From the Shore to the Stars

Ted Mercer: I’ve been around the space business for a lot of years. I started out in our nation’s Air Force in the intercontinental ballistic missile business. I sat in underground silos, ready to launch our nuclear assets should the president decide to do that. During that time, there was a program called the Follow-On Test and Evaluation Program, which tested the reliability of intercontinental ballistic missiles that had been sitting in underground silos for years. The program would randomly select a missile by serial number, remove it from its operational silo, take it to Vandenberg Air Force Base in California, reinsert it into a like silo at Vandenberg, and when directed, launch it some 4,200 nautical miles downrange to the Kwajalein Atoll.

I had to pull together an operations, maintenance, and logistics team encompassing some 50 to 60 people. The team went out to Vandenberg for 45 days to prepare this missile for launch. I take you back to that point because that was when I was bitten by the launch bug. I fell in love with space lift when we launched that missile downrange.

I am extremely pleased to join the Virginia Space team and assume responsibility for Virginia Space and the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport. There aren’t many places in the United States where you can actually launch rockets to orbit. In all of my years of service in the U.S. Air Force, government, and industry, being a part of a rocket launch is just extremely special. To be able to do that safely is a great responsibility and extremely rewarding.

MARS has world-class facilities and an extremely strong workforce that make MARS a leader in low-earth orbit launches. The spaceport, in my view, was already well-positioned for future development. My charter is to grow that expertise and increase our operations tempo, or the frequency of launches out of MARS.

El Koubi: Thinking back on your career in the Air Force and your leadership there, how does that affect the way you approach this new position?

Mercer: One of the things you learn in the U.S. military is that the most important asset you have is your people. You can’t get the mission done without your people.

Prior to joining Virginia Space, my career encompassed decades in aerospace and executive leadership in the military, the private sector, and then back in government after I left the private sector. I commanded what was then the 45th Logistics Group at Cape Canaveral in Florida. I ran the operational launch range for everything that launched out of the Cape, to include shuttle operations. That meant I was in charge of all optics, telemetry, radar, and command destruct systems, all the way down the coast of Florida out to the island of Antigua, and all the way to Ascension Island off the west coast of Africa. I’ve been involved in developing national security policy and operations almost my entire career. In industry, I had profit and loss responsibility in actually building the exquisite satellites for our intelligence community that were launched into orbit on behalf of this nation.

El Koubi: Can you give us a quick overview of space assets in Virginia — the facilities and capabilities?

Mercer: It’s one of the things that impresses every person who comes to MARS to tour our facilities. They leave with their eyes the size of half dollars, saying to themselves, “Wow, we didn’t know that the Commonwealth of Virginia had this kind of capability.”

Let me walk through some of that capability. We have basically three launchpads. Launchpad 0A is designed to handle liquid fuel rockets. The Northrop Grumman commercial Antares rocket with the payload to resupply the International Space Station launches out of Pad A. Pad B is for launching solid rockets like the Minotaur I, the Minotaur IV, and the Minotaur V. We launch many Department of Defense and national security missions, as well as other federal government satellites off of Pad B. We also launched the first lunar mission off of Pad B, the LADEE mission, the Lunar Atmospheric Dust Environmental Explorer. Pad C is a venture-class launchpad that will be used to launch the Rocket Lab Electron rocket. We built this launchpad, from groundbreaking to full operational status, in 11 months.

We have a MARS command building that offers secure operational facilities for classified work, a spaceport control room, large meeting rooms, and a segregated, dedicated customer space.

We have a state-of-the-art MARS Payload Processing Facility designed to accommodate and attract both classified and unclassified security missions. It’s designed to process classified and unclassified payloads simultaneously, but yet segregated for security and clearance requirements.

We have an Integration and Control Facility, owned by Virginia Space and leased to Rocket Lab for them to integrate their multiple Electron launch vehicles. Additionally, it has a mission control room and office and customer space. It’s located only nine miles from their launchpad.

We are one of only four launch spaceports in the United States that are licensed by the FAA for vertical launch to orbit. One interesting thing to note is that unlike horizontal launch, vertical launch provides the ability to get larger payloads to space on a single rocket. For example, most horizontal space lift operations can put up anywhere from 1,000 to about an 1,100-pound payload. We routinely launch payloads in excess of 18,000 pounds.

Rocket Lab, Accomack County

El Koubi: We interviewed your predecessor, Dale Nash, about a year and a half ago for this publication. At that time, Mr. Nash said that about half of the launches at MARS were commercial. Can you talk about the operation today? Is it roughly the same mix, or is it changing?

Mercer: That’s not a cut-and-dried answer. The lines are blurring between commercial and government launches more than they ever have before. Let me start by giving you the FAA definition. The FAA says a commercial launch is a launch that is internationally competed, or whose primary payload is commercial in nature. The reason I say that it’s not cut and dried is because we launch many payloads into orbit that may be on a commercial rocket, but the payload is a government payload — or the payload was actually built by a commercial company. In that scenario, is that a government payload or is that a satellite commercial launch? According to the FAA’s definition, about 67% of our launches last year would be classified as commercial.

The other thing I would point out is that all the rockets launched from MARS this past year were commercial launch vehicles, supporting government and DOD customers. For example, the Northrop Grumman Antares rocket that resupplies the International Space Station — the resupply is a NASA payload, but the rocket is a Northrop Grumman commercial rocket.