Astra Makes Bold Move Into Rocket Market
Describing themselves as “the biggest rocket company you’ve never heard of”, Astra is moving aggressively into the highly competitive small-lift market with a cheap, flexible rocket built on speed and convenience. Led by former NASA executive Chris Kemp, this initially mysterious company has had a very busy 3 years-designing and testing its rockets, entering itself into a DARPA competition with a 12 million dollar prize, and building testing areas and a huge factory in Alameda, California as well as a spaceport in Kodiak, Alaska. That factory, a quarter of a million feet in area, spells out this companies ambitions-to build and launch hundreds of rockets at an industrial scale.
While companies like SpaceX and Blue Origin(and soon Electron)have made decisive moves on making reusability an essential part of commercially competitive rocketry as part of the so-called Space Renaissance, Astra is pursuing an alternative path that puts heavy emphasis on simplicity, flexibility, and economies of scale. Rather than needing to perfect the intricacies of controlled landings with elaborate onboard AI and complex attitude control or optimizing weight by being made of expensive carbon fiber, Astra is opting for its rockets to be dead simple machines, with skin of simple to work with aluminum and design elements built for rapid assembly.
The company is counting on economies of scale and the rapid growth of the smallsat market to allow it to push forward with a business model based off of a high launch cadence. With its cost-cutting mass market mindset, Astra predicts it can launch its rockets with 450 pounds of cargo for as little as 2.5 million dollars and still make a profit, putting its per-pound cost at roughly half of Electrons. The company also touts its desire to set up rocket launches at very short notice, using a scheduling system as easy to use as ones for setting up long-distance flights.
The fledgling company still has much to prove-all of its prototype launches have ended in failure, and it remains to be seen if the growth of the space market will continue at a level that can sustain such a high-volume business model (To be fair, SpaceX failed during its initial launches to the point of almost going bankrupt-aerospace is hard). But in spite of all of the uncertainties, Astra aims to persevere. And as we all know-Per aspera ad astra.
