Astra Loses an Engine But Still Flies

Astra had an attempted orbital rocket launch but they immediately lost an engine and flew sideways. The four engines only had enough thrust to hover but after they burned enough fuel they started climbing. They reached 47 kilometer altitude.

They had 1.25 thrust to weight ratio but losing an engine immediately gave it 1.0 thrust to weight.

Astra has been working for five years. They have over 50 launches under contract. They hope to begin delivering customer payloads into low Earth orbit in summer 2021.

Astra plans to begin delivering customer payloads into orbit in Summer 2021 and then moving to monthly, biweekly, weekly, and daily launches by 2025.

They are publicly traded under stock symbol ASTR and have a $3 billion valuation.

SOURCES- Scott Manley, Astra
Written by Brian Wang, Nextbigfuture.com

9 thoughts on “Astra Loses an Engine But Still Flies”

  1. Very impressive guidance system and they are getting quite close between this failure and the last one. I hope they succeed so we can have a thriving launch sector.

  2. but when talking about trig, you say "sine, cosine", which is natural, but the pair is notated (cos, sin), which is the problem. Or, Descartes is the problem, as he came much later. Too much tau makes my head spin.

  3. Putting the coordinates as (y, x) would make it match (cos, sin), which simplifies thinking. So would making the charge of the electron +. Not sure if setting pi to 3.even would help. And making clocks go right hand rule "up". All sorts of things to fix.

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