> Their software/controls people were obviously top notch.
Ben Brockert was at controls - literally - and led Masten Space to the first place in Northrop Grumman Lunar Landing Challenge - https://www.xprize.org/prizes/lunar-lander - and he also participated in Astra activities. I'm sure experience in rocket control can accumulate...
Pretty good trade, earn money from SPAC sale, keep the money and invest it your way between 2020 and 2024. Post-SPAC shares now at 99% off, while your personal investments mooned or simply stayed steady in cash. Buy Post-SPAC shares and take company private.
so I personally treat all my entrepreneurial endeavors the same way as I treat shares in my brokerage account.
It doesn't make a difference to me if I bought shares from someone for $36/share or if I created shares on a piece of paper for $0.00/share
If someone else buys those $0.00 shares for $36/share from me, and then those shares are worth much closer to $0.00 again, I'll make an offer and consider doing it again. Investments where you have an outsized influence on the outcome are tightly regulated but great opportunities to watch out for.
In this case, SPACs were always set up to flood the market with shares no matter what the underlying financials of the target company were like. Rosy? Still flooded with shares. Paltry? same result.
If people buy that anyway I can't consider that evil. The SEC mandated disclosures. Although in 2020 SPACs were allowed to say forward looking statements of potential target companies, and the SEC has clamped down on that because they have a paternal view that investors - the individual humans - cannot discern and are gullible, swayed by cults of personality. Personally, I think its a matter for investors, many SPAC deals did not close because investors used their discretion to not approve the movement of money into the target company and withdrew. Everyone has agency.
The problem was never evil short sellers and always evil naked short sellers. Two very different things. The latter being highly illegal and policed everywhere except in the US (market maker exemptions).
How does such buyback work? Like, for example, with retail shareholders - all the owners just wake up one day having their stocks exchanged for the money?
What happens if you are not legally or contractually allowed to sell your Astra stock? E. g. you're in the process of bankruptcy, or your stock is used as a security deposit or margin for some contract?
What happens if Astra is not legally allowed to buy back stock from you? Like if some stock was owned by some Russian investment fund, which was later sanctioned? Should Astra request an OFAC license for the transaction?
I can't speak for Astra, but I worked for and held stock in a company that went private, and the way it worked was you were given a choice to either sell at the price proposed by the private party that was going to be the new owner, or you retained your shares but they would no longer be publicly tradeable.
If you did nothing, the default was, yes, the shares would just disappear and be replaced in your account by cash. If you opted to retain, however, possibly because you were legally required to for some reason, have at it. You just own a thing you can't sell now. If the company ever goes public again in the future, then you can sell.
It gets replaced with dollars in your account. You don't have a choice. Maybe that's stupidly made illegal somewhere, but in most cases just don't touch the dollars afterwards.
Why isn't anyone adopting Astra's simple, no thrills approach and applying it to suborbital tourist flights? Blue Origin are only using New Shepard to please hand-picked celebrities while testing their capsule for mating to New Glenn (hence the current phallic appearance), and Virgin Galactic are doing.. well god knows what. Build something small and simple for 2-4 people and launch it around the clock from multiple sites across the world. If it could be offered as a 20-50k carnival ride there would be no shortage of willing customers.
Small, simple, and 2-4 people combine poorly. I think the closest is the venerable Soyuz-2 rocket that has been built and flown in hundreds, without drastic changes.
It was used for space tourism.a few times, but it's still too expensive, even at $30M per launch (without an orbital vehicle though).
Soyuz isn't reusable and doesn't take advantage of recent advances in manufacturing. I recently saw a capsule flown three years ago and could see the hand beaten panels and ruler marks from the people who were cutting the metal and welding it together by hand. Building them like that will be expensive.
Because building a human capable machine is expensive and its hard to sell tickets to rich people if you kill like 50% of them.
Astra approach literally resulted in them not having a reliable rocket ever. Ever rocket they ever build had issues.
Simply put, human suborbital is barley a real market at all. Its unlikely anybody will make a profit of it. And given the Blue Origin has infinity money and no need for revenue. And VO has scammed the stock market out of 100 of million of $.
Entering in that market would be crazy, you are not Jeff Bezos and you can't scam the stock market again. And anybody smart isn't gone invest in this terrible market.
It feels odd to gatekeep a term that is already quite dismissive, but… is it even really tourism? You don’t stay in the place really, the entire thing is spent on transit. I think carnival ride is the right phrase, and… I dunno, I’m poor, but a $20k carnival ride sounds nuts to me.
From a national security & technology policy PoV, there are far too few private space companies. Space is looking very big and important, and the U.S. has far too many of its eggs in the SpaceX basket.
From a business PoV, there are far too many private space companies. Beyond satellite internet (which may have very sketchy economics) and maybe, eventually space tourism for the uber-rich, there isn't enough demand for launch services, satellites, etc. to justify even 10% of the current and near-future capacity.
But space is cool, and there are plenty of bright wanna-be rocket scientists and dim wanna-be space billionaires - so I'd expect to see plenty more launches and crashes of private space companies.
> there isn't enough demand for launch services, satellites, etc. to justify even 10% of the current and near-future capacity.
Perhaps. But lower costs can reveal demand.
For example, while I think microwave beamed power from space is a terrible idea, an orbital ring can also be used to transport power[0], and Starship makes such a structure somewhat more affordable.
[0] can, but I'm not saying it's the best option, even if "a charged object spinning in a vacuum" is a ballistic superconductor[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orbital_ring
The markets for sub-orbital passenger service, or transporting bulk goods, are still 99.9% speculation. Otherwise - the total cost of a satellite or space station includes generally-very-high development and construction costs, then serious ongoing operational expenses. Neither dirt-cheap launch, nor a "Raspberry Pi, but for space" generic satellite bus could make useful satellites nearly as cheap as many folks seem eager to imagine. And Kessler Syndrome concerns give every A List nation in space ample reason to discourage anyone who wants to put cheap-but-less-reliable stuff into orbit. (Or abandon their stuff in orbit, after they get bored or go bankrupt.)
Lower costs can also reveal that you've blown billions on a 4-lane bridge to Lonely Island, when the 4-trips-daily old car ferry really was enough.
I'm not sure what your point is, given you're responding negatively to the possibility of very small cheap things when my example was a piece of global power-grid infrastructure that's probably got a raw material cost in the hundreds of billions of dollars range even if launch was free? (And made out of a launch system which would make launch costs overlap the price range of cargo flights).
>> For example, while I think microwave beamed power from space is a terrible idea, an orbital ring can also be used to transport power[0], and Starship makes such a structure somewhat more affordable...
You're obviously more familiar with this concept than I am...and your wording seems fairly unenthusiastic about the prospects for it. So spending billions to unlock the possibility of it...well, just does not sound like a rational business decision. And my "...isn't enough demand...to justify..." point was tagged "From a business PoV".
Microwave beamed power = bad for reasons too long to divert into here.
Orbital ring = contiguous ring orbiting earth, with connection points floating on it mag-lev style, tethered to the ground.
The latter is functionally a superconductor, you can put charge on it and it keeps moving without loss. It's also a convenient place to put PV with no clouds. It's also an estimated cost to LEO of $0.05/kg, which is cheap enough to be worth comparing to conventional transport costs.
It's certainly extremely speculative. Heck, I hope the first is built on the moon rather than on Earth because I expect surprise failure modes.
But for what it can do, there's several clear business cases — just extremely risky ones.
And that's just one thing Starship can help make affordable. For example of a different possibility: I have no idea if the occasional ideas I hear about factories in freefall are good or bad ideas, but it seems to be attracting investment now.
A "stack" of orbital ring systems (this is a train-on-ring) lets you build the functional equivalent of a space elevator out of plausible materials like fiber glass & superconductors. Every rung in the ladder has value.
The top of an ORS isn't in orbit — it's stationary with respect to the ground. You still have to burn the Δv to get into orbit. The idea is that it's easier to go slowly up, where the natural speed you're at will (eventually) match the Earth's rotation.
I'm not sure which structure you're thinking of, but the first sentence of my link was this:
"""An orbital ring is a concept of an artificial ring placed around a body and set rotating at such a rate that the apparent centrifugal force is large enough to counteract the force of gravity."""
The tether isn't in orbit, but the ring absolutely is. And you can exchange momentum with the ring to reach orbital speed.
Could you provide examples of the anti-western comments he has posted? I understand he is one of the few of the ultra rich who wants to increase the birth rate beyond replacement in the west.
Generally I think the West is more concerned about the fact that he's currently providing infrastructure for a Western ally whilst actively campaigning for them to surrender, endorsing Russia's annexation of the Crimea and questioning the existence of NATO than his enthusiasm for fecundity.
Though I think the comment that's most indicative of Musk's actual mental state recently is "super rich ex wives who hate their spouse should be listed under the 'Reasons Western Civilization died'". :D
Thanks. So you think he is essentially against western civilization in his motives, if I understand you correctly. What do you think drives this sentiment? Does he want another sort of civilization to flourish instead of the Western one?
That's... a long way from what I actually said, which is that it's fairly unusual for a Western ally to be dependent on infrastructure provided by a company lead by an-unstable-seeming guy whose screechingly bad takes on Twitter include an obsession with endorsing their enemy's talking points.
Its always kind of funny to me that people call Musk unstable. He had the same 2 jobs for decades now. He does these jobs and works on them insane hours. He is successful in the things he does. Other then people not liking his opinion, he isn't really unstable in any meaningful way. People just prefer to call him crazy and unstable because then anything he says doesn't have to be taken seriously.
Of course he is often wrong about things, and has bad takes. And he can get angry and competitive. He is pretty petty. But if that makes somebody mentally unstable there are a lot of unstable people around.
There's a difference between merely tweeting nonsense and spending a large part of your fortune buying Twitter and driving its commercial partners away with the nonsense you tweet though...
And, back on topic, dependency on infrastructure provided by a company lead by someone who is publicly campaigning for you to surrender and occasionally publicly threatens to switch it off is a more conspicuous security risk than most.
Wanting to end a civil war isn't a bad thing, as civil wars go on, the often settle in along existing battle lines, if people want it or not. Think about Korea, lots of people would have been pissed if somebody suggested to let Pyongyang be in the Communist sphere. And yet its still there.
The fact is, in actual action, rather then a few tweets throwing ideas around, is there any other private person who help Ukraine more?
I think its kind of depressing when you have pro-Ukraine people shit on Musk, including the government itself, given that without him they would be in a far worse position. But that's the thing, in war, give a hand they want a whole arm, and if you wont give the arm, they will call you an enemy. That is a rational position to take for a government that is in a war, but everybody else doesn't have to parrot the messaging.
The Soviet Union in WW2 was the same way with the US. Here have this X any Z. Stalin "but we also want Y, A, B, C and more of X. The evil capitalist wont us to fail because they don't want to give us C".
> Wanting to end a civil war isn't a bad thing, as civil wars go on, the often settle in along existing battle lines, if people want it or not.
It's possible to want to end the war without loudly and publicly endorsing explicitly Russian chauvinist positions like Crimea being "Khruschev's mistake" (screw the Crimeans that voted to continue to be part of Ukraine when they actually had a free and fair vote on the issue), Ukraine having an obligation to be "neutral" after its surrender to ensure they can't acquire any allies to protect themselves when Russia comes back for Odessa, and NATO having no reason to exist. It might be rational for Elon to believe any armistice is going to involve some concessions to Russia, but he doesn't have to parrot their messaging. (Or indeed comment at all: the main reason why you can't think of any other private people that have helped Ukraine more is that CEOs of other companies supplying Ukraine aren't quite so active on Twitter)
I think it's kind of depressing that Ukrainians have to trust him whilst he becomes one of the loudest public voices calling for a settlement on Russia's terms, and kind of understandable that they don't trust his motivations when he takes more reasonable decisions like declining to extend Starlink coverage to support an attack on the Russian naval fleet.
It doesn't matter about the company, the SPAC route has almost always resulted in the collapse of any company that is unable to make or show evidence of growing revenue and they list on the stock exchange anyway.
SPACs are a complete scam and a grift only benefitting insiders.
I know one such person, sold his full stake before the SPAC for the nominall SPAC price minus some, negligible, discount. Shortly after SPAC, it tanked. Since the they are positioning themselves as an Angel investor and early start-up expert. Might well be true, they have the money to be an Angel and argueably stayed with their company until SPAC. What I never understood was, why for the love of god, he choose to stay with the SPAC company...
Is there any info on what caused their technical issues? Basic rocketry isn't all that hard anymore, the dynamics are well understood, were they trying to do something weird with manufacturing?
They'd gotten pretty close in their last launch. It may not have looked like it (the first stage exiting stage right was wacky), but from a technical standpoint it actually went off pretty well.
It's the business case that failed. Mass-produced expendable rockets was a brilliant idea prior to SpaceX. It would have worked two decades ago. There's no market for it now.
ETA: Apparently they had more attempts than I remembered. The next one after the sideways launch did in fact reach orbit as their first success. They've only had a 50% success rate after that though, which is really unusual.
Their lunch success rate was far to late and the rockets they built were always behind what the market actually demanded. They moved from rocket model to rocket model and never managed to stable produce any of them.
> Mass-produced expendable rockets was a brilliant idea prior to SpaceX.
No it wasn't. Their whole idea of 'its fine if half the rockets fail' doesn't actually work. There are not enough payloads to mass-produce rockets (specially small rockets). Its a total misunderstanding of the economics of mass manufacture to think this was gone get the price low enough.
> It would have worked two decades ago.
No it wouldn't have. Because a decade ago they would not have gotten the money for so many failed launches in the first place. Its only because SpaceX and RocketLab proved the viability, that companies like Astra got the money to even attempted what they did.
The reason why they survived as long as they did is because the were able to SPAC when the market was high.
The readability is Astra was a technical failure of a company. The only success they had was because their CEO was good at twitter and selling the company.
Their business model was not based on a 50% flight success rate. They anticipated some failures, but not that many. They wanted to be launching a new rocket literally every day, with only a few failures per year.
Ironically, SpaceX is approaching those numbers for its reusable Falcon fleet.
> The readability is Astra was a technical failure of a company. The only success they had was because their CEO was good at twitter and selling the company.
Couldn't agree with you more on this though. I worked under the guy at NASA Ames. He was a hack and a poser, and I steered clear ever since.
This is just plainly incorrect. There is very little room for error launching rockets and they are quite complex. Many opportunities for failure and when you don't get everything right the default outcome is a large explosion.
Also a lot of the complexity comes around doing new things like any sort of cleansheet design. SpaceX has absurdly good reliability launching Falcon 9's because of how many they launch and have launched while they've crashed a ton of starships.
SLS reused a whole bunch of hardware and launched 6 years late, basically doubling the planned schedule and slipping dozens of times.
Obviously a clean first launch can be done, I'm not arguing against that, I'm saying "Basic rocketry isn't all that hard anymore" is nonsense. Nobody looking at the SLS program and its troubles and say that building rockets isn't difficult.
You can spend an enormous amount of time and resources while using as much legacy proven hardware as possible to try to never fail... or you can blow up rockets to test them for faster cheaper results.
Well here is the thing, SLS cost 20 billion $ or more. And uses lots of components that existed before SLS was around.
Vulcan still cost multiple billions to develop, the engines had to go threw a very demanding air force test and validation program first. The rocket was delayed for years because of issues with both the BE-4 and the Centaur.
ULA has established suppliers and established factory, with lots of people that build and launch rockets. Those suppliers are very expensive, but if you have the US military paying you 200+ million $ per launch, you can afford that.
To compare those to examples to a tiny startup rocket company is kind of absurd. They simply don't have lots of legacy reliable components. They can't use existing suppliers as those are far to expensive and don't have products for micro launchers.
You are comparing rockets that cost 30x or 300x of what Astra priced their rocket at.
Generally if you want to understand Astra issues, you have to understand the dynamics of the market.
The main problem with Astra was that they were always behind the market. They started with a micro rocket, that was simply to small for most sats. So before they ever made that reliable they made the rocket bigger. And once they had done that it was pretty clear that the market needed even bigger sats. So they iterated again and made their rocket bigger.
But that happened again so they gave up that rocket and (in theory) now they are building an even bigger rocket.
They never actually settled on a design. The basically launch a new rocket 1-2 times and before they had figured out all the issues were already looking at the next design and those designs had new issues.
It was more important for the CEO scam and lie about how brilliant the next rocket was gone be so nobody thought to much about why the last rocket blew up. The companies main product was selling stock to uninformed people.
When RocketLab and others strategically moved into space craft, Astra bought a Ion-Engine company just so they can say they do the same thing. When SpaceX had success with Starlink, Astra promised to have an even better global internet.
Having a good story was more the priority then having good engineering and good execution.
This book is a good read: "When the Heavens Went on Sale: The Misfits and Geniuses Racing to Put Space Within Reach"
Its about Planet, Astra, RocketLab and Firefly. Book doesn't make the Astra CEO look great.
Agree with what you said about SLS and Vulcan, and just posted a similar response
before seeing yours:) Yeah, not sure how people can say rockets are easy, still extremely dangerous and difficult.
... and Will have to check out "When the Heavens Went on Sale." Recently, read "Lift Off: Elon Musk and the Desperate Early Days That Launched SpaceX." Truly interesting and showed how so much of Falcon 1's development was touch and go, with tons of technical, political and financial set backs. Lots of brillant engineers worked on that rocket.
Hmm, in my opinion, not great examples of how rockets aren't difficult anymore. Read recently that for Vulcan, ULA reused a lot of existing systems from Atlas V (such as the entire second stage, but also many other system) which obviously have been developed and used in actual flights for decades:
Yeah, NASA and ULA take the most conservative approach to rockets, using technology that they developed decades ago.
... but maybe that's what you mean by "following the established component and integration test playbook." It's smart and safe, but still, this also means they aren't innovating and, as you know, even for Space X, doing something new took them many, many years of failures, for Falcon 1, Falcon 9, and on into Starship.
Turns out there's a list on Wikipedia. Looks like they found just about everything that can go wrong. Mostly fuel system issues though.
It's pretty uncommon to be that bad at launch vehicle design. Recently Vulcan and SLS both launched and made orbit with new designs on the first try instead of the 7th, though you could probably just stack $1 bills and get to space just as fast.
Rocket lab got electron to orbit on their second try.
Relativity almost made it and they had a very weird production technique. SpaceX has been having issues but they're building a much more complicated vehicle.
It true that Astra took 7 tries to get to orbit, but they did so in record time from founding to achieving orbit.
* Astra - 5 years
* SpaceX - 7 years
* Firefly - 8 years
* RocketLab - 12 years
* Virgin Orbit - 13 years
ABL, Relativity, Blue Origin, Stoke - never made it to orbit
Compare the cost of SLS ($4.1 billion) and Vulcan ($100-200 million) to an Astra rocket ($4 million). If you spend 100-1000x more money, is it impressive to have better performance than a $4 million rocket?
It's really not common for an organization to make it to orbit on their first try. SpaceX may make it look easy, but it took them 4 tries to finally pull it off on their first rocket.
Astra does seem to have had more than their fair share though.
I think the thing that's striking is most of the failures look like lack of ground testing to me. They had lots of failures that would have presented in ground firing and a couple that would have been obvious with proper electrical integration testing.
There's a lot of process we follow in the industry that looks weird from the outside but is pretty well tuned for risk reduction, you just don't have to go full Boeing where you create tons of bonus process then circumvent it all when it becomes expensive.
They didn't launch the same rocket 7 times. Those launches are with 3 or 4 different rockets.
Startups like Astra couldn't hit the price point they wanted if they had done all those processes. So they did it a different way. In the case of Astra not successfully.
>Rocket lab got electron to orbit on their second try.
IIRC their first launch was destroyed by bad telemetry requiring manual flight termination (if in doubt terminate), the hardware itself flew perfectly on first launch.
Their software/controls people were obviously top notch.
https://youtu.be/x2jU5W4ehPE