Astra plans to end production of its current line of missiles after multiple launch failures.
The California-based company will instead focus on “the next version of its launch system,” a more powerful vehicle that will feature increased reliability, capacity and production rate, Astra announced on Thursday (August 4) (opens in new tab) . ).
“It was pretty clear that after two flights out of four that we had flown, we weren’t successful,” said Chris Kemp, Astra’s founder and CEO, during a conference call with investors regarding Rocket 3.3, the latest version of the now canceled Rocket 3 booster line.
Video: Watch the failure of Astra’s LV0010 rocket with NASA satellites
Most recently, Astra’s Launch Vehicle 0010 (LV0010) suffered a second stage failure after lifting off from a landing pad at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida on June 12, were lost in the failure.
NASA selected Astra to launch these CubeSats for the agency’s Time-Resolved Observations of Precipitation structure and Storm Intensity with a Constellation of Smallsats (TROPICS) mission. Astra is hired to air four more TROPICS CubeSats on two launches in a $7.95 million deal for the company.
Astra said the company plans to transition all customers (including NASA) to its next-generation launch system, called Rocket 4. “We are in discussions with NASA to proceed with TROPICS,” Kemp said.
Kemp emphasized that the transition will take some time for customers and Rocket 4 test launches would not occur until 2023 at the earliest. “We want to do multiple test flights, we want to test every component of the system, we want to test the engines, we want to test the stages, we want to test the software, we want to test the electronics,” he said.
The timeline for moving to Rocket 4, he added, will have “a lot of uncertainty because we want to give the team time to do all of this testing before we do another commercial launch.” He called for Astra engineers to be “given time to achieve those milestones” and promised to provide updates as needed.
At the same time, Astra is working with NASA and the US Federal Aviation Administration to understand the cause of the June 12 launch failure problem. Kemp said the rocket was a normal first stage flight and stage separation that day, but the upper stage had a problem that caused its engine to “run out of fuel and shut down prematurely.”
Including test flights and previous versions, the Rocket 3 line has failed five times out of seven launches, according to SpaceNews (opens in new tab).
Another high-profile failure occurred on Feb. 10 in a mission involving four tiny CubeSats for NASA’s Educational Nanosatellite Launch Initiative. The problem was later traced to a payload fairing deployment issue that caused the second stage to crash, resulting in the loss of the satellites.
Astra was addressing the causes ahead of its next launch, which saw multiple satellites successfully deployed on March 15 after a launch from the Pacific Spaceport Complex on Alaska’s Kodiak Island. The company’s first successful orbital launch occurred during a test flight in November 2021.
Rocket 4 will see some design changes in its development before test flights take place in 2023 at the earliest. The vehicle’s payload capacity will be 1,320 pounds (600 kilograms), a large increase over previous Astra vehicles, and the upper stage engine has been upgraded to support this change.
“The feedback we got from some of the larger constellation operators was that the satellites were getting bigger,” Kemp said of the design change. In contrast, the latest version of Rocket 3, at 110 pounds (50 kg), had a payload capacity less than a tenth that of its successor.
The price of a Rocket 4 launch is expected to be less than $5 million, Astra said in Thursday’s statement.
Astra aims to offer a distinctive service in the crowded small satellite launch market by using rockets advertised as inexpensive, easily transportable and efficient. However, a NASA official recently said the agency is evaluating its options to continue TROPICS launches.
“We had signed a contract with a new and innovative carrier company and we knew we were taking a certain risk. In this case, the risk didn’t pay off,” Karen St. Germain, director of NASA’s Earth Science Division, said at the Aug. 24 2nd meeting of the Earth Science Advisory Committee attended by SpaceNews. NASA is in talks with partners, she added, “to figure out what that path forward will look like.”
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