Over the past week, a nearly-confirmed rumor has circulated that while NASA may actually be getting a slight financial boost overall in the President’s 2011 budget plan — which he’ll announce Monday — Obama will also urge Congress to give the Constellation program the axe, big time, leaving the U.S. space program with no plan for human spaceflight in the foreseeable future. (We’ll be relying on the Russians to send our astronauts to the International Space Station — oh, what a few decades change.)

So what is in the sky? Well, there is one area of spaceflight that, almost under the radar, is receiving significant support from government and commercial coffers alike: spaceports. The Federal Aviation Administration has officially licensed seven spaceports (including Richard Branson’s Spaceport America in New Mexico) around the country in the last decade, one of which concerns our readership: the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport (or MARS) located at picturesque Wallops Island, Va., about a three-hour drive from D.C. MARS and its two launchpads are on the southern tip of the Wallops Flight Facility (WFF), which has been a significant NASA rocket launching facility since 1945 (in fact, before NASA was even called NASA), and is supported by Goddard Space Flight Center, right here at the end of the Green line. The governors of Virginia and Maryland signed a joint agreement and broke ground for MARS in 2003.

MARS works in conjunction with WFF, launching satellites and other missions into low-Earth orbit. With an FAA license, MARS will be able to launch humans on commercial spaceflights for space tourism. Virginia’s Governor Bob McDonnell has thrown his full support behind Wallops and MARS (Creigh Deeds and McDonnell matched each other on support for Wallops during the election). Last week, McDonnell urged the Virginia General Assembly to keep former Gov. Kaine’s commitment to invest $1.3 million in MARS, despite Virginia’s current budget shortfall. As Space Politics noted, McDonnell promised, “We can make Wallops Island the top commercial Spaceport in America, and I ask you to keep that money in place so that we can aggressively recruit aerospace companies and promote space tourism initiatives.”