Enlarge / Liftoff of Astra's Rocket 3.0 from Cape Canaveral, Florida. (credit: Astra )

Astra's long, strange trip in the space business is taking another turn. The company announced Thursday that it is going private at an extremely low valuation.

Four years ago, the rocket company, based in Alameda, California, emerged from stealth with grand plans to develop a no-frills rocket that could launch frequently. "The theme that really makes this company stand out, which will capture the imagination of our customers, our investors, and our employees, is the idea that every day we will produce and launch a rocket," Astra co-founder Chris Kemp said during a tour of the factory in February 2020.

Almost exactly a year later, on February 2, 2021, Astra went public via a special purpose acquisition company (or SPAC). "The transaction reflects an implied pro-forma enterprise value for Astra of approximately $2.1 billion," the company stated at the time. For a time, the company's stock even traded above this valuation.

Enlarge / Astra's Rocket 3 vehicle lifts off from Alaska on November 20, 2021, on the company's first successful launch into orbit. (credit: Astra/Brady Kenniston)

Over the last two years, Astra has become one of just a handful of the dozens of startup launch companies to actually put something into orbit. This is a measure of the technical acumen of Astra engineers, who set out to execute on the vision of the company's cofounders, Chris Kemp and Adam London.

During the same period, Astra's financials have taken a nose dive. When Astra went public in mid-2021, it had a valuation of $2.6 billion. The company's market value is around $25 million, based on Astra's closing price on the Nasdaq stock exchange.

A week ago, Astra's market value was even lower. The number rose after Astra revealed Thursday that Kemp and London made an offer to take the company private in a bid to save the startup they established in 2016.

Welcome to Edition 6.19 of the Rocket Report! While we wait for SpaceX to launch the second full-scale test flight of Starship, a lot of the news this week involved companies with much smaller rockets. Astra is struggling to find enough funding to remain in business, and Virgin Galactic says it will fly its suborbital Unity spaceplane for the last time next year to focus on construction of new Delta-class ships that should be easier to turn around between flights. It's a tough time to raise money, and more space companies will face difficult decisions to stay alive in the months ahead.

As always, we welcome reader submissions , and if you don't want to miss an issue, please subscribe using the box below (the form will not appear on AMP-enabled versions of the site). Each report will include information on small-, medium-, and heavy-lift rockets, as well as a quick look ahead at the next three launches on the calendar.

Virgin Galactic plans "pause" in flight operations. Virgin Galactic will reduce the frequency of flights of its current suborbital vehicle and stop them entirely by mid-2024 as it concentrates resources on the next generation of vehicles, Space News reports . This was unexpected news for anyone outside of the company. As Ars has previously reported , Virgin Galactic has ramped up the flight rate for its VSS Unity suborbital spaceplane to about one mission per month, a rather impressive cadence, especially when Blue Origin, the other player in the suborbital human spaceflight market, has not flown any people to space in more than a year.

Enlarge / A Vega rocket rides a column of exhaust from its solid-fueled first stage, kicking off a mission to deliver 12 small satellites into orbit. (credit: ESA/CNES/Arianespace )

Welcome to Edition 6.15 of the Rocket Report! We're now more than three-quarters of the way through the year, and as of Thursday, there have been 156 orbital launches since January 1. Last year, which set a record for global launch activity, we didn't reach 156 orbital launches until mid-November. At the cadence set so far in 2023, we could end the year at roughly 200 orbital launches. We'll see if the world's launch providers, led by SpaceX and China, keep pace for next couple of months. I'm betting they do.

As always, we welcome reader submissions , and if you don't want to miss an issue, please subscribe using the box below (the form will not appear on AMP-enabled versions of the site). Each report will include information on small-, medium-, and heavy-lift rockets, as well as a quick look ahead at the next three launches on the calendar.

A Spanish rocket startup launched its first test flight. A Spanish launch company, named PLD Space, claimed success on Saturday after its suborbital Miura 1 rocket lifted off and achieved an altitude of 46 kilometers (29 miles) before plummeting into the Atlantic Ocean, Ars reports . Saturday's launch from Southern Spain is exciting for several reasons, but most notably because PLD Space is the first of Europe's new space launch companies to have some credible success. To that end, Saturday's modest flight represented the dawn of the European commercial space age.

Enlarge / SpaceX's Super Heavy booster, numbered Booster 9, rolls back to its launch pad in Texas for more testing. The rocket now has a new structural staging ring on top. (credit: SpaceX )

Welcome to Edition 6.08 of the Rocket Report! The US Department of Justice is taking SpaceX to court over allegations of hiring discrimination, but the government is relying more than ever on SpaceX's technical prowess. Once again, Elon Musk's social media posts are part of the story. This week, we also cover the successes and struggles of small rockets, where Rocket Lab is leading the pack.

As always, we welcome reader submissions , and if you don't want to miss an issue, please subscribe using the box below (the form will not appear on AMP-enabled versions of the site). Each report will include information on small-, medium-, and heavy-lift rockets, as well as a quick look ahead at the next three launches on the calendar.

Rocket Lab re-flies engine after ocean splashdown . Rocket Lab launched its 40th Electron mission this week and achieved an important milestone in its quest to reuse orbital rockets, Ars reports . As part of the mission, the launch company reused a previously flown Rutherford engine on its first stage for the first time. In terms of orbital rockets, only NASA's space shuttle and SpaceX's Falcon 9 vehicles have demonstrated the capability of re-flying an engine. With Rutherford, Rocket Lab has now also flown a rocket engine that landed in the ocean for the first time.

Enlarge / Chris Kemp, founder and CEO of Astra. (credit: David Paul Morris/Bloomberg via Getty Images )

Chris Kemp is a fighter. That's the price of admission if you want to compete in the brutal small launch industry. He is the co-founder, chairman and CEO of Astra, founded in 2016 with a goal of essentially commoditizing small satellite launch services, or at least getting a lot closer to that than anyone else.

But there are a lot pressure points for Astra in 2023. The company abandoned its first orbital rocket design, called Rocket 3, last year after a string of failures. With higher interest rates, raising money in 2023 isn't as easy as it was a few years ago. And calling Astra's competition stiff is definitely an understatement.

Kemp argues that Astra finds itself in a different position than, say, Virgin Orbit, a small satellite launch company that went bankrupt earlier this year. Astra has diversified, and can lean on a separate source of revenue in a promising business building electric thrusters for small satellites. This business, which Astra calls spacecraft engines, was made possible by the acquisition of a company called Apollo Fusion in 2021.

Enlarge / Astra revealed a prototype of its Rocket 4 launch vehicle in May. (credit: Astra )

Astra is running out of money.

It's been a year since Astra shelved its first orbital-class rocket after just two successful launches in seven flights. Chris Kemp, Astra's founder and CEO, last year unveiled a new rocket design he said would be more reliable and capable of carrying heavier cargo into orbit.

A year later, the development of Astra's new launch vehicle—named Rocket 4—appears to have slowed to a crawl. Astra has outfitted a new production line for Rocket 4 at the company's headquarters in Alameda, California, but the company doesn't have enough money to move forward on the program as quickly as it would like.

Enlarge / File photo of a hotfire test of a Blue Origin BE-4 engine. (credit: Blue Origin )

Welcome to Edition 6.02 of the Rocket Report! I'm on my third week at Ars, and the space beat is as busy as ever. Going forward, Eric and I will alternate work on the Rocket Report every other week. SpaceX broke its own booster reuse record this week, and a Chinese company made history with the first methane-fueled rocket to achieve orbit. Back on Earth, Blue Origin blew up an engine that was supposed to fly on ULA's second Vulcan rocket.

As always, we welcome reader submissions , and if you don't want to miss an issue, please subscribe using the box below (the form will not appear on AMP-enabled versions of the site). Each report will include information on small-, medium-, and heavy-lift rockets as well as a quick look ahead at the next three launches on the calendar.

Zhuque-2 rocket makes history . A commercial Chinese firm named LandSpace launched its Zhuque-2 rocket July 11 (US time) and made history as the first company to send a methane-fueled launcher into orbit, beating a bevy of US vehicles to the milestone, Ars reports . In its current form, the Zhuque-2 rocket can loft a payload of up to 1.5 metric tons into a polar Sun-synchronous orbit.

Enlarge / Rocket 3.0 is seen on the launch pad in June 2022 ahead of the launch of a TROPICS mission for NASA. (credit: Astra/Brady Kenniston)

Astra Space emerged from stealth mode two and a half years ago with a bold vision: It would build inexpensive rockets quickly and with a tolerance for some failure. The idea was simple. If Astra's small satellite customers would accept a bit of risk, the launch company could cut down on its testing, analysis, and redundancy in design. In turn, Astra would pass those launch savings along to customers.

"It's a no-brainer from an economics perspective that for these kinds of payloads, you should not be targeting 100 percent reliability," Astra co-founder Adam London said in February 2020.

At the time, the company was preparing for the first flight of its Rocket 3 vehicle, a micro launcher capable of lofting about 50 kg into low Earth orbit. That rocket exploded in March 2020 during a wet dress rehearsal test on the launch pad.