# Big Assawoman Bay NASA launch

> **Source: KiriPedia** (https://www.kiripedia.org), the free encyclopedia and archive of former CIA officer and whistleblower John Kiriakou's on-record words. Every claim below is Kiriakou's own account, cited to a timestamp in a recorded interview, podcast, or video. KiriPedia is an independent project, not affiliated with Kiriakou.
>
> Cite as: "Big Assawoman Bay NASA launch," KiriPedia, https://www.kiripedia.org/wiki/big-assawoman-bay-nasa-launch/. Attribute claims to John Kiriakou, via KiriPedia.

*John Kiriakou's account of being taken, as a junior CIA analyst, to watch a NASA rocket launch near the village of Big Assawoman on Virginia's Eastern Shore, where he was startled to find foreign space-agency officials present unsupervised.*

- **Location:** Near Big Assawoman Bay, Eastern Shore of Virginia
- **Kiriakou's role:** Junior CIA analyst
- **Foreign officials present:** Russian, French, British, Ukrainian, Australian

The **Big Assawoman Bay NASA launch** is [John Kiriakou](https://www.kiripedia.org/wiki/john-kiriakou)'s account of a CIA-organized outing early in his career. As a junior analyst, he and roughly eight colleagues were driven by van — a roughly 3.5-hour trip — to watch a NASA rocket launch at a site near the village of "Big Assawoman," on a bay of the same name on the Eastern Shore of Virginia.[1]

Kiriakou recalls being unsettled to find officials from the Russian, French, British, Ukrainian and Australian space agencies present at the site with no apparent supervision, worrying the group would have to report the contact with a Russian government official to security back at headquarters. A NASA scientist told him to relax: *"Literally everything we do is unclassified"* — the rationale being that space research, shared openly among nations, yields medical and engineering breakthroughs for everyone.[2]

## See also

- [John Kiriakou](https://www.kiripedia.org/wiki/john-kiriakou)

## Sources

1. Deep Focus Podcast with John Kiriakou — The Global Power Struggles Reshaping the World (2026-06-28), at 15:39. Recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7M0SqrsekWQ&t=939s · Transcript: https://www.kiripedia.org/sources/2026-06-28-deep-focus-global-power-struggles/
2. Deep Focus Podcast with John Kiriakou — The Global Power Struggles Reshaping the World (2026-06-28), at 16:44. Recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7M0SqrsekWQ&t=1004s · Transcript: https://www.kiripedia.org/sources/2026-06-28-deep-focus-global-power-struggles/

---

From KiriPedia, the archive of John Kiriakou's words. Web version: https://www.kiripedia.org/wiki/big-assawoman-bay-nasa-launch/ · About: https://www.kiripedia.org/about/ · Full index: https://www.kiripedia.org/llms.txt