This is a second successful launch for Astra. It is an important success for the young American company, which has been collecting chess until now.
This time it’s the right one. After a start to the year marked by failure, Astra is finding its way back to success. The American company managed to carry out a space mission, numbered LV0009. This consisted of delivering various small payloads into orbit, as part of “space carpooling”.
The purpose of a shared flight is to bring together several partners to afford a launch, because it is too expensive for a single participant or because the value of the payload to be put into orbit (or the stake of the mission) does not correspond to the cost of the flight. Other companies now offer this type of service, such as Arianespace or SpaceX.
A second success for Astra
Successful completion of mission LV0009 was announced March 15, 2022 on Twitter by the company: ” We can confirm the successful deployment of Spaceflight’s Astra-1 mission satellites today. We are grateful to our partner spaceflight and incredibly proud of the success of this mission “. The day before, a contract between Astra and Spaceflight had been unveiled.
Astra really needed a success to get back on track. It was for the young company to get back in the saddle after an inevitably disappointing start to the year. Its failure, the causes of which have since been identified and treated, made it impossible to honor an agreement with NASA, resulting in the loss of cubesats, satellites no bigger than a shoebox.
And above all, Astra had to demonstrate that its previous and only success was not a great fluke. The company has been launching launches since 2018 and of the seven planned missions (not counting that of March 15), only one, in November 2021, was completed – Astra claims a success for the first two, tests, but it is disputed.
The March 15 flight is also the company’s first successful commercial mission — the November flight was for the US Space Force, a branch of the US military. ” Astra has just delivered its first customer payloads into Earth orbit! », also welcomed Chris Kemp, the boss of Astra, on Twitter.