Thursday, February 10, 2022

Astra's First Florida Launch Fails

It wasn't visible from the ground, but I missed it anyway (forgot it was at 3:00 PM and went grocery shopping - d'oh!).  

The online magazine Techcrunch has the story that other sites don't have yet.    

According to the company, the rocket encountered an issue during flight that meant it didn’t get a chance to deliver any of its payloads to their target destination. That means NASA’s four CubeSats on board will be lost. Astra was awarded this contract under NASA’s Launch Services Program, and it was intended to show the efficacy of a low-cost alternative light load rocket delivery to space for small payloads.

While I missed it in real time, I later watched the launch on NASA Spaceflight's video feed (note: that video starts almost an hour before launch - you can literally grab the slider and skip the first 59 minutes of the video).   When the first stage cut out, the video downlink was two screens and one looked like it shook but didn't do what it was supposed to.  Within a couple of seconds the video changed and the announcer said the stage separation and fairing jettison went on schedule.  It still didn't look right and they lost the video slightly thereafter. 

That's about all the details available right now.

Image source:  Astra / John Kraus

As we've all said many times: space is hard; orbit is harder.  Astra has made orbit once. 



2 comments:

  1. Looks like it's tumbling....notice the Earth flipping around a lot in the second screen....

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  2. One more orbital launch than Blue Origin, so they're literally orbital class versus BO...

    That sucks. Hope they survive to the next launch.

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