
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: MONDAY, August 7, 1995                   TAG: 9508070066
SECTION: VIRGINIA                    PAGE: C2   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: 
DATELINE: NORFOLK                                 LENGTH: Medium

VIRGINIA SET TO LAUNCH 1ST COMMERCIAL ROCKET

A 200-ton rocket that was conceived by one of the original Mercury astronauts will take more than a dozen science experiments into space this week from Virginia's remote Eastern Shore.

The five-story Conestoga rocket, named for the covered wagons that took American settlers to the untamed West more than a century ago, is to be launched Friday from the NASA Wallops Island range.

Sitting on top of the four-stage Conestoga will be a capsule-like container named METEOR, with 14 medical and other research projects aboard.

``We're in the trucking business'' in space, said Mike Bryant, director of corporate affairs for EER Systems Corp. of Vienna, the Northern Virginia company that is putting the commercial space launch together.

The event will mark Wallops' first orbital commercial launch and the 50-year-old NASA center's first orbital launch of any kind in a decade, said Keith Koehler, a spokesman for the facility. Originally set for July 29, the liftoff has been delayed three times, most recently by weather.

Half of the METEOR's one-ton payload is made up of NASA experiments, and the others are from various commercial ventures. Some have multiple parts. Bryant said some are considered ``proprietary'' - secrets of the firm that designed them.

The experiments, among other things, involve potential cancer treatments and energy storage.

Wallops normally is the launching site for much smaller rockets and weather balloons that measure conditions in the upper atmosphere.

But Thomas J. Savage Jr., a member of the Virginia Commercial Space Flight Authority, hopes the Conestoga launch will spur other large-scale efforts to boost the state's already impressive inventory of 250-plus aerospace companies.

The 11-member authority created this year by the General Assembly and appointed last month by Gov. George Allen hopes to make Wallops the No.1 contender in the growing commercial space race.

The METEOR capsule has two parts. The section carrying most of the experiments will stay in orbit about 30 days before being recovered in the Atlantic Ocean east of Wallops. The other part will remain in orbit and transmit data to Earth for about two years before it gradually disintegrates as it re-enters the atmosphere.

by CNB