wallops Island after its mission fell out of favor during and before the Clinton administration.

Oktay Baysal, dean of ODU's Frank Batten College of Engineering and Technology, picks up the story in an e-mail: "More than a decade ago, we at ODU dreamed, conceptualized and convinced the state to put together the Virginia Commercial Space Flight Authority, and we appointed one of our professors, Billie Reed, to be the director."

The authority was designed to be to outer space what the Virginia Port Authority is to oceans. After that ambition was rewarded with no business, and after the state's budget fell apart in the Gilmore years, in 2001 ODU stopped paying Reed's salary.

The school still offered and offers technical and engineering support, and provides a conduit for funding, but most of the money comes now from the states and from what the authority earns launching missions.

Orbital's new business, obviously, will help improve those finances, and will even go some way toward fulfilling the mission that ODU and partners envisioned a decade ago.