For the last like 50 or 60 years,
space has mostly been dominated by a handful of governments.
It took government money to get a rocket up,
to build a satellite.
Around sort of 2008, the launch of this Falcon 1 rocket,
made by SpaceX, that marked the first time
we had billionaires who had some success in space.
We have lift off.
And now we're at this really interesting moment
in time where I think pretty much inspired by this example,
everybody decided they could do space as well
and could take a crack at these things
that people have been dreaming about for almost a century.
We've gone from governments to billionaires
to now all this private money, venture capitalists,
just regular old millionaires flooding in to space
and funding all kinds of projects.
As space becomes more accessible
to private enterprise, many companies are hoping
to make it not just possible but affordable
to put objects into orbit.
Now, a rocket startup called Astra is
on the verge of launching rockets
at a fraction of the cost of its competitors,
potentially opening up a new era
in the technology and business of space.
As I look 50 years into the future,
I see a platform emerging in space
and right above that thin blue line, I see competition,
I see ecosystems that are global, I see standards emerging
and I see a really exciting opportunity
for a trillion plus dollar economy to form.
My name's Chris Kemp, I'm the founder,
chairman and CEO of Astra and we're in our rocket factory,
located just across the Bay Bridge
from San Francisco in Alameda, California.
And I think that Astra is really
offering a very unique service.
No one can go anywhere on earth
and put something anywhere in space
in a few days with a few people.
We started talking about basically the idea
of building a rocket factory from the very beginning
and this idea was based on the principle
that if you make a lot of something,
the cost comes down a lot
so we're building Hondas not Ferraris.
We don't use any of the exotic materials,
carbon fiber composites, 3D printing,
that a lot of other companies like to talk a lot about.
They're actually very expensive
and they're very hard to scale
so we're building these rockets out of aluminum
so we're bending, we're welding, we're fastening,
we're stamping, we're machining aluminum
but our thesis was that if you could build rockets
like an aircraft or an automobile,
we could really bring the economics
in line with some of these larger rockets.
Astra's entering
into a crowded and well-funded space.
SpaceX is the clear leader with its Falcon 9,
Falcon Heavy and Falcon Super Heavy rockets.
Another front runner is New Zealand based Rocket Lab
with their Electron and Neutron rockets.
Astra has announced two different models,
one small, one big and says both will be much faster
and cheaper to build than those of its competitors.
For like 100 years, people in the United States,
Germany, Russia have been trying to build one
of these small liquid fueled rockets.
The first private company
to really pull it off was SpaceX in 2008.
It took SpaceX seven years to go from nothing
to getting this first rocket up.
Astra's whole goal really was to try
and shrink that time as much as possible
and to develop and manufacture this type
of rocket faster than any company in history.
Over the next few years here at this facility,
we'll be increasing the production rate of rockets
from monthly this year to weekly in 2023 to bi-weekly
in 2024 to a full daily production rate in 2025
and by launching a rocket a day,
we'll be able to bring the price point down
to about a half a million dollars
and we'll be selling launches
for a few million dollars that can deliver
between three and 500 kilograms to low-earth orbit.
Astra's ambition was born
from the massive demand for getting small satellites
into low earth orbit.
Startups are lining up to hitch rides on bigger rockets,
often waiting months or years for their turn.
Well, about five years ago,
one of my best friends started Planet,
which was the pioneer in building small satellites
and they were having some real trouble getting to space.
After spending a few months,
meeting a bunch of the other rocket companies,
it was pretty clear that he needed to be able
to get from anywhere on earth to anywhere in space
on his schedule, not the schedule of some large satellite.
If you're a small satellite company
and you want to get on a SpaceX rocket,
the going rate for a SpaceX launch
is about $60 million and there's gonna be one
or two very large satellites that are on that rocket
and they're really the primary payload.
All these startups want to be these,
what they call secondary payloads.
They're sort of attached around the big satellites
and so you're paying almost to be
like a second class citizen on this rocket.
The large satellites, the people that are really paying
for the bulk of the launch, they get deposited exactly
in the orbit that they want.
Then the secondary satellites get dropped off
and usually they have to use really small thrusters
on the satellites then to kind of push themselves
into their desired orbit.
There's not as many guarantees
that you're going to end up in the right spot.
Companies like Planet Labs are aiming
to dispatch many tiny satellites all around the globe
in what's called a constellation.
The satellites can do various computational tasks
using data from all over the earth
and since they're tiny and sit in low earth orbit,
they just burn up in the atmosphere
after a while, rather than contributing
to the growing problem of space debris.
As more and more companies try to build systems like this,
the need for easy access to space
is becoming greater and greater.
That's where Astra comes in.
The idea with the small rockets is
that you're getting your own ride to space.
It's taking your satellite to exactly the orbit you want
and even more than that, you're not having to wait months
and months and months to find space on a launch.
The whole idea here with something like Astra
is you hop on a website, you book a rocket launch,
you send them your satellite and hopefully
in a couple of weeks, your satellite's up in orbit
so we've never seen anything
like this sort of access to space
and the pace at which you could fly something into space
In much the same way, Amazon has big warehouses
and trucks that pull up.
You wouldn't land an Airbus 380
on Market Street and deliver a package to me.
A little sprinter van pulls up
and someone walks up and delivers a package.
Just look back at the last 10 years.
We've seen almost 400 companies now formed,
solving all sorts of really interesting problems,
looking at the earth, looking at how crops are growing,
looking at where we're fishing oceans,
looking at how to prevent things like coral reefs
being overheated in the oceans
and understanding weather patterns.
I can't imagine all the applications.
While private space flight
is becoming an increasingly crowded field.
The success rate is still extremely low.
More than 20 rocket startups have now failed
and there are at least 80 others
currently trying to get off the ground.
Only two private companies, SpaceX and Rocket Lab,
are flying regular missions to space
and Astra could be on the verge of becoming the third.
So Astra's been at it for about four or five years.
They've done really well in many senses.
They actually got to Alaska and did their first launch
in about two years, which was a record.
Rocket launch in Kodiak, Alaska, pretty cool.
The downside of that launch was that the rocket blew up.
Whoa.
It took 'em about a couple more tries
and then just at the end of last year,
they had really what was, for all intents and purposes,
a tremendous success, their rocket got like just
to the edge of low earth orbit within really a few feet
and so we know now that their rocket works.
The company plans
to launch another rocket later this year
as they continue to inch towards making commercial flights.
Eventually, they hope to launch a rocket every single day
which could lead to an exponential increase
in the number of satellites in orbit.
I mean, we're at this super interesting time
that I don't think most people are paying attention to,
which is that at the start of this year,
there are probably about 2200 satellites roughly
orbiting the earth.
If you look at the launch manifests
of the various rocket and satellite companies,
that number is supposed to go to about 50,000
to a 100,000 satellites in the next five to 10 years.
This is the next great technology story,
the next great computing infrastructure story
is what's going to happen right above our heads
and so the next few years are going to bring
with them this unbelievable frenetic amount of activity,
both from the rocket companies and the satellite companies,
and really all the global powers kind of
understanding the new rules of engagement
that go in to this era when governments
do not control this real estate that had been
the most prized, expensive real estate there is.
Now, just about anyone with a decent amount of money
and a decent amount of brains can get to space
and do something interesting there.
Our customers will be able to go
from a concept to a constellation
to really helping improve life on earth
in months instead of many years
and that's really our purpose
and I think over the next few years,
you'll see us really make it easier to allow space
to be a platform for entrepreneurs across the world.