Posted: Sat, Dec 16, 2006, 9:58 AM ET (1458 GMT)
A Minotaur rocket launched two satellites for the Air Force and NASA from a new commercial spaceport in Virginia Saturday morning. The Minotaur 1 rocket lifted off from Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport (MARS) at Wallops Island, Virginia at 7 am EST (1200 GMT) and placed the TacSat-2 and GeneSat-1 spacecraft into low Earth orbit. TacSat-2 is an experimental military satellite designed to test means of providing tactical imagery directly to troops on the ground. GeneSat-1 is a microsatellite built by NASA Ames Research Center to test the effects of the space environment on a strain of E. coli bacteria. The launch is the first from MARS, a commercial spaceport co-located with NASA's Wallops Flight Facility, and is the first orbital launch from Wallops in general in over a decade.

Related Links:

•  AP article
•  Hampton Roads Virginian Pilot article
•  NASA SpaceFlight.com article