Astra Space fails to deliver satellites to orbit; shares dive

Feb 10 (Reuters) – California-based launch service Astra Space Inc (ASTR.O)suffered a major blow in its quest to join the burgeoning club of new ventures partnering with NASA, as its rocket failed on Thursday to deliver the startup’s first commercial payload to orbit.

Shares of Astra Space, which went public in July, tumbled on news of the setback, dropping by as much as 38% during Thursday trading on the Nasdaq to an all-time low of $3.25. They closed at $3.91, down 26%.

Astra’s two-stage, kerosene-fueled Launch Vehicle 0008, also known as Rocket 3.3, was carrying four miniature research satellites, or CubeSats, for NASA. Three of them were developed by public universities and one by the space agency itself.

Word of the mission’s failure came about 14 minutes after the 38-foot-tall rocket blasted off at 3 p.m. EST (1000 GMT) from the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station and soared into the clear blue skies over Florida in what appeared at first to be a seamless flight.

A video camera feed from the upper stage of the rocket was lost about five minutes after launch, followed by a lengthy pause in Astra’s commentary during its livestream of the event.

Astra director of product management Carolina Grossman finally broke the suspense to announce that an unspecified “issue has been experienced during flight that prevented the delivery of our customer payloads to orbit.”

“More information will be provided as we complete a data review,” she said, adding that the company was “deeply sorry to our customers.”

The failed flight came on the third launch try of the mission, designated by NASA as ELaNA 41.

The previous attempt, on Monday, was aborted at T-minus zero of the countdown, just as the rocket’s engines were about to ignite. Astra officials said Monday’s launch was automatically scrubbed when systems detected a minor telemetry glitch, which they later said was resolved and would not have affected the flight in any case.

Headquartered in Alameda, California, Astra is one of a growing array of new firms building small-payload launch systems to cash in on the exponential growth in compact satellites needing a ride to orbit.

Front-runners in this class of commercial space ventures include Firefly Aerospace, owned by entrepreneur Max Polyakov, U.S.-New Zealand startup Rocket Lab (RKLB.O) and British billionaire Richard Branson’s Virgin Orbit (VORB.O).

The boom has been driven in part by venture cash and technology advances that have reduced the size, and boosted the capabilities, of satellites used for purposes ranging from communications to national security and climate research.

Astra boasts of becoming the first rocket company to reach orbit in less than five years with the flight of an earlier rocket, Launch Vehicle 0007, which demonstrated orbital placement of a test payload in November 2021.

The ELaNa initiative, short for the Educational Launch of Nanosatellites, has sent more than 100 CubeSats to orbit since its 2010 inception under NASA’s Launch Services Program, which contracted with Astra for Thursday’s ill-fated mission.

Reporting by Steve Gorman in Los Angeles, Editing by Franklin Paul, Jonathan Oatis and David Gregorio

Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.