The next launch of the carrier rocket of the American space company Astra ended in failure
The next launch of the Rocket 3.3 rocket, produced by the American space company Astra, ended in complete failure.
In this way, not only the launch vehicle was lost, but also the satellites that were supposed to be launched into calculated near-Earth orbits. This is the fourth out of five failed launches.
What is a rocket from the American company Astra
So, the Rocket 3.3 rocket has a rather modest size, and it is only 12 meters long. The main task of Rocket 3.3 is to launch microsatellites (maximum payload is 150 kg) into a sun-synchronous near-Earth orbit.
The main advantage of the Rocket rocket lies in its low cost. So the cost of one launch is only 2.5 million US dollars. By comparison, launching the closest competitor, the Electron rocket, costs US$7.5 million.
Rocket 3.3 has two stages. At the same time, five Delphin propulsion units were installed at once on the first stage, and Aether engines were installed on the second stage.
At the same time, “especially thin aluminum” is used for the production of the rocket, which allows the spent rocket to burn in dense layers of the atmosphere without residue.
But while Rocket rockets are failing one after another, and that's what happened this time.
Another failure of Astra
The launch of the Rocket 3.3 launch vehicle with BAMA-1, INCA, CubeSat, and R5-S1 satellites took place at the cosmodrome located at Cape Canaveral on February 11 at 23:00 Moscow time.
Initially, everything went strictly according to plan, and after an estimated time of 3.5 minutes, the first stage was separated in a fully automatic mode.
Further, the engines of the second stage were also successfully turned on, but just after that the rocket began an uncontrolled rotation, and after a while the connection with it was completely lost.
At the moment, no details of this incident have been reported yet.
I would like to note that this is only the fifth launch of the Rocket 3.3 rocket. At the same time, the first three launches, which took place between September 2020 and August 2021, turned out to be failures.
It turns out that at the moment only the fourth launch, which took place in November 2021, was successful, since the fifth launch also turned out to be a failure.
We will wait for the official version of what happened, and we wish the Astra engineers to overcome all the technical difficulties and finally carry out successful launches.
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