outer space – Product Management Confabulation

February 24, 2022

Clutter merges with MakeSpace to add scale to the business of moving and storage

Some consolidation is afoot in the world of moving and storage startups: Clutter and MakeSpace, two erstwhile rivals in the market, are merging to form a single company, which will operate under the Clutter brand, serving some 6,500 towns in the U.S. that together cover about 60% of the total population in the country, with operations also in Canada, covering services like on-demand moving, storage, self-storage, and disposal.

Financial terms of the deal are not being disclosed, Clutter founder and CEO Art Mir told me in an interview, but he confirmed that the company combined will be clearing close to $200 million in revenue annually, that it will break even this year, and that it’s planning for an IPO in 2023. Mir will continue with his role and will also be CEO of the merged business, while MakeSpace’s CEO Rahul Gandhi will become president.

The combined, enlarged Clutter does not have any plans to raise any more funding before then, Mir said. It’s unclear how many employees will be at the combined company. Clutter has around 1,000 and Mir said they made offers to some but not all MakeSpace employees to join the merged firm. Both companies operated on a model of employing all of their delivery drivers, rather than employing gig workers.

“It was a natural culture fit for us,” Mir said.

I have confirmed that Clutter was valued at around $580 million when it last raised money, back in 2019, a $200 million round led by SoftBank. MakeSpace last raised in 2021, a $55 million round when the pandemic was well under way, with its investors including strategic backer IronSource and a number of others. MakeSpace has never disclosed its valuation. Both companies have grown since then.

Mir said that the deal caps off a long-held ambition of his to make Clutter a consolidator in the space and he’d been eyeing up MakeSpace for a while now.

“I’ve always been a big fan of building relationships and have been working on the relationship with MakeSpace for years now,” he said in an interview. He said he’d periodically reached out “once or twice a year” before the latter company finally bit. Indeed, I heard about this deal going down several months ago, although both companies declined to comment on the situation at the time.

The deal underscores a couple of bring trends that are moving the market, one that is estimated at $38 billion for storage alone annually.

One of these is the effects of the pandemic.

Covid-19 has been a period of social distancing and staying put, but not for everyone: a lot of us took the moment to pause, think about how and where we are living, and in many cases take action by relocating, downsizing or simply rethinking our living spaces. All of that has had a big impact on companies like Clutter and MakeSpace, both of which saw business continue to grow in the last two years. Clutter, Mir told me, was designated an essential service and continued all operations as normal, while MakeSpace’s Gandhi told me last year that it was outpacing its growth forecasts for the period by 30%.

The other is economy of scale.

As with any logistics-based business — the wider category of e-commerce being one prime other example — ultimately the most successful players are those that have grown to a big enough size that they are maximizing their network of operations with as many customers and orders as possible for the best margins on that model.

That is very much the case here, too. Clutter, Mir told me, was profitable in its bigger markets but not everywhere; this merger will give it, and MakeSpace, the ability to aim for positive unit economics and better margins in more places. And, it will also cut out one more competitor in places where they overlapped, meaning less money to spend on marketing and promotions.

This is not Clutter’s first acquisition and consolidation move. It acquired The Storage Fox in 2019 for $152 million also as part of that strategy. It also bought assets from failed storage startup Omni in the same year, and has also picked up assets from Handy, Livible, Shed, and Callbox. MakeSpace has also been doing some consolidating, acquiring Stashable from Iron Mountain when it raised its Series D led by the business storage giant.

“The moving and storage industries are fragmented, and a really frustrating experience for a lot of customers. There is clear demand for a brand that consumers know they can trust nationwide, and the combination of MakeSpace and Clutter will put the company in an excellent position to offer convenient storage and moving services nationwide, with plenty of room to grow,” said Gandhi in a statement.

October 11, 2021

To continue exploring space sustainably, we must act now

Luca Rossettini Contributor

Luca Rossettini is the founder and CEO of D-Orbit.

It was Branson versus Bezos, rocket against rocket, in the race to send the first billionaire into space.

Blue Origin announced on June 7 that Jeff Bezos, its founder, would fly on the firm’s first crewed mission scheduled for July 20. That same day, Parabolic Arc reported that Virgin Galactic was planning to send Richard Branson on a suborbital flight on July 11. And both aimed to beat the third space-going billionaire, Elon Musk.

More than half a century after Apollo 11 landed on the moon, space exploration is clearly on the upswing again. However, today’s missions reflect far more than the ambitions of billionaires, even if Musk, Bezos and Branson have generated the most headlines for their personal space plans.

Instead, we’re seeing the emergence of a true space economy. This new sector is in its exponential growth phase, and what unifies current commercial projects is the influx of investments in new technologies and infrastructure.

Today’s explorers have plans for expansion that range from the outer limits of our imagination — travel to other planets or colonizing Mars — to the launches of thousands of telecommunication, global navigation and Earth observation satellites, with massive investments being made.

The size of the global space economy — which combines satellite services and ground equipment, government space budgets and global navigation satellites equipment — is estimated to be about $345 billion. Startup space ventures brought in $5.7 billion in 2019, easily besting 2018’s $3.5 billion record. By 2040, Morgan Stanley estimates that the global space industry could generate revenue of more than $1 trillion.

In other words, we’re at the start of a gold rush in outer space — and our track record for the sustainable development of any environment during gold rushes hasn’t been particularly noteworthy.

The threat of catastrophic space collisions is growing

We are at a critical tipping point for ensuring the safe and sustainable development of new business opportunities in space. Many of these activities use the same regions of the Earth’s orbit, which is not an infinite space. According to NASA, more than 100 million pieces of orbital debris of about 1 mm or larger are tracked by the Department of Defense’s global Space Surveillance Network (SSN) sensors. Much more debris — too small to be tracked, but large enough to threaten human spaceflight and robotic missions — exists in the near-Earth space environment.

In an environment where both debris and spacecraft are traveling at velocities in excess of 15,700 mph in low-Earth orbit, even a 5 mm nut can shred a solar panel like it was made of paper. In fact, NASA reports that millimeter-sized orbital debris represents the highest mission-ending risk to most robotic spacecraft operating in low-Earth orbit. As space becomes more and more congested, unsafe or irresponsible actions by any one actor could have catastrophic consequences.

Advances in reusable rockets, which lowered the cost to launch 1 kilogram of payload mass to orbit, and the miniaturization of satellites have all helped to create this threat of a traffic jam in Earth’s orbit. Nearly 3,000 active satellites are currently in orbit above our planet, and this number will likely skyrocket in the coming years. A 230% increase in satellite launches per year is expected by 2025, with 24,000 satellite launches now in planning, according to MarketWatch. And that figure doesn’t even include launches by SpaceX, OneWeb or Kuiper. SpaceX’s Starlink alone has applied to fly 40,000 satellites.

The cost to launch 22 tons to low-Earth orbit has declined from $200 million to about $60 million thanks to reusable rockets. Satellite applications that once required one massive high-performance satellite with a cost in the hundreds of millions of dollars can now be tackled with constellations of cheaper ($1 million), smaller, lower-performance satellites working together to provide a global service.

While the performance of a single smaller satellite is still inferior to that of a much larger one, the use of data from multiple satellites can often produce comparable results. Moreover, the architecture of a constellation is highly scalable, so as soon as newer generations of satellites are launched, the performance of the infrastructure as a whole increases exponentially.

Sustainable development requires new technologies and better governance

Sustainable economic expansion will require innovative solutions to support traditional and new customers throughout the life cycle of a space mission, from a careful analysis of a mission’s requirements to end-of-life decommissioning.

Some of these solutions will require completely new space-based infrastructures that can streamline launch, operation and decommissioning. D-Orbit’s ION Satellite Carrier, for example, is a space transportation vehicle designed to host a batch of satellites, transport them to orbit and release them individually into distinct orbital slots. This deployment service complements the one offered by launch providers, which targets only the most strategic orbits, enabling satellite operators to cover the last mile in a significantly shorter time and use all the resources of their spacecraft to extend the duration of the mission itself.

This is the first step toward the creation of permanent space logistic infrastructures that can move spacecraft from one orbit to another, extend the life of older vehicles, perform repairs and collect satellite wrecks and other debris.

The issues surrounding sustainable growth in the space economy are too important and consequential to be left to a single company or country.

To strengthen international cooperation and establish a set of ground rules, we need a new model of space governance based on consensus among countries, with common standards. While the technology for debris-capturing spacecraft is already attainable, for example, there are still legal challenges to allow an operator based in a country to approach, capture and remove a space object launched by another country. Formulating global regulation to address this kind of operation is an essential step that can open new markets and business opportunities.

Forty-eight organizations and other government and industry stakeholders, including D-Orbit, formed the Space Safety Coalition (SSC) in 2019 to actively promote best practices for the long-term sustainability of space operations. The SSC has developed guidelines for avoiding launch and on-orbit collisions, minimizing human casualties from spacecraft or debris reentry and minimizing the impact of radio frequency interference (RFI) events, among other best practices for the overall long-term sustainability of space operations.

This industry-led sustainability effort needs to be adopted by all space stakeholders. How we develop and regulate the space economy will have long-lasting repercussions, and the window for avoiding mistakes is rapidly closing.

It is essential that we lose no time in developing the infrastructure, best practices and governance that will broaden humankind’s ability to operate in space and create still-unimagined opportunities for us all.

September 22, 2021

Peter Beck says Rocket Lab actively prepared for interplanetary missions ‘from day one’

Rocket Lab long ago graduated from underdog launch provider to industry heavyweight (with funding to match). Now the company is planning to go to the moon, Mars and Venus in the next decade. But it may come as a surprise that the company planned to go beyond Earth’s orbit from the very beginning, as founder Peter Beck explained at TechCrunch Disrupt 2021. In fact, it was in plain sight the whole time.

Beck explained with a touching anecdote that his own ambition to explore and learn from space goes back to his youth. “You know, the earliest childhood memory I have is standing outside in the bottom of the South Island, a little town in New Zealand called Invercargill, on a cold winter’s night looking at a crystal clear sky with my father,” he recalled. “He was pointing out to me that all the stars in the sky have planets on them, and perhaps on one of those planets, that could be somebody looking back and asking the same questions that I was asking.

“That really was the point in time where I decided that space was the thing that I was going to do. That memory stuck with me, you know, forever. I always felt that, if I could have the opportunity to go out into those stars and explore and perhaps ask or answer, one of the biggest questions in mankind’s history — ‘Are we the only life in the universe or not?’ — I would take that chance.”

Of course, many of us as children had aspirations to become astronauts and intrepid space explorers, but he put in the work, and has been “tremendously fortunate,” as well, he noted.

But more to the point, he said that the plan to go from low-lift rides to orbit to designing spacecraft and interplanetary missions has been part of the company all along.

September 2, 2021

Virgin Galactic looks to late September, early October for first commercial crewed flight

Just two months after celebrating its first manned launch to orbit – which is now under investigation with the Federal Aviation Administration – Virgin Galactic wants to return to space.

The company will be conducting its first commercial mission, the 23^rd for the VSS Unity rocket-powered spaceplane, in late September or early October from the company’s sprawling Spaceport America facility. The flight will carry three crew members from the Italian Air Force and the National Research Council, each of whom paid an undisclosed amount for the seat. A Virgin Galactic staff member will also be on board.

The role of mission lead will be held by Walter Villadei, a Colonel with the Italian Air Force; Angelo Landolfi, a physician and Lieutenant Colonel; Pantaleone Carlucci, an aerospace engineer on behalf of the National Research Council; and Virgin Galactic’s chief astronaut instructor Beth Moses. Michael Masucci and CJ Sturckow will pilot the spaceplane.

The goal of the mission will be to evaluate the effects of the “transitional phase” from gravity to zero G on the human body; to that end, the crew members will be wearing sensors to measure physiological activity, and Villadei will even be wearing a smart suit that Virgin says will “[incorporate] Italian fashion style and technology.”

The announcement comes just one day after the FAA said that it was investigating the first crewed flight of VSS Unity in July. The news was first reported by The New Yorker and confirmed by the aerospace regulatory, who said that the spaceplane “deviated from its Air Traffic Control clearance as it returned to Spaceport America.” According to journalist Nicholas Schmidle’s reporting, a red warning light appeared on the dash of the Unity during flight, indicating that it had diverged from its planned trajectory.

FAA opens probe into anomaly on Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic spaceflight

Virgin Galactic later issued a statement disputing the piece, saying that “athough the flights ultimate trajectory deviated from our initial plan, it was a controlled and intentional flight path that allowed Unity 22 to successfully reach space and land safely at our Spaceport in New Mexico.”

“At no time were passengers and crew put in any danger as a result of this change in trajectory,” the company added.

This is not the first time Schmidle has uncovered news regarding the safety of Virgin Galactic’s supersonic operations. His book, Test Gods, also includes a previously unknown account of a 2019 test flight (confirmed in the book by former employees) which saw potentially serious issues with the plane’s wing.

August 25, 2021

Peter Beck on Rocket Lab’s public listing debut, space SPACs and the Neutron rocket

Peter Beck’s earliest memory is standing outside with his father in his hometown of Invercargill, New Zealand, looking up at the stars and being told that there could very well be people on planets orbiting those stars looking right back at him.

“For a three or four year old, that was a mind-blowing thing that got etched into my memory and from that point onwards, that was me destined to work in the space industry,” he said at the Space Generation Fusion Forum (SGFF).

Of course, hindsight is 20/20. But it’s true that Beck’s career has been characterized by an unusually single-minded focus on rocketry. Instead of going to university, Beck got a trade job, working as a tool-making apprentice by day and a dilettante rocket engine maker by night. “I was very, very fortunate through my career that the companies I worked with and worked for, and the government organizations that I’ve worked for, always encouraged — or tolerated, maybe is a better word — me using their facilities and doing things in their facilities at night,” he said.

His tinkering matured with experience and working double time paid off: In 2006, he founded his space launch company Rocket Lab. Now, 15 years and 21 launches later, the company has gone public through a merger with a blank-check firm that’s added $777 million to its war chest.

$RKLB has launched! Today’s exciting next step in Rocket Lab’s story was made possible by the incredible people behind us — our team, our families, our customers, and our investors. Thank you, thank you, thank you. #SpaceIsOpenForBusiness #NasdaqListed pic.twitter.com/DLmVsmtqOj

— Rocket Lab (@RocketLab) August 25, 2021

The space SPAC craze

The merger with Vector Acquisition catapulted Rocket Lab’s valuation to $4.8 billion, putting it second (by value) amongst space launch companies only to Elon Musk’s SpaceX. SPACs have become a popular route to going public amongst space industry companies looking to secure large amounts of capital; rival satellite launch startups Virgin Orbit and Astra have each started trading via a SPAC merger, in addition to other companies in the sector, like Redwire, Planet and Satellogic (to name just a few).

Beyond the fanfare and SEC warnings, SPACs are here to stay

Beck told TechCrunch that going public has been part of Rocket Lab’s plans for years; the original plan was to use a traditional initial public offering, but the SPAC route in particular enabled certainty around capital and valuation. According to a March investor presentation in advance of the SPAC merger — documents that should always be taken with a large grain of salt — the future is bright: Rocket Lab anticipates revenues of $749 million in 2025 and surpassing $1 billion the following year. The company reported revenues of $48 million in 2019 and $33 million in 2020, and anticipates hitting around $69 million this year.

But he remains skeptical of pre-revenue space startups, or those that failed to raise capital, using SPACs as a financial instrument. “There has been a lot of space SPACs go out, and I think that there is a spectrum of quality there for sure — some that have failed to raise money in the private markets, and [a SPAC merger] is the last-ditch attempt. That is no way to become a public company.”

While the space industry is relatively crowded now, with companies like Rocket Lab and SpaceX sending payloads to orbit and myriad newer entrants looking to join them (or, more optimistically, take their leading place), Beck said he anticipates the crowd thinning out.

“It’s going to become blatantly obvious to investors really quickly, who’s executing, and who’s aspiring to execute,” he said. “We’re in a time where there’s lots of excitement, but at the end of the day, this industry and the public markets are all about execution. The wheat from the chaff will get separated very, very quickly here.”

From Electron to Neutron

Rocket Lab’s revenues have largely come from the small payload launch market, in which it’s managed to take a leading position with its Electron rocket. Electron is only 59 feet tall and scarcely four feet in diameter, significantly smaller than other rockets going to space today. The company conducts launches from two sites: Its privately-owned launch range on Mahia Peninsula, New Zealand, and a launch pad out of NASA’s Wallops Island facility in Virginia (which has yet to play host to an actual Rocket Lab mission).

Rocket Lab is in the process of transitioning Electron’s first-stage booster to be reusable. The company has been implementing a new atmospheric reentry and ocean splashdown process that uses a parachute to slow the booster’s descent, but the ultimate goal is to catch it in the air using a helicopter.

Thus far, Rocket Lab and SpaceX have dominated the market, but that could change soon. Both Astra and Relativity are developing small launch vehicles — the latest iteration of Astra’s rocket is around 40 feet tall, while Relativity’s Terran 1 is in between Electron and Falcon 9 at 115 feet.

For that reason, it makes sense that Rocket Lab is planning on expanding its operations to include medium-lift rocketry, with its much-anticipated (and very mysterious) Neutron launch vehicle. The company has been keeping the details about Neutron close to its chest so far — Beck told SGFF attendees that even publicly released renderings of the rocket have been “a bit of a ruse” (meaning the image below bears little to no resemblance to what the Neutron actually looks like) — but it’s expected to be more than double the height of Electron and be capable of sending around 8,000 kilograms to low-Earth orbit.

Image Credits: Rocket Lab

“We do see a lot of people in the industry copying us in many ways,” he explained to TechCrunch. “So, we’d rather get a little bit further down the path and then reveal the work that we’ve done.”

Rocket Lab estimates that Electron and Neutron will be capable of lifting 98% of all satellites forecasted to launch through 2029, making the need for an additional heavy-lift rocket unnecessary.

In addition to Neutron, the company has also started developing spacecraft. It’s called Photon, and Rocket Lab imagines it as a “satellite platform” that can easily be integrated with the Electron rocket. The company’s already lined up Photon missions to the moon and beyond: first to lunar orbit for NASA, as part of its Cislunar Autonomous Positioning System Technology Operations and Navigation Experiment (CAPSTONE) program.

Two Photons were selected earlier this month for an 11-month mission to Mars, and Beck has publicly discussed long-term plans to send a probe into Venus’ atmosphere via a Photon satellite.

Beyond Photon, Rocket Lab has also locked in a deal with space manufacturing startup Varda Space Industries to build it a spacecraft to launch in 2023 and 2024.

Neutron has been designed to be human-rateable right from the start, meaning that it will meet certain safety specifications for carrying astronauts. Beck said he’s certain that “we are going to see the democratization of spaceflight” and he wants Rocket Lab to be well positioned to deliver that service in the future. In terms of whether Rocket Lab would eventually expand into building other spacecraft, like landers or human-rated capsules, Beck demurred.

“Never, ever say never,” he said. “That’s the one takeaway I’ve learned in my career as a space CEO.”

August 24, 2021

Ispace unveils bigger moon lander capable of surviving lunar nights

Ispace, a Japanese space startup that aims to lead the development of a lunar economy, has unveiled its design for a large lander that could go to the moon as early as 2024.

Tokyo-based ispace said this next-gen lander, dubbed Series 2, would be used on the company’s third planned moon mission. The lander is both larger in size and payload capacity than the company’s first lander, coming in at around 9 feet tall and 14 feet wide including legs. The vehicle will be capable of carrying up to 500 kilograms to the moon’s surface and 2,000 kilograms to lunar orbit. Series 1, which will fly in 2022 and 2023, has a maximum payload capacity of only 30 kilograms.

Crucially, the new lander is designed to be able to survive the frigid lunar nighttime, possibly as long as a two-week stint on the moon’s surface. It’s also capable of landing on either the near or far side of the moon, including its polar regions.

The new lander has a few other features as well: it has multiple payload bays, and an advanced guidance, navigation and control (GNC) system to ensure the craft sticks the landing on the moon’s surface. The GNC technology is being provided by engineering developer Draper, a company with a deep footprint in the space industry. Draper is which is also one of fourteen eligible contractors for NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) initiative.

Ispace said in a statement that the lander has completed its preliminary design review; the next stage is manufacturing and assembly, which will be completed in partnership with General Atomics, a defense and aerospace technology company.

The partnership with Draper – a CLPS contractor – is key, as ispace wants its Series 2 to compete in the NASA program. “Over the next few months, we will work closely with Draper and General Atomics to prepare for the next NASA CLPS task order,” Kyle Acierno, CEO of ispace’s U.S.-based subsidiary, said.

Ispace is developing the next-gen lander out of its North American offices in Colorado, and it intends to also manufacture the vehicle in the United States. In the meanwhile, the company is still at work preparing for its first two lunar missions in 2022 and 2023. The company said the Series 1 lander is undergoing final assembly of the flight module at a facility in Germany owned by space launch company ArianeGroup. The customer manifest for the first mission is full, but ispace did say payload capacity is still available for the subsequent mission.

The lander unveiling comes just weeks after ispace announced the close of a $46 million Series C funding round, capital it said at the time would go toward the second and third planned missions.

Rocket Lab’s Mars mission gets green light from NASA

August 19, 2021

Astra given regulatory green light for its first commercial orbital launch at the end of the month

Rocket launch startup Astra has received a key license from the Federal Aviation Administration, giving the green light for the company’s first commercial orbital launch at the end of the month.

Astra CEO Chris Kemp tweeted the news on Thursday, adding that the launch operator license through the FAA is valid through 2026. The new license is a modification of the company’s previous launch license and applicable to the current version of the company’s rocket, a company spokesperson told TechCrunch.

Thrilled that @Astra now authorized to conduct launches out of Kodiak through 2026 with @FAA launch operator’s license! #AdAstra pic.twitter.com/QKn3mgRuwY

— Chris Kemp (@Kemp) August 19, 2021

The license, posted on the FAA’s website, authorizes Astra to conduct flights of its Rocket v3 launch vehicle from the company’s launch pad at the Pacific Spaceport Complex in Kodiak, Alaska. It expires on March 9, 2026. It clears the way for Astra to conduct a demonstration mission for the U.S. Space Force on August 27, as well as a second launch planned for some time later this year.

This is proving to be a big year for Astra. In addition to conducting its first commercial orbital launch on August 27, the company also starting trading on the NASDAQ under the ticker symbol “ASTR.” The company made its debut after merging with special purpose acquisition company Holicity at a pro-forma enterprise value of $2.1 billion.

Earlier this summer, Astra also acquired space-propulsion company Apollo Fusion. The acquisition gives a possible hint into how Astra is thinking about future launches, as electric propulsion systems are useful for moving objects from lower to higher orbits.

Why Astra built a space startup and rocket factory in Silicon Valley

August 17, 2021

Aurora Propulsion Technologies will be sending up space junk removal tech on Rocket Lab’s Electron later this year

Aurora Propulsion Technologies, a Finnish company that develops thrusters and de-orbiting modules for small satellites, will be sending its technology to space for the first time. The company has signed on with Rocket Lab to send its inaugural AuroraSat-1 cubesat into low Earth orbit aboard an Electron rocket rideshare mission in the fourth quarter of this year.

Aurora is part of a small number of startups have emerged over the past few years whose technology could help solve a tricky problem that, for most of us, can be summed up as ‘out of sight, out of mind’: space junk.

Removing space debris requires action and caution

Space junk, or orbital debris, includes any human-generated object in space that’s no longer functional. While the Department of Defense keeps track of around 27,000 pieces of space junk through its Space Surveillance Network, there are estimated to be millions of pieces of debris floating around in low Earth orbit. As the costs of launch and other technology continues to decline, LEO is only poised to grow more crowded in the coming years – which could mean more useless junk floating around us in the long-term.

The launch with Rocket Lab later this year is the opportunity for the company to demonstrate its technology in-space. AuroraSat-1 will have two modules. The first module will contain 6 “resistojet” thrusters, designed to help cubesats quickly de-tumble and adjust their attitude control, or the satellite’s orientation. Aurora will also test its Plasma Brakes, which use an electrically charged microtether to generate drag for satellite de-orbiting.

AuroraSat-1 was originally scheduled to fly with in-space transportation provider Momentus on board a Space X Falcon 9 rideshare mission earlier this year, but that flight was halted after Momentus failed to receive approvals from the Federal Aviation Administration.

Regarding the switch up, Aurora CEO Roope Takala told TechCrunch that “in light of Momentus’ difficulties, we had to re-manifest the satellite onto the now published Rocket Lab flight.” Aurora announced in March it had signed on to launch a satellite with Momentus in June 2022.

3 VCs discuss space junk and what else they’re betting on right now

August 5, 2021

Astra targets first commercial orbital launch for August 27

Astra’s last test launch went better than expected, nearly achieving orbit — kind of a stretch goal for that specific mission. The company at the time said that it would only need to tweak software to reach an orbital destination, and now we know when it’s going to get the chance to prove it: Astra revealed a launch window today of August 27 for its first ever commercial orbital launch, a demonstration mission for the U.S. Space Force.

The contract Astra has with the Space Force also includes a second launch, set for sometime later this year, with the exact schedule for that launch yet to be finalized.

The payload that Astra’s rocket will carry for the Space Force will be a test spacecraft flown for the agency’s Space Test Program. The launch will take place from Astra’s spaceport in Kodiak, Alaska, which is where it has flown its test missions previously.

While the launch window officially opens at 1 PM PT on August 27, it will remain open all the way through Saturday, September 11, and Astra could easily shift the launch within that window based on weather conditions and other factors.

Astra, which become a publicly traded company at the start of July through a SPAC merger, builds it own launch vehicles at its factory in Alameda, California. The launch provider is targeting cheap, high-volume, low mass launches as its milieu, offering more flexible services relative to SpaceX, and a cost advantage when compared to Rocket Lab.

Astra to acquire electric in-space propulsion company Apollo Fusion

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Tag: outer space