The orbital club has a new member.
The 43-foot tall (13 meter) Launch Vehicle 0007 lifted off from the Pacific Spaceport Complex on Alaska's Kodiak Island at 1:16 a.m. A dummy is being carried on a test flight for the U.S. military.
Just nine minutes later, the upper stage of LV0007 slipped into space, making it a huge milestone for Astra.
"We are absolutely bursting with pride at the number seven," Carolina Grossman, the director of product management, said during the launch. "This is a huge step in our mission to improve life on Earth from space."
The first successful flight of the Rocket 3.2 is shown in the video.
On November 20, 2021, the upper stage of Astra's LV0007 will make its way to space. The footage was provided by NASASpaceflight and Astra Space Inc.
The goal of the company is to secure a large portion of the small-satellite launch market with its line of cost-effective, ever-evolving rockets. The rockets are designed to be flexible and responsive, so they can be transported in a few standard shipping containers.
Some of the company's customers are very high-profile. In May, Astra announced that it had signed a launch contract with San Francisco company Planet, which operates the world's largest fleet of Earth-observing satellites.
TROPICS was selected by NASA to launch its Time-Resolved Observations of Precipitation Structure and Storm Intensity. TROPICS will study hurricanes using six tiny cubesats, which will be lofted over three launches in the first half of 2022, if all goes according to plan.
Saturday's launch was the fourth of its kind. The company's rocket had a problem with its guidance system and the first attempt ended shortly after liftoff.
Three months later, Astra was back on the pad for try number two, which succeeded in reaching space. The company's rocket ran out of fuel a few seconds before it reached its destination.
The third attempt happened on August 28. The rocket slid off the pad after one of the first-stage engines conked out. The flight ended up being terminated after 2.5 minutes after the vehicle recovered nicely and soared high into the Alaska sky.
All four of the attempts to launch from the Pacific Spaceport Complex have been successful. Two recent flights were test missions for the U.S. military that carried dummy payloads.
Over the coming weeks and months, we should expect more spaceflight action from Astra, which hopes to ramp up to a nearly daily launch cadence by the year 2025.
Chris Kemp, CEO and co-founder of Astra, said during Saturday's webcast that they have rocket serial number 8, 9, 10 in production. "We're just beginning."
Building and launching rockets are not the only ambitions of Astra. The company is also developing a satellite bus that will allow customers to integrate their payloads into a spaceship they don't have to build themselves. A constellation of 13,600 internet-beaming satellites was recently filed by Astra.
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