Is there any info on what caused their technical issues? Basic rocketry isn't all that hard anymore, the dynamics are well understood, were they trying to do something weird with manufacturing?
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.
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?