Chicago Mercantile: Certain market data is the property of Chicago Mercantile Exchange Inc. US market indices are shown in real time, except for the S&P 500 which is refreshed every two minutes. Your CNN account Log in to your CNN account “The market moves also indicate that this is still an emerging industry, and we look forward to the day when launches are viewed in the same routine way as airline flights, where investors monitor the overall trends but not each individual flight.” “The stock swings related to Astra’s launch can be seen as a positive sign because investors are watching the company’s progress and are actively engaging with the space industry,” he said via email. In other words, Astra plans to mass produce rockets to make them cheaper, but it doesn’t put too much emphasis on having a pristine success rate.Īnd that means its stock is likely to continue to be a wild ride for the foreseeable future.īut that’s not necessarily a bad thing, said Micah Walter-Range, president of space consulting firm Caelus Partners. But when you really get into it, they don’t need to be that complicated, particularly when you’re not flying people or critical national assets, and they don’t absolutely, positively have to work 100% of the time.” You make one at a time, and they’re very complicated. When asked in a company Q&A posted online how Astra plans to stand out in such a crowded industry, Adam London, Astra’s founder and chief technology officer, said that “rockets are typically artisanal, crafted objects. But the company is facing stiff competition. That’s not to say Astra and the others can’t or won’t be successful. The target company then takes over the SPAC’s trading symbol, allowing it to go public with little of the financial disclosure or scrutiny that comes with traditional IPOs. AstraĪstra stock soars after first successful rocket launchĪstra is one of dozens of companies that plan to use relatively small, lightweight rockets to make frequent trips to space to drop off satellites - not to be confused with the far larger rockets launched by Elon Musk’s SpaceX, or the suborbital space tourism rocket developed by Jeff Bezos’ company, Blue Origin.Īstra, Rocket Lab and California-based Virgin Orbit are among the only startups that have now proven their rockets can get the job done.Īnd all of those companies have now gone public via SPAC, or “special purpose acquisition company,” which serve as investment placeholders on the stock market as the fund’s backers hunt for an acquisition target. Now, the company’s stock is consistently below the $4 per share mark, way off its high of more than $16 per share.Īstra completed its first commercial orbital launch on Friday November 19, 2021, PST. But then, in February, it notched another failure. That caused a massive surge in trading, taking the stock price up more than 30%. The company had five failures attempting to put a rocket into orbit before its first success in November 2021. The ordeal highlights how volatile it can be to invest in a rocket company - especially when they choose to set off a rocket during trading hours.Īstra in particular has been on a wild ride in recent months. Twenty minutes after confirming the success, its stock price was still down more than 3%. But the company’s stock didn’t immediately reverse. Astra’s stock shed more than 10% of its value, and trading was briefly halted.īut then, another update came: “We can confirm the successful deployment of the satellites on Spaceflight’s Astra-1 mission today,” the company wrote on Twitter. (ASTR) confirmed on Twitter that the rocket had made it to orbit, but it wasn’t immediately clear whether its payload - a group of small satellites for a variety of customers - safely deployed into orbit.ĭuring a webcast of the launch, Astra’s director of product, Carolina Grossman, warned that the company wouldn’t know immediately if the satellites deployed safely, as the rocket wasn’t in a position to send ground readings in the minutes after it reached orbit.įollowing the launch, 30 minutes of silence went by. A California startup wants to put satellites into a circular chamber and whip them around to more than 5,000 miles per hour before letting them burst out, allowing a rocket to fire up its engine only after it’s escaped the smothering tug of Earth’s gravity.
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