Delmarva Treasure: Wallop’s Flight Facility – Tuesday, June 23, 2015

Did you know a lot of the research that paved the way for man to travel to space, and to the moon, was done right here on Delmarva at NASA’s Wallops Island Flight Facility? The facility has been around for 70 years. Today’s Delmarva Treasure we decided to take a look back and forward on Wallop’s Island.

T.J. Meyer is an Environmental Restoration Program Manager with NASA, but he is also an unofficial historian. He says operations began here shortly after the attack on Pearl Harbor. There were growing concern that Germany U boats were threatening the east coast. The Chincoteague Naval Auxiliary Air Station was home of two torpedo bomber squadrons. Meyer says a young pilot named George Herbert Walker Bush was trained here. Following WWII the naval aviation ordnance test station was establish to test new types of ordnance, planes and missiles. 1959 NASA took over the formal naval air station renaming it the Wallop’s Flight Center.