page_title: Wallops Flight Facility
section_title: Visitor center
hierarchical_section_title: Wallops Flight Facility / Visitor center
caption_attribution_description: English: NASA Visitor Center at Wallops Flight Facility, Virginia along Route 175.
context_page_description: Wallops Flight Facility is a rocket launch site on Wallops Island on the Eastern Shore of Virginia, United States, just east of the Delmarva Peninsula and approximately 100 miles north-northeast of Norfolk. The facility is operated by the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, and primarily serves to support science and exploration missions for NASA and other Federal agencies. WFF includes an extensively instrumented range to support launches of more than a dozen types of sounding rockets; small expendable suborbital and orbital rockets; high-altitude balloon flights carrying scientific instruments for atmospheric and astronomical research; and, using its Research Airport, flight tests of aeronautical research aircraft, including unmanned aerial vehicles.
  There have been over 16,000 launches from the rocket testing range at Wallops since its founding in 1945 in the quest for information on the flight characteristics of airplanes, launch vehicles, and spacecraft, and to increase the knowledge of the Earth's upper atmosphere and the environment of outer space.
context_section_description: The Wallops Visitor Center has a variety of hands-on exhibits and hosts weekly educational activities and programs to enable children to explore and learn about the technologies designed and used by NASA researchers and scientists. In addition, one Saturday each month, NASA invites model rocketry enthusiasts to launch their own rockets from the WFF rocket launch site. NASA personnel also participate, launching models of various rockets and explaining the spacecraft they carry in real life.
  The schedule for sounding rocket launches from WFF is posted on its official Web site.
caption: NASA Visitor Center at Wallops Flight Facility
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