15.03.2022 / 19:10 MEZ
Astra scrubs return-to-flight launch from Alaska
Astra engineers identified two problems — an electrical design issue and a software glitch — that prevented a rocket from reaching orbit last month with a suite of NASA-sponsored CubeSats, clearing the way for a return-to-flight mission that could launch from Alaska this week.
The company’s next mission is ready to lift off from Pacific Spaceport Complex on Kodiak Island, Alaska, with several small commercial payloads heading into a polar orbit.
A launch attempt Monday was scrubbed due to bad weather at the Alaska launch site. The mission has a 29-minute launch window Tuesday opening at 12:22 p.m. EDT (1622 GMT; 8:22 a.m. AKDT).
The launch was widely anticipated after airspace warning notices suggested a mission was scheduled to fly from Kodiak Island. But Astra did not officially confirm the launch plan until Monday morning, hours before the opening of the first launch window, once it secured a launch license from the Federal Aviation Administration.
The mission’s customer is Spaceflight, a commercial launch broker and an arranger of rideshare launch services. Spaceflight said Monday it has three of its customers flying on Astra’s Rocket 3.3 launch vehicle, designated Launch Vehicle 0009, or LV0009. Two of the customers are Portland State Aerospace Society and NearSpace Launch, while the third was undisclosed.
Portland State Aerospace Society’s payload, named OreSat0, is a student-built nanosatellite developed at Portland State University in Oregon. NearSpace Launch’s payload, named S4 CROSSOVER, will remain attached to the Astra rocket’s second stage after entering orbit, testing communications instruments and gathering data on the space environment.
The launch of LV0009 marks Astra’s return to Kodiak Island, where the company’s first four orbital launch attempts. The first three test flights failed to reach orbit, but Astra successfully placed an inert payload into orbit for the U.S. Space Force in November.
That set the stage for Astra’s first mission with functional satellites on-board, which took off Feb. 10 from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station. But a problem during separation of the rocket’s payload shroud, followed by a software glitch on the upper stage, prevented the mission from completing its mission.
Astra said March 6 that the launch from Florida last month failed to reach orbit after the rocket’s payload fairing did not fully open nearly three minutes after liftoff.
The two halves of the clamshell-like nose cone on Astra’s rocket were supposed to jettison after shutdown of the vehicle’s first stage engines, revealing the rocket’s second stage and satellite passengers to continue the climb into orbit.
Astra said an investigation led by company engineers, with oversight from the FAA, revealed that the payload fairing’s five separation mechanisms fired in the wrong order due to an electrical issue. That led to unexpected movement of the fairing structure, causing an electrical disconnection that prevented the final separation mechanism from receiving its command to open.
On-board video from the rocket showed the payload fairing start to open, but the two halves never fully separated to fall away from launch vehicle. That meant the upper stage lit its engine while still inside the fairing.
In a separate issue, Astra said engineers discovered a software problem that caused the upper stage to begin tumbling after firing away from the first stage and malfunctioning payload fairing.
Astra said the root cause of the payload fairing separation failure was an error in an engineering drawing, which caused technicians to improperly install wiring harnesses on the fairing separation system. Testing did not detect the problem before launch.
The software problem was rooted in a vulnerability to a “packet loss” failure mode, according to Astra. ” A missed series of signals resulted in a chain of events, resulting in the upper stage’s inability to recover from its tumble,” the company said in a statement.
Officials updated the engineering drawing and modified the payload separation system wiring harnesses on rockets already built in Astra’s factory, and introduced a new test to detect similar issues in the future. Engineers also upgraded software to overcome the problem that paralyzed the steering system ion the upper stage.
The LV0009 mission from Alaska is critical for Astra, which aims to eventually launch daily missions to carry small satellites into orbit for a range of customers, including the U.S. military, commercial companies, and NASA. So far, the company has successfully reached orbit in just one of five tries.
After the LV0009 mission, Astra plans to return to Cape Canaveral for a series of three launches for NASA in April and May, carrying NASA’s TROPICS CubeSats.
TROPICS, a weather research mission, stands for Time-Resolved Observations of Precipitation structure and storm Intensity with a Constellation of Smallsats. The mission will consist of six CubeSats flying in three orbital planes, with each Astra launch targeting a specific orbit in the constellation.
Quelle: SN
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Update: 23:00 MEZ
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Quelle: Astra Rocket
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Update: 16.03.2022
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Astra’s Rocket 3.3 returns to flight with successful launch
Updated 6:45 p.m. Eastern with stock information.
WASHINGTON — Astra successfully returned its Rocket 3.3 vehicle to flight March 15, placing several payloads into low Earth orbit.
The Rocket 3.3 vehicle, designated LV0009 by Astra, lifted off at 12:22 p.m. Eastern from Pacific Spaceport Complex – Alaska on Kodiak Island. The company scrubbed a launch attempt the previous day because of poor weather.
The liftoff and ascent appeared to go as expected. That included the successful separation of the payload fairing after the first stage engines shut down and before separation of the second stage. On the previous Astra launch Feb. 10, a flawed design in the wiring for the payload fairing separation system prevented one mechanism from firing, keeping the fairing from separating as planned.
The second stage engine shut down about eight minutes and 35 seconds after liftoff. Payload separation was scheduled to take place 10 seconds later, but there was no immediate confirmation that the payloads were released.
A little more than an hour after liftoff, though, Astra Chief Executive Chris Kemp said the payloads were communicating with ground stations, confirming successful separation. “The flight was nominal,” he said on a company webcast. “We were able to precisely deliver to the targeted orbit and inclination at orbital velocity.” Astra said before the launch the vehicle would deliver the payloads to a sun-synchronous orbit at an altitude of 525 kilometers.
The mission, the first in a multilaunch agreement Astra announced with launch services provider Spaceflight March 14, carried payloads for three customers. One payload, called EyeStar-S4 and developed by NearSpace Launch, was designed to remain attached to the second stage to test intersatellite communications technologies the company plans to use on future satellites.
A second payload was OreSat0, a cubesat developed by a student group, the Portland State Aerospace Society. Spaceflight previously planned to launch OreSat0 on one of its Sherpa tugs manifested on the SpaceX Transporter-3 rideshare mission in January, but a propellant leak on the Sherpa forced the company to remove the vehicle from that launch and find other rides for OreSat0 and the other satellites it was to deploy. A third customer, not identified by either Astra or Spaceflight, also had one or more payloads on board.
The launch was the first since the February launch failure from Cape Canaveral that carried four NASA and university cubesats on a launch arranged by NASA’s Venture Class Launch Services program. The subsequent investigation turned up both the payload fairing wiring problem as well as a software glitch with the thrust vector control system on the second stage.
“The team worked really hard — every day, every weekend, many nights — to quickly identify the issues that we had on the flight, get another rocket back up to Kodiak, and fly it,” Kemp said on the webcast.
Kemp previously said that the next three launches Astra has planned will take place from Florida, carrying cubesats for NASA’s Time-Resolved Observations of Precipitation structure and storm Intensity with a Constellation of Smallsats (TROPICS) Earth science mission. Those launches are scheduled for this spring.
Despite the successful launch, Astra was not rewarded on the stock market. Shares in Astra were volatile in trading March 13, soaring briefly after liftoff only to sharply plummet during the nearly one hour with no updates regarding payload separation. The stock rebounded when Kemp announced successful payload deployment, but shared closed for the day down nearly 0.6% at $3.49.
Edison Yu, a research analyst at Deutsche Bank, said in a note after the launch that the success of this mission alone was not sufficient. “We think this will help sentiment on the stock but the company likely needs to put together a string of successful launches for a meaningful re-rating,” he wrote.
Astra will release its fourth quarter and full year 2021 financial results after the markets close March 17.
Quelle: SN