Astra’s NASA mission met with failure, causing loss of weather satellites

Astra’s NASA mission on Sunday met with a failure after a second-stage booster engine shut down early in the space. Rocket firm Astra Space’s (ASTR.O) mission is to send tiny storm-monitoring NASA satellites to orbit.

The failure occurred nearly 10 minutes after a successful liftoff of Astra’s Rocket 3.3 at 1:43 p.m. ET (1743 GMT) from a launchpad at the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida.

Quoting to Astra’s livestream commentator Amanda Durk Frye as saying, Reuters writes, “We had a nominal first-stage flight. However, the upper-stage engine did shutdown early and we did not deliver our payloads to orbit”.

It’s reported that the rocket was carrying two small satellites designed by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Lincoln Laboratory to measure moisture and precipitation in tropical storm systems. They were to be the first batch of a six-satellite constellation managed by NASA, the rest of which Astra also plans to launch in the future.

The Sunday’s mission failure was Astra’s second this year as the newcomer attempts to get its launch business off the ground with Rocket 3.3, an expendable two-stage vehicle capable of lifting 330 pounds (150 kg) of satellites to low-Earth orbit.

Astra’s seven attempts to reach orbit included test missions carrying no revenue-generating payloads and two which have been successful – the first in November last year and the second in March.

NASA partners with burgeoning rocket companies to launch low-cost science payloads as a way to spur growth in the rocket industry.

“Although today’s launch with @Astra did not go as planned, the mission offered a great opportunity for new science and launch capabilities,” Thomas Zurbuchen, the head of NASA’s science unit that oversaw the mission, wrote on Twitter.

Zurbuchen further added that although they were disappointed then, they knew there was value in taking risks in their overall NASA Science portfolio because innovation was required for them to lead.