page_title: History of Virginia
section_title: Cold War and Space Age
hierarchical_section_title: History of Virginia / WWII and Modern era / Cold War and Space Age
caption_attribution_description: English: Little Joe on launcher at Wallops Island. Little Joe was a major project for Langley. It was a test of the escape and recovery systems on the Mercury spacecraft.
context_page_description: The History of Virginia begins with documentation by the first Spanish explorers to reach the area in the 1500s, when it was occupied chiefly by Algonquian, Iroquoian, and Siouan peoples. After a failed English attempt to colonize Virginia in the 1580s by Walter Raleigh, permanent English colonization began in Virginia with Jamestown, Virginia, in 1607. The Virginia Company colony was looking for gold but failed and the colonists could barely feed themselves. The famine during the harsh winter of 1609 forced the colonists to eat leather from their clothes and boots and resort to cannibalism. The colony nearly failed until tobacco emerged as a profitable export. It was grown on plantations, using primarily indentured servants for the intensive hand labor involved. After 1662, the colony turned black slavery into a hereditary racial caste. By 1750, the primary cultivators of the cash crop were West African slaves. While the plantations thrived because of the high demand for tobacco, most white settlers raised their families on subsistence farms.
context_section_description: In addition to general postwar growth, the Cold War resulted in further growth in both Northern Virginia and Hampton Roads. With the Pentagon already established in Arlington, the newly formed Central Intelligence Agency located its headquarters further afield at Langley (unrelated to the Air Force Base). In the early 1960s, the new Dulles International Airport was built, straddling the Fairfax County-Loudoun County border. Other sites in Northern Virginia included the listening station at Vint Hill. Due to the presence of the U.S. Atlantic Fleet in Norfolk, in 1952 the Allied Command Atlantic of NATO was headquartered there, where it remained for the duration of the Cold War. Later in the 1950s and across the river, Newport News Shipbuilding would begin construction of the USS Enterprise—the world's first nuclear-powered aircraft carrier—and the subsequent atomic carrier fleet.
  Virginia also witnessed American efforts in the Space Race. When the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics was transformed into the National Aeronautics and Space Administration in 1958, the resulting Space Task Group headquartered at the laboratories of Langley Research Center. From there, it would initiate Project Mercury, and would remain the headquarters of the U.S. manned spaceflight program until its transfer to Houston in 1962. On the Eastern Shore, near Chincoteague, Wallops Flight Facility served as a rocket launch site, including the launch of Little Joe 2 on December 4, 1959, which sent a rhesus monkey, Sam, into suborbital spaceflight. Langley later oversaw the Viking program to Mars.
  The new U.S. Interstate highway system begun in the 1950s and the new Hampton Roads Bridge-Tunnel in 1958 helped transform Virginia Beach from a tiny resort town into one of the state's largest cities by 1963, and spurring the growth of the Hampton Roads region linked by the Hampton Roads Beltway. In the western portion of the state, completion of north-south Interstate 81 brought better access and new businesses to dozens of counties over a distance of 300 miles (480 km) as well as facilitating travel by students at the many Shenandoah area colleges and universities. The creation of Smith Mountain Lake, Lake Anna, Claytor Lake, Lake Gaston, and Buggs Island Lake, by damming rivers, attracted many retirees and vacationers to those rural areas. As the century drew to a close, Virginia tobacco growing gradually declined due to health concerns, although not at steeply as in Southern Maryland. A state community college system brought affordable higher education within commuting distance of most Virginians, including those in remote, underserved localities. Other new institutions were founded, most notably George Mason University and Liberty University. Localities such as Danville and Martinsville suffered greatly as their manufacturing industries closed.
caption: A Little Joe rocket being prepared for launch at the Wallops Flight Facility near Chincoteague, as part of Project Mercury
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