The Wallops Flight Facility also supports science missions for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and occasionally for foreign governments and commercial organizations. The launch vehicles vary in size and power from the small Super Loki meteorological rockets to orbital-class 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. 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. Wallops Flight Facility ( WFF) (IATA: WAL, ICAO: KWAL, FAA LID: WAL), located on the Eastern Shore of Virginia, United States, approximately 100 miles ( Template:Convert/round km) north-northeast of Norfolk, is operated by the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, primarily as a rocket launch site to support science and exploration missions for NASA and other Federal agencies.
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