Astra/John Kraus
After three failures,Astra, which finally successfully entered the orbit in November last year, launched its first commercial mission earlier this week, launching multiple cubesats for NASA’s ELaNa 41 (Education Launch of Nanosatellites). Unfortunately, a mistake occurred during the separation of the fairing, and it did not separate as designed, causing the upper stage rocket, which was subsequently fired, to crash into the fairing that was still on the outside, and then crashed out of control. This means that Astra has failed a total of four of its past five launches, which is not optimistic for Astra’s future.
The ELaNa 41 mission is a total of four cubesats, three of which are provided by partner universities, and will study projects such as speed sails, space weather, and quantum gyroscopes; NASA also has a satellite itself, mainly to study how fast and cheap Build CubeSats.
In a statement, Astra said they regretted the loss of their paycheck and would carefully review the available data to find out what went wrong. While it’s not particularly surprising that rockets — especially in the early stages of development — fail to launch, at a time when there are more and more small rockets and more competition, Astra’s record of only 20% of the success is not a big deal. Its prospects are not very optimistic. In particular, Astra is already a listed company, and the pressure from investors will be even greater.