Astra Space, which had two rocket launch failures on both of its tries to fly from the Space Coast announced Wednesday the likely reason for the most recent loss.
Teams moving through a four-step investigation have completed their flight data review and timeline reconstruction, and are nearly complete with a fault-tree analysis, according to a release on the company’s website.
“We’ve determined that the upper stage shut down early due to a higher-than-normal fuel consumption rate,” the update reads. “We have narrowed the root cause to an issue with the upper stage engine. We have also completed many rounds of ground testing, including multiple tests that yielded results consistent with the failure condition in flight.”
The final step in the process is “implementing corrective and preventative actions.”
“The team is conducting additional experiments to verify the root cause before wrapping up the investigation with the FAA,” the update reads. “We are focused on conducting an exhaustive investigation and ensuring that we extract all lessons learned.”
Those lessons, though won’t apply to the model of rocket that failed.
While Rocket 3.3 as it was called was able to fly successfully to orbit twice from the company’s Alaska spaceport since last fall, both Canaveral failures, which both involved the loss of payloads for NASA, led the company to shelve the Rocket 3 design in favor of a larger model not expected to come until late 2023 at the earliest.
The Alameda, California-based company instead announced in August it would kill further development of the Rocket 3 design. Instead, Astra would focus efforts on Rocket 4 saying in a press release the company “will transition to the next version of its launch system and is working with customers to re-manifest all payloads onto the new launch system, designed for higher capacity, reliability, and production rate.”
The larger design, doubling the payload capacity of Rocket 3, is targeting the ability to service the sundry commercial internet constellations in the works similar to SpaceX’s Starlink and Amazon’s Project Kuiper. The company stated it intends to keep costs to under $5 million per launch.
The decision means NASA is still on the hunt for a new ride for its remaining hurricane-tracking satellites that Astra was supposed to launch.
During the June 12 launch from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, the rocket made it off the pad, but the second stage ran out of fuel and shut down before putting the payload of two TROPICS satellites into the desired orbit. TROPICS stands for Time-Resolved Observations of Precipitation structure and storm Intensity with a Constellation of Smallsats.
That mission was the first of what was supposed to be three launches Astra was contracted to complete before the end of summer. The contract was worth $7.8 million, and it’s undetermined if NASA will stick with the company to complete the mission with the four remaining satellites.
In its first Cape Canaveral launch attempt in February, the second stage also failed, but for different reasons. That flight lost its payload of small satellites that were being flown for a $3.9 million award as part of NASA’s Venture Class Launch Services Demonstration 2 contract, designed to give incentive to new rocket companies to pursue successful launch vehicles. While it managed to launch without issue from Canaveral, the second stage had issues separating, and a video stream during flight last showed the rocket spinning end over end in space. The rocket and the four small satellites it was carrying for U.S. universities as well as NASA’s Johnson Space Center burned up in the atmosphere.
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