After Astra loses 99 percent of its value, founders take rocket firm private
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
Their software/controls people were obviously top notch.
Ben Brockert was at controls - literally - and led Masten Space to the first place in Northrop Grumman Lunar Landing Challenge - https://www.xprize.org/prizes/lunar-lander - and he also participated in Astra activities. I'm sure experience in rocket control can accumulate...
(The relevant rocket had an engine failure and left the pad sideways rather than upwards, with impressive control)
Love a good short sale.
It doesn't make a difference to me if I bought shares from someone for $36/share or if I created shares on a piece of paper for $0.00/share
If someone else buys those $0.00 shares for $36/share from me, and then those shares are worth much closer to $0.00 again, I'll make an offer and consider doing it again. Investments where you have an outsized influence on the outcome are tightly regulated but great opportunities to watch out for.
In this case, SPACs were always set up to flood the market with shares no matter what the underlying financials of the target company were like. Rosy? Still flooded with shares. Paltry? same result.
If people buy that anyway I can't consider that evil. The SEC mandated disclosures. Although in 2020 SPACs were allowed to say forward looking statements of potential target companies, and the SEC has clamped down on that because they have a paternal view that investors - the individual humans - cannot discern and are gullible, swayed by cults of personality. Personally, I think its a matter for investors, many SPAC deals did not close because investors used their discretion to not approve the movement of money into the target company and withdrew. Everyone has agency.
Already maybe 100 steps ahead of you
What happens if you are not legally or contractually allowed to sell your Astra stock? E. g. you're in the process of bankruptcy, or your stock is used as a security deposit or margin for some contract?
What happens if Astra is not legally allowed to buy back stock from you? Like if some stock was owned by some Russian investment fund, which was later sanctioned? Should Astra request an OFAC license for the transaction?
If you did nothing, the default was, yes, the shares would just disappear and be replaced in your account by cash. If you opted to retain, however, possibly because you were legally required to for some reason, have at it. You just own a thing you can't sell now. If the company ever goes public again in the future, then you can sell.
It was used for space tourism.a few times, but it's still too expensive, even at $30M per launch (without an orbital vehicle though).
I would personally rather not have some no frills, go fast and break things startup destroy space tourism before it has even started.
Astra approach literally resulted in them not having a reliable rocket ever. Ever rocket they ever build had issues.
Simply put, human suborbital is barley a real market at all. Its unlikely anybody will make a profit of it. And given the Blue Origin has infinity money and no need for revenue. And VO has scammed the stock market out of 100 of million of $.
Entering in that market would be crazy, you are not Jeff Bezos and you can't scam the stock market again. And anybody smart isn't gone invest in this terrible market.
From a business PoV, there are far too many private space companies. Beyond satellite internet (which may have very sketchy economics) and maybe, eventually space tourism for the uber-rich, there isn't enough demand for launch services, satellites, etc. to justify even 10% of the current and near-future capacity.
But space is cool, and there are plenty of bright wanna-be rocket scientists and dim wanna-be space billionaires - so I'd expect to see plenty more launches and crashes of private space companies.
Though I think the comment that's most indicative of Musk's actual mental state recently is "super rich ex wives who hate their spouse should be listed under the 'Reasons Western Civilization died'". :D
Of course he is often wrong about things, and has bad takes. And he can get angry and competitive. He is pretty petty. But if that makes somebody mentally unstable there are a lot of unstable people around.
As in, a person can be a screeching lunatic on twitter yet have two companies that are hitting milestone after milestone.
The achievements are what's relevant but everyone is glued to what's tweeted.
It's not a hard lesson to learn.
And, back on topic, dependency on infrastructure provided by a company lead by someone who is publicly campaigning for you to surrender and occasionally publicly threatens to switch it off is a more conspicuous security risk than most.
The fact is, in actual action, rather then a few tweets throwing ideas around, is there any other private person who help Ukraine more?
I think its kind of depressing when you have pro-Ukraine people shit on Musk, including the government itself, given that without him they would be in a far worse position. But that's the thing, in war, give a hand they want a whole arm, and if you wont give the arm, they will call you an enemy. That is a rational position to take for a government that is in a war, but everybody else doesn't have to parrot the messaging.
The Soviet Union in WW2 was the same way with the US. Here have this X any Z. Stalin "but we also want Y, A, B, C and more of X. The evil capitalist wont us to fail because they don't want to give us C".
It's possible to want to end the war without loudly and publicly endorsing explicitly Russian chauvinist positions like Crimea being "Khruschev's mistake" (screw the Crimeans that voted to continue to be part of Ukraine when they actually had a free and fair vote on the issue), Ukraine having an obligation to be "neutral" after its surrender to ensure they can't acquire any allies to protect themselves when Russia comes back for Odessa, and NATO having no reason to exist. It might be rational for Elon to believe any armistice is going to involve some concessions to Russia, but he doesn't have to parrot their messaging. (Or indeed comment at all: the main reason why you can't think of any other private people that have helped Ukraine more is that CEOs of other companies supplying Ukraine aren't quite so active on Twitter)
I think it's kind of depressing that Ukrainians have to trust him whilst he becomes one of the loudest public voices calling for a settlement on Russia's terms, and kind of understandable that they don't trust his motivations when he takes more reasonable decisions like declining to extend Starlink coverage to support an attack on the Russian naval fleet.
Perhaps. But lower costs can reveal demand.
For example, while I think microwave beamed power from space is a terrible idea, an orbital ring can also be used to transport power[0], and Starship makes such a structure somewhat more affordable.
[0] can, but I'm not saying it's the best option, even if "a charged object spinning in a vacuum" is a ballistic superconductor[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orbital_ring
[1] without the quantum effects: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ballistic_conduction
The markets for sub-orbital passenger service, or transporting bulk goods, are still 99.9% speculation. Otherwise - the total cost of a satellite or space station includes generally-very-high development and construction costs, then serious ongoing operational expenses. Neither dirt-cheap launch, nor a "Raspberry Pi, but for space" generic satellite bus could make useful satellites nearly as cheap as many folks seem eager to imagine. And Kessler Syndrome concerns give every A List nation in space ample reason to discourage anyone who wants to put cheap-but-less-reliable stuff into orbit. (Or abandon their stuff in orbit, after they get bored or go bankrupt.)
Lower costs can also reveal that you've blown billions on a 4-lane bridge to Lonely Island, when the 4-trips-daily old car ferry really was enough.
You're obviously more familiar with this concept than I am...and your wording seems fairly unenthusiastic about the prospects for it. So spending billions to unlock the possibility of it...well, just does not sound like a rational business decision. And my "...isn't enough demand...to justify..." point was tagged "From a business PoV".
Microwave beamed power = bad for reasons too long to divert into here.
Orbital ring = contiguous ring orbiting earth, with connection points floating on it mag-lev style, tethered to the ground.
The latter is functionally a superconductor, you can put charge on it and it keeps moving without loss. It's also a convenient place to put PV with no clouds. It's also an estimated cost to LEO of $0.05/kg, which is cheap enough to be worth comparing to conventional transport costs.
It's certainly extremely speculative. Heck, I hope the first is built on the moon rather than on Earth because I expect surprise failure modes.
But for what it can do, there's several clear business cases — just extremely risky ones.
And that's just one thing Starship can help make affordable. For example of a different possibility: I have no idea if the occasional ideas I hear about factories in freefall are good or bad ideas, but it seems to be attracting investment now.
"""An orbital ring is a concept of an artificial ring placed around a body and set rotating at such a rate that the apparent centrifugal force is large enough to counteract the force of gravity."""
The tether isn't in orbit, but the ring absolutely is. And you can exchange momentum with the ring to reach orbital speed.
All in RKLB.
SPACs are a complete scam and a grift only benefitting insiders.
It's pretty uncommon to be that bad at launch vehicle design. Recently Vulcan and SLS both launched and made orbit with new designs on the first try instead of the 7th, though you could probably just stack $1 bills and get to space just as fast.
Rocket lab got electron to orbit on their second try.
Relativity almost made it and they had a very weird production technique. SpaceX has been having issues but they're building a much more complicated vehicle.
Astra does seem to have had more than their fair share though.
I think the thing that's striking is most of the failures look like lack of ground testing to me. They had lots of failures that would have presented in ground firing and a couple that would have been obvious with proper electrical integration testing.
There's a lot of process we follow in the industry that looks weird from the outside but is pretty well tuned for risk reduction, you just don't have to go full Boeing where you create tons of bonus process then circumvent it all when it becomes expensive.
Startups like Astra couldn't hit the price point they wanted if they had done all those processes. So they did it a different way. In the case of Astra not successfully.
IIRC their first launch was destroyed by bad telemetry requiring manual flight termination (if in doubt terminate), the hardware itself flew perfectly on first launch.
Which is remarkably impressive.
* Astra - 5 years
* SpaceX - 7 years
* Firefly - 8 years
* RocketLab - 12 years
* Virgin Orbit - 13 years
ABL, Relativity, Blue Origin, Stoke - never made it to orbit
Compare the cost of SLS ($4.1 billion) and Vulcan ($100-200 million) to an Astra rocket ($4 million). If you spend 100-1000x more money, is it impressive to have better performance than a $4 million rocket?
It's the business case that failed. Mass-produced expendable rockets was a brilliant idea prior to SpaceX. It would have worked two decades ago. There's no market for it now.
ETA: Apparently they had more attempts than I remembered. The next one after the sideways launch did in fact reach orbit as their first success. They've only had a 50% success rate after that though, which is really unusual.
They failed technically and in business.
Their lunch success rate was far to late and the rockets they built were always behind what the market actually demanded. They moved from rocket model to rocket model and never managed to stable produce any of them.
> Mass-produced expendable rockets was a brilliant idea prior to SpaceX.
No it wasn't. Their whole idea of 'its fine if half the rockets fail' doesn't actually work. There are not enough payloads to mass-produce rockets (specially small rockets). Its a total misunderstanding of the economics of mass manufacture to think this was gone get the price low enough.
> It would have worked two decades ago.
No it wouldn't have. Because a decade ago they would not have gotten the money for so many failed launches in the first place. Its only because SpaceX and RocketLab proved the viability, that companies like Astra got the money to even attempted what they did.
The reason why they survived as long as they did is because the were able to SPAC when the market was high.
The readability is Astra was a technical failure of a company. The only success they had was because their CEO was good at twitter and selling the company.
Ironically, SpaceX is approaching those numbers for its reusable Falcon fleet.
> The readability is Astra was a technical failure of a company. The only success they had was because their CEO was good at twitter and selling the company.
Couldn't agree with you more on this though. I worked under the guy at NASA Ames. He was a hack and a poser, and I steered clear ever since.
This is just plainly incorrect. There is very little room for error launching rockets and they are quite complex. Many opportunities for failure and when you don't get everything right the default outcome is a large explosion.
It's really not that hard if you follow the established component and integration test playbook.
Source: I build space shit so I can eat.
Vulcan still cost multiple billions to develop, the engines had to go threw a very demanding air force test and validation program first. The rocket was delayed for years because of issues with both the BE-4 and the Centaur.
ULA has established suppliers and established factory, with lots of people that build and launch rockets. Those suppliers are very expensive, but if you have the US military paying you 200+ million $ per launch, you can afford that.
To compare those to examples to a tiny startup rocket company is kind of absurd. They simply don't have lots of legacy reliable components. They can't use existing suppliers as those are far to expensive and don't have products for micro launchers.
You are comparing rockets that cost 30x or 300x of what Astra priced their rocket at.
Generally if you want to understand Astra issues, you have to understand the dynamics of the market.
The main problem with Astra was that they were always behind the market. They started with a micro rocket, that was simply to small for most sats. So before they ever made that reliable they made the rocket bigger. And once they had done that it was pretty clear that the market needed even bigger sats. So they iterated again and made their rocket bigger.
But that happened again so they gave up that rocket and (in theory) now they are building an even bigger rocket.
They never actually settled on a design. The basically launch a new rocket 1-2 times and before they had figured out all the issues were already looking at the next design and those designs had new issues.
It was more important for the CEO scam and lie about how brilliant the next rocket was gone be so nobody thought to much about why the last rocket blew up. The companies main product was selling stock to uninformed people.
When RocketLab and others strategically moved into space craft, Astra bought a Ion-Engine company just so they can say they do the same thing. When SpaceX had success with Starlink, Astra promised to have an even better global internet.
Having a good story was more the priority then having good engineering and good execution.
This book is a good read: "When the Heavens Went on Sale: The Misfits and Geniuses Racing to Put Space Within Reach"
Its about Planet, Astra, RocketLab and Firefly. Book doesn't make the Astra CEO look great.
... and Will have to check out "When the Heavens Went on Sale." Recently, read "Lift Off: Elon Musk and the Desperate Early Days That Launched SpaceX." Truly interesting and showed how so much of Falcon 1's development was touch and go, with tons of technical, political and financial set backs. Lots of brillant engineers worked on that rocket.
https://spacenews.com/ula-to-fly-vulcan-technology-on-atlas-...
And SLS reused old-tech even more so (at least from my understanding). For SLS, NASA used the boosters from the space shuttle for the first stage: https://www.nasa.gov/reference/space-launch-system-solid-roc...
Yeah, NASA and ULA take the most conservative approach to rockets, using technology that they developed decades ago.
... but maybe that's what you mean by "following the established component and integration test playbook." It's smart and safe, but still, this also means they aren't innovating and, as you know, even for Space X, doing something new took them many, many years of failures, for Falcon 1, Falcon 9, and on into Starship.
Obviously a clean first launch can be done, I'm not arguing against that, I'm saying "Basic rocketry isn't all that hard anymore" is nonsense. Nobody looking at the SLS program and its troubles and say that building rockets isn't difficult.
You can spend an enormous amount of time and resources while using as much legacy proven hardware as possible to try to never fail... or you can blow up rockets to test them for faster cheaper results.