Astra doesn't want to rest on its laurels.
The company from the Bay Area reached space for the first time early Saturday morning with a dummy mission on a rocket.
The lessons learned from the successful flight of LV0007 will be incorporated into future rockets and missions, according to representatives from the company. The next liftoff should be close by.
Chris Kemp, co-founder and CEO of Astra, said Monday that the vehicle is ready for launch. We'll be making some announcements soon as to the schedule, and we're working on all the details around the dates and range. Don't expect a long wait for the next flight.
The first successful flight of the Rocket 3.2 is shown in the video.
Don't expect that next flight to carry a dummy.
Kemp said that the test-flight phase was over. We'll be restarting with commercial payloads that will operate for our customers in low Earth orbit.
He said that the test flights aren't done yet. The upgraded versions of the rockets will need to fly trial missions as they come online, as the company plans to keep iterating and improving.
The Rocket 3 line includes LV0007 and LV0008. Kemp said that the company is working on a new vehicle called Rocket 4 and will conduct a few test flights with it next year.
The small-satellite launch market is a large one, and the goal of the company is to secure a large portion of it. The company's entire launch system can fit into a few standard shipping containers, which can be transported to the desired liftoff site quickly.
It doesn't take long for a rocket to reach its destination, as evidenced by the fact that LV0007 reached its off- Earth destination in less than nine minutes on Saturday morning.
Kemp said that he believed that Astra was in a position to deliver a payload to a precise location.
He said that the ability to fly something when they need it flown to the correct location has a lot of value to their customers. That's a pretty powerful, unique capability that has never been available before in this industry.
The Pacific Spaceport Complex has hosted all four of the Astra orbital test launches. The company eventually plans to fly from multiple sites around the world, and to launch more often than any company has ever done.
About 300 launches per year will be the target for Astra. Kemp said that the company is doubling the size of its Bay Area rocket factory in order to meet that rate.
He said that they were just getting started. There is a lot of hard work to be done.
Some of the big players in spaceflight and space science are customers of Astra. The company recently signed a launch contract with Planet, which operates the world's largest constellation of Earth-observation satellites. NASA selected Astra to loft its TROPICS mission, which will study storm intensity with a constellation of smallsats.
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