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Astra Orbital Attempt Upcoming

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#12
Yazata Offline
Astra launched their tiny little rocket today from Kodiak AK. As with Sn8, it was good news and bad news, in similar proportions.

The rocket ignited and ascended for a full nominal first stage burn. Stage separation was successful and the second stage ignited and burned pretty well. The rocket crossed the Karman line and sent back some cool space photos.

But... the second stage shut down early and the rocket was about 0.5 km/sec short of orbital velocity. Almost... but not quite. Presumably it came down (or burned up) over some distant location in the south Pacific or someplace.

Eric Berger reports that the launch was set up in two weeks by five Astra people in Kodiak. The rocket and everything they needed fit in four shipping containers. The idea of orbital rockets deployable anywhere by ships and eventually by cargo planes has the military by way of DARPA interested.

https://twitter.com/Astra/status/1338999451893915649

https://twitter.com/SciGuySpace/status/1...0085916678


[Image: 1500x500]
[Image: 1500x500]

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#13
Yazata Offline
Astra has another launch attempt from their super-gorgeous Kodiak island launch site on tap for Friday August 27. (Watch out Rocketlab, your Mahia Peninsula launch site has competition in the beauty category.)


[Image: 1961019.jpg]
[Image: 1961019.jpg]



And Astra will be teaming with nasaspaceflight.com to livestream it.

https://twitter.com/Astra/status/1430154218309046276

There isn't much information on what the payload is, but it appears to be a DoD payload for the Space Force. I'm guessing that it's more of that Agile Launch stuff that we saw with Virgin Orbit, the military testing out the ability of private small-sat launch providers getting satellites up on very short notice.

https://astra.com/news/stp-27ad1/
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#14
Yazata Offline
Astra tried to get their little rocket off today, the countdown got down to zero and there was a pad abort. The engines lit and shut down a split second later. They stood down for the day in order to investigate the problem and may make another try as early as tomorrow.

You can watch all the buildup to the scrub on what was the livestream here

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TvGiEtPxS0E

Astra photo


[Image: E91GHZEVUAEfphT?format=jpg&name=small]
[Image: E91GHZEVUAEfphT?format=jpg&name=small]

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#16
Yazata Offline
It wasn't boring, I'll give it that...

When the clock got down to t - 0, the engines lit but something immediately went wrong. I'm guessing that one of the engines blew. The rocket came off the pad sliding sideways and appeared to be toppling over. I expected to see a fireball, but the flight control system seems to have saved it with thrust-vector-control and the rocket emerged from a cloud of smoke and ascended. It passed through max-q but the booster engines shut off prematurely and the last thing the onboard cameras showed was the rocket starting to tumble and a large piece flying off.

It seems to have suffered a fatal failure at ignition and despite the best efforts of the flight computer the flight was either manually terminated or else the first stage ran out of fuel after the exceedingly wonky start.

Right up there with some of Elon's best Boca Chica failures.

Edit: Chris Kemp, Astra CEO, verifies that it lost an engine during the first second after ignition, was allowed to get safely away from the launch site and then was intentionally terminated. But impressive nevertheless, how the automatic control system recovered and struggled to keep the vehicle pointed pointy-end-up. It appears to have essentially been hovering at first with about a 1:1 thrust to weight ratio. Then it accelerated very slowly upwards as its fuel load was consumed and the vehicle became lighter. But it was obviously imposslble to make orbit with a blown engine so the brave little rocket's flight was terminated. It tried its best in impossible circumstances.

Video of the takeoff here

https://twitter.com/Kemp/status/1431812555324854272

https://twitter.com/NASASpaceflight/stat...7177115649
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#17
Yazata Offline
Tour of Astra's factory with Thomas Burghardt of nasaspaceflight.com, guided by Bryson Gentile, Astra's VP of Operations. The factory is at the "Alameda runway" made famous by the Mythbusters and occupies some of the buildings of the former Alameda naval air station. Of particular interest is how they use the navy's old jet engine test cells for rocket engine static fires. Lots of information about manufacturing processes and how Astra's engineers are spending much of their energy trying to figure out how to manufacture rockets more cheaply and better able to scale into low-cost mass production. (Elon's spoken about that too, about how it's harder to design how to build rockets than it is to design rockets.) It provides a feeling for how building test prototypes differs from quantity production. Gentile talks about how there are multiple ways to solve engineering problems and they are going for the simplest and most efficient. He talks about how they are gradually simplifying mission control from a room full of controllers to something two people can do from their desks on their computer screens. Lots of interesting stuff.  


https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/dmACuTqFkPY
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#18
Yazata Offline
This evening Astra succeeded in launching their first rocket into orbit from Kodiak Alaska. There was a late hold due to a sticky valve (!) in the ground support equipment, but they succeeded in unsticking it by cycling it a few times. (Take notes Boeing.) Then everything went perfectly from there. The rocket didn't carry an actual payload, just a mass to simulate a payload for the Space Force. (They are very interested in cheap easy to set up orbital rockets that can be delivered with all of their support equipment + fuel to remote sites anywhere in shipping containers.)

After verifying its orbital parameters etc., Astra's new satellite will be deorbited into the remote ocean somewhere.

https://twitter.com/NASASpaceflight/stat...7880658950

https://twitter.com/NASASpaceflight/stat...6938040325

https://twitter.com/NASASpaceflight/stat...7925632000

https://twitter.com/Astra/status/1461944599786622976

https://twitter.com/Kemp/status/1461960864391598088

Astra photo


[Image: FEmrMJOUcAQszpJ?format=jpg&name=small]
[Image: FEmrMJOUcAQszpJ?format=jpg&name=small]

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#19
C C Offline
Good to hear. Such a small operation that I was afraid they were going to go belly-up if another one failed.
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#20
Yazata Offline
Astra is set to launch another one, from Cape Canaveral this time! It's scheduled for 1 PM EST (10 AM PST) from SLC 46 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station.

Edit - Launch seems to have been pushed back an hour to 2:10 PM EST / 11:10 AM PST.

It was contracted by NASA as part of their small satellite program with a payload called Elana-41 which consists of four cubesats. Astra's little rocket only costs $2.5 million per launch, which is peanuts compared to the big rockets which more typically cost ~ $100 million. (Even reusable Falcon 9 sells for ~ $50 million a launch.)

One is a 4-u cubesat from the University of Alabama called Bama-1 designed to unfurl a sail to measure how much increasing drag in the almost-vacuum of near earth space will speed up satellite orbit decay. (The Earth's atmosphere doesn't suddenly stop, it just gets thinner and thinner, so some atmospheric residues remain even at low-earth-orbit altitudes. It's why low-earth satellite orbits gradually decay. Ability to increase the speed with which that happens might help clean up defunct satellites when their lifetime is up.)

One is called INCA from New Mexico State University. (Ionospheric neutron content analyzer.) It carries a neutron detector to detect neutrons in the low earth orbit environment so as to better understand space weather. The neutron detector it carries is a joint product of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center and the University of New Hampshire.

One is called QubeSat from the University of California Berkeley, which will observe quantum "spin" in diamond to determine if it behaves like a macroscopic gyroscope that would make possible the construction of future quantum angular-velocity measurement instruments.

Lastly is R5-S1 from NASA's Johnson Space Center, which demonstrates using cheap off-the-shelf components to build small low-cost cubesats using simple methods. (There's actually a plan by a group in Finland to launch a wooden cubesat later this year, to determine the suitability of wood as a space construction material.)

https://www.nasa.gov/content/elana-41-mission

https://nextspaceflight.com/launches/details/6873


https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/XEYS7d1CHso
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