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wallop

Wallops Flight Facility, NASA's hidden launch shop

WALLOPS ISLAND, Va.--Imagine a football stadium floating high in the sky, enclosed in material not much thicker than a sandwich bag.

Take away the physical part of the football field, but leave the volume, and you get a sense of the size of the high-altitude balloons that NASA uses to conduct scientific experiments.

Those balloons, as well as the design and manufacture of sub-orbital rockets and the launching into space of government satellites, are among the mandates of the Wallops Flight Facility, a NASA center based here on the Atlantic coast about 160 miles southeast of Washington, D.C. … Read more

Microsoft-backed social network gets walloped

A would-be social network called Wallop has shut its doors, according to a message on the home page.

"Thank you for being part of the Wallop beta social-networking site," the message reads. "We really appreciate your feedback and support. The beta period will end on September 18th, 2008--after that date, you will no longer be able to access your account."

But Wallop wasn't just another tale of crushed Silicon Valley dreams. The site, which once aimed to compete with the likes of MySpace, had backing from none other than Microsoft.

Microsoft hadn't invested in … Read more