By RICK STEELHAMMER
Charleston Gazette-Mail
(NASA photo)
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CHARLESTON, W.Va. — The first space satellite designed and built in West Virginia was to begin a five-year, 310-mile high orbit of Earth starting at 11 p.m. Eastern Standard Time Wednesday from a launch site near Mahia, New Zealand, according to NASA’s Fairmont-based Independent Verification and Validation (IV&V) Program.
West Virginia’s cube-shaped satellite, named Simulation to Flight, has joined 10 other cube satellites produced at states across the country aboard the launch vehicle Electron, owned by the private company Rocket Lab, at its launch complex on New Zealand’s North Island.
The primary goal of the mission is to demonstrate the capabilities of the software-only simulation environments developed by NASA’s IV&V program.
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