A Rare Orbital Electron from Wallops

Rocket Lab’s Electron made a rare orbital flight out of Wallops Island, Virginia on December 18, 2025, lifting off just past midnight from Launch Pad 0C at the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport. Also known by its Rocket Lab designation of LC-2, the launch site in Virginia is usually host only to the occasional secretive HASTE flight, though the island is forecast to see increased activity as 2026 dawns.

Electron supported the Space Test Program-S30 mission for the U.S. Space Force, carrying a payload of four small, disk-shaped satellites into low Earth orbit. This marked Rocket Lab’s 20th launch of 2025, yet only its fourth from Virginia in the past year, and the only orbital one at that. Rocket Lab typically uses the site for its HASTE hypersonic test program, which uses a variant of Electron to send payloads on suborbital trajectories—often with short notice and scarce public information. Since its commissioning, LP-0C/LC-2 has hosted a total of ten flights of Electron, six of them being HASTE missions. The last orbital flight of Electron from Virginia was NROL-123 in March of 2024.

The Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport as a whole has been fairly quiet in recent years. There are two other active pads; LP-0A hosted the Antares launch vehicle until 2023, when that vehicle’s supply chain was compromised by the Russian invasion of Ukraine. LP-0B is the home of the elusive Minotaur rocket, but hasn’t seen a flight since 2021.

In 2026, however, Wallops Island may become much more active. Rocket Lab has been developing the larger Neutron rocket, a partially-reusable medium-lift vehicle, which it hopes to deliver to the site and fly sometime this year. The company had previously pushed to launch the inaugural flight in 2025, but CEO Peter Beck has stressed that the company will not fly Neutron unless it is confident in success—which could push the timeline further still. Neutron will fly from LP-0D, also known to Rocket Lab as LC-3, the site’s newly-built fourth pad.

Meanwhile, Firefly Aerospace and Northrop Grumman have been collaborating on a new first stage for Antares to restore Cygnus launch capability independent of Falcon 9. The new vehicle, called Antares 330, is also planned to launch in 2026. Altogether, the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport could see two new users make waves in the coming year as the American launch landscape continues to evolve.