Rocketry failure achievements Astra has earned so far: Failure to Launch, Separation Anxiety, and now Engine Rich Exhaust

It's just sad that they lost yet another rocket & payload. ULA, Arianespace, and especially SpaceX have really spoiled us, making it look like it should be easy to successfully send rockets into orbit. But failures like these keep reminding us of how difficult rocketry really is. Best of luck to Astra in their future launches, I really hope they can make it.

I've been watching launches since Armstrong in 1961. Astra simply has the most unique and entertaining failures.

"No one is going to charge NASA for littering" nice little reference to Skylab and Australia there Scott. Love the channel. 🙂

And that’s why I always put a parachute on my satellite in Kerbal

Felt sorry for that launch engineer with his mask on. His eyes gave away his panic when he saw that unplanned puff of smoke from the engine.

In a "Think Tank" near you, "Well, what was Scott Manley's take on it". Well deserved! (Spread sheets, mission comparisons, color enhancements, payload explanations, back stories and some needed humor.) Perfect!

"Digging around behind the couch on SLS". That made me laugh. You are a funny man.

I really hope Astra figures out the problems -- their "launch anywhere" from trucks system looks like such a great idea.

as a bonus to producing more satelites, you have some cold-spares in case you need more satelite capacity or some fail a couple years into the program

Considering their failures they have accomplished more than Blue Origin. That is all.

These repeat failures make me so sad. It's something different every time too. The engineers must be so frustrated by this too 😭

As soon as they showed the first rocket cam views and the rocket looked like it was wobbling a lot and like overcorrecting I was like "uh oh, not again..." but hoped it would still make it. Hoping Astra gets all the kinks worked out and stops having issues like this, and I'm interested to hear what they determine the issue was this time.

"... Digging around behind the couch on SLS ..." BRUTAL FINALE' ! And so appropriate. Well done! 👏👏👏

Astra should make a deal with spinlaunch allowing them to share the company name.

As much as people want to see Astra succeed, and it'd be nice, sure, but at this point it's clear they need some more testing. Until they can actually demonstrate some reliability, probably best to avoid using them for launches. I certainly wouldn't choose them. Might sound harsh, but, there are other options.

Morning. Alameda Naval Base? Isn't that where the nuclear wessels were?

Thanks Scott. Good assessment. And great nerding with the telemetry data !

In such a "$20M cubesat project" the actual cost of the hardware is only a small fraction. It should be easy to build 6 more, and probably they have already done that. (and it would cost less than a single cable in the new SLS launch tower)

I always appreciate your analysis after a failure like this. Thank you.

This is one of the channels I can comfortably turning on notification🔔. Always high quality contents and fun streams that I never want to miss. Also Scott doesn't remind us for subs & nots.

My guess is one of the two fuels needed ran out prematurely. I will say it was a leak that predicated the early shutdown also causing the The bobbling in the video while thrusting.

I remember a theory from one of our rare submarine losses. It was thought that the highly compressed air used to blow the ballast tanks had too much moisture in that air and clogged the air tank vents with ice. This would probably not be anything like what happened with this rocket, but my mind always goes there when I think of compressed gasses being released

My friend asked me what went wrong with the rocket and I told him to check your channel this morning for your video on it. Thanks Scott

I have always loved Astra's concept of loading everything in to a few shipping containers and being able to launch from any suitable location on Earth. Sad to have watched another failure yesterday, but space is hard and the margin between success and failure is razor thin. SpaceX was iffy during the early days, though they have made routine booster recovery a reality. I still hold my breath from landing legs deployed to touchdown however. I likely will not live long enough to ever see Starship turnaround times of 1 hour. The TPS will be a major factor in that for quite some time to come, although I hope they have better success than the space shuttle did. Other companies have had their failures too, it's a fact of rocketry that can not be totally avoided. Cube sats are relatively inexpensive. If you need 6, build 8 or 10 so that in the event of a launch failure or subsequent failure of a satellite in orbit the constellation can be quickly restored to full capability. SLS pocket change....more like the money in the couch cushions would be enough to help subsidize more than a few small launch providers and cube sats.

I burst out laughing at work with the "digging behind the couch on SLS" comment, good one Scott!!

Love the way you just drop the values into a spread sheet and come out with great conclusions :)

I can see a way that fuel sloshing due to repeated attitude correction could indirectly lead to fuel or oxidizer starvation, especially if a resonant sloshing occurred in one of the tanks: As the fuel or oxidizer gets low, permitting the drain hole in the tank to become momentarily uncovered, in a pressure-fed system, this will result in the pressurization gas escaping very quickly, because its viscosity is less than that of the liquid fuel or oxidizer. Then, even when the drain hole gets covered back up, the tank pressure will have dropped too low to keep the engine going.

Considering the high failure rate with Astra, as cheap as launching with them was and as limited as the alternatives were, this doesn't feel like having been the right decision. When Astra gets through these troubles, sure, but now using them is sadly just Russian roulette.

I don't see how ASTRA can survive. Poor engineering, poor business decisions, focus on politics??????

Excellent video, great explanation and clarity. Very educational material. Thank you! ~

Another major influence on the magnitude of propellant sloshing is the frequency of vehicle oscillations. If oscillations are near the resonant frequency of sloshing motions, then slosh magnitudes can obviously grow rapidly. Since the tanks were roughly 20% full at the time of the shutdown, sloshing and resultant gas ingestion could have caused a mixture problem and engine shutdown. The video does seem to show some small upper stage movements that are less than smooth during the earlier phase of the upper stage flight. Those vehicle movements would produce some sloshing motions. Also, propellant motions and resultant forces could feedback into the control system and cause it to become unstable. The vehicle may have already been losing attitude control when the engine shutdown. Telemetry should be able to quickly identify a control problem, if that occurred.

I noticed right away that the engine bell wasn’t glowing at all as compared to previous successes. It could have just been the lighting, but I actually thought that it had failed to light. Maybe just burning too rich and went through the fuel faster than anticipated?

Savage, bro’! And well deserved! NASA’s new funding source: “…digging around behind the couch on SLS.”

I thought the upper stage had a turbopump. A pressure fed engine failure, the most likely parts to fail are the various sensors and the control electronics. Thank you for the prompt update Mr Manley...

As always super Good work! Thanks Scott🇸🇪👍

In the Upward-Ho boardgame you'd draw a launch card and it would either say "Congratulations on a successful launch!" or "Congratulations! You learned ...." and it would name a cause for launch failure. If you already had one of those "learning" cards on the table with the same cause, your launch would succeed. Otherwise you had to eat the cost of the launch with no income but you got to put down the card in front of you as 'expertise.' There were two other cards that said, "Disaster! Your rocket fell in the ocean (or 'exploded in flight') and you have NO IDEA WHY!" Those were a dead loss. No launch income, no expertise gained.

It was frustrating to watch live. First two holds, then they managed to finally launch - and then rocket failed anyway. Poor Astra.

If there's pumps or rotating elements in the 2nd stage, the sudden change in attitude when the engine stops could also be engine components spinning down gradually or RUD-ily and donating their angular momentum to the rocket body.

An excellent analysis, thanks Scott!

Everyone knows you need at least 10 people in the control room for a successful launch 🚀

Poor Astra. I’m a fan of them but they’ve been plagued by the space kraken since their first attempted launch. I hope they succeed but these launches are expensive failures

I don’t really care about the rocket as much as I thought I might when I clicked on this. But I could listen to you talk for days 😊. I love that accent!

Thank you Scott.

When you have a different problem every time you launch and fail there are some serious problems throughout your design.

I’m not sure why NASA gave this contract to ASTRA with a success rate of 1 to 5 at the time when Rocketlabs electron could of done this and would of had a higher chance of getting into orbit.

"Plotted it on a spreadsheet like a nerd." You're my favorite nerd, Scott!

Astra recently said the preliminary cause for the failure was "a higher-than-normal fuel consumption rate", causing the Aether engine to shut down early. I believe the "fuel" in the cause listed referred to the RP-1 kerosene running out early with some liquid oxygen left over. It didn't say "higher-than-normal oxidizer consumption rate".

Didn't know there was an SLS couch! 😱😱😱 Always keeping the best secrets for the last, eh Scott? 🤣🤣🤣

Combustion chamber melted thru in s spot. Loss of pressure caused shutdown. My initial thoughts watching it live

Astra seems to be a fine idea and they will get it all together soon. Now having Falcon 9 launching like a Consolidated Freightways truck on its regular route there is a tendency to forget that rocketry still demands its sacrifice before things will work. We also need to remember this when SpaceX starts launching Starship, even with their experience we can bet that at least one will have a RUD (Rapid Unscheduled Disassembly). NASA needs to keep working on the small stuff and not just multi-billion dollar 20-year projects. And Scott, you are right, there should be enough change behind SLS's couch to keep Astra working on it long enough that they will get it all straight. Ideally, in a few years, we can be doing small space science all the time. A day is even coming where we can send out little exploration satellites till we find a rare earth asteroid and/or all the other things a future-oriented society needs.

When they are digging around the couch why does there hand always end up in our pockets? Good video. Thanks Scott

Excellent and genuine content that we can trust.

How is shipping insurance handeled in space? Is it carrier risk or is the customer the one who foots the bill? If NASA could rebuild the sats would Astra be required to launch them for free? Alm those things would be a interresting video.

'Digging around the couch on SLS' Gotta love it. Thanks Scott.

Real bummer. Rooting for all of the startups to have success to help drive competition, so it sucks when these failures happen with payload on board

7:00 - I'm going to take issue with this statement: this *only* applies if the forces applying to the stage when the engine stops are not in line with the flight trajectory, *and* the ability to correct its attitude is lost: all successful orbital stages stop their engines at some point, but they fly on regardless.

3:55 is that an Arduino? Will there be such Arduinos in space or just test equipment?

My guess is that, because the launch with a bad fairing had a under aggressive control system, now they had an over aggressive control system, which was wasting fuel and delta-V, and led to a hard, lack of fuel related shutdown. (This also makes sense because it could have run out of oxygen, making a red exhaust.)

"...digging around the couch on SLS." Sting! I hope for the best for Astra - this was a blow...

I love these small launch providers. Particularly astra’s philosophy of the keeping the whole second stage inside the fairing and also launching with such slimmed down infrastructure. Really innovative and interesting. Failures early on are the birthing pains of any rocket company. I hope they come into their stride soon.

2nd stage is so unstable, it seems like it always fights the center of mass making constant corrections.

pre-launch cooling water jets caused an issue with the rocket thrust cones.. I would turn the water off hold for a second or 2 then launch

Was that trim jet burst at 7:17 on the left side of the bell?

Fascinating, do they have a counter-rotating counterweight to the radar reflectors to prevent the whole craft rotating from torque?

Good morning Scott. Thanks for a good discussion on the mishap. Do you think is was prudent for NASA to award Astra these missions given that they are not really flight proven yet? Seems too soon to give them payloads give no track record. Love to hear your opinion sir.

Looked to me like they either didn’t load enough oxidizer, or there was a small leak, and they lost a little during the burn. Ran out of oxidizer, the flame went out and just the fuel continued to spray out. Just the last little bit.

Digging around behind the couch…lol good one!

The dig on SLS costs to launch was spot on. That said, I'm quite certain Astra would be thrilled to have NASA continue to fund their launch failures. Even rocket builders need some accountability, as Musk learned in the early days of Falcon development.

daft question: Your animation shows the satellites RADAR continuously on as it rotates. It records the atmospheric and ground data. Would it not also be recording 360 degrees around the satellite? In the mm range, how effective would these sort of satellites be in obtaining data on 'space junk' and other satellites within the range of the beam? Or are they build Only with receivers on the Earthside? If this is the case - would it not be more logical to have 360 receiver on the units? These 360 degree images would potentially be superior to ground based 'space fence' radar for the LEO range of object mapping?

I was 100% sure we will get your coverage of this today.

I hope Astra can get their rocket sorted out as the launch anywhere concept is potentially very useful.

So close yet so far ! better luck next launch astra !

Yes astronautics is hard, but Astra is just not ready for commercial exploitation and I feel very sorry for the payload engineers who lost years of hard work in a matter of seconds.

Pogo/ullage might have led to some kind of resonant feedback in the oxidizer plumbing?

The Quality Price tradeoff improvement only occurs....if you can get the Volume Up. Mr Manley, Doctor Chopral at General Motors in a 1982 teleconference with Australia, was asked if, at 1 million vehicles at 3 dollars per pound, it might be better for the team to stop making cars and build aeronautical vehicles. He replied, partly in jest..." that would be a good, if we could get the Volume of production up". I wonder what the total cost is per pound in space...I'm pretty sure the USA is still doing pretty good....

That "nominal" shutdown you showed had a ton of sparks. I'd put my bet on something in the engine burning through followed by a controlled shutdown.

I think NASA could save on half of their budged if they fired all those people in charge of the naming acronyms and instead opted for naming the satellites after the lead designers' dogs.

Didn't center of mass for that upper stage is at the jonction of the two tanks? So in the lower part of fuel tank and upper part of oxigen?

The last "hold" was due to LOX conditioning, not the weather. I believe there was a problem with the temp and pressure in the LOX tank, and I believe they chose to launch anyway after some analysis and conversation that may have concluded with a statement of the form "we will have just enough, so let's launch". In other words, they were not conservative enough. But, I'm just speculating, I have no inside info, but I watched the entire broadcast and my curiousity was definitely piqued by the LOX conditioning issue that caused the hold.

Laughed at last little sly poke at the SLS program 🤣. To be honest, as you learn more about SLS, you just become staggered at the money wasted

Imagine pouring years of your life to build, test, retest, re-re-re-retest a satelite , only for it to be destroyed and everything be in vain. Why didn't they launch with more realiable launch provider? Why risk payload like this until people at Astra actually prove, that they can get cargo to space safely and reliably. This is ridiculous.

"Shut down in a big puff of, uh, vapor" strikes me as an Unusual Euphemism for "Exploded". (Didn't I also hear them use the word "anomaly"?) Of course, from a customer point of view, "success" is all-or-nothing. But from a technology point of view, this was VERY close to success, and I'm still very excited to see Astra perfect this. Good luck to them!

Looks like a miscalculation of the ullage for the oxidizer. Given the number of failures to date I question whether the problems management work is addressing systems and cultural issues or are Astra stuck in incident management mode.

As someone who owns a lot of astra shares. This hurts

If Astra is able to pull out of this, they're going to be some of the most experienced small launchers ever.

I think that about seals the casket on Astra. Tim will tell and I hope I'm wrong, but it's not looking good.

Rofl. Digging behind the SLS couch for spare cube sat change 🤣

Even with a bunch of propellant left the chamber unburnt I don’t believe it would make that much plume. I think that’s a cloud of metal oxide, probably the injector plate igniting.

Well, it's not much but it was hard work.

looks like a small plume of gas above the eng bell from the 2nd stage kinda like a fuel line or o2 line ruptured in some way after the pitch down.

Hey Scott. If you get a chance, look at the replay and notice the contrail before and after MaxQ. It sure looks uneven to me compared to SpaceX. Is there a chance there was an issue well before the failure?

Here's hoping Astra can improve their success rate. More successful launch providers will reduce the costs, somewhat.

This just shows how difficult it is to be successful. Commercial companies who are successful should be applauded. Space X who takes humans to the space station is mind blowing!

Hahah digging behind the couch on SLS. Niiiice! 😎

Premature shutdown implies the engine shut down normally but it did so early. This appears to have been an abnormal shutdown considering the blast of fuel.

I thought it was successful? That’s awfully unfortunate for the buyer.

Good news: obviously they still have all the designs so they can get new satellites built without any significant NRE Bad news: Because of the type of mission this is (class D), it's extremely unlikely they have more than 1 flight spare of payload and avionics, and spare structure is even more unlikely. They're unlikely to have many spare components needed to build the avionics up, especially for anything more than $10, which are not the parts you need to really have spares of. Supply chain is fucked, so gettin most parts is extremely long lead. Stuff that used to have a lead time of 8-12 weeks now has a lead time of 32-44 weeks, and competition for buying parts has increased. Back to good news: Upside to the class of mission, it's way cheaper than higher class missions and has a much faster development and integration timeline, which is why there's more satellites. The mission will still work with 4 satellites, just slightly degraded data. But they'll still be able to complete the mission with those 4 satellites. They might be able to get 2 new satellites built by the time the other 4 have launched. Back to bad news: It's unlikely NASA will spring for more satellites. They'll more likely declare the mission can be completed with 4, so that's it. While again this class of mission is cheaper, NASA isn't generally willing to increase budget over what was originally slated for them. The biggest driver on an up or down on more satellites imo is solar arrays and payload. Solar arrays are usually one of the largest chunk of the bus budget, especially since these are fold out deployables which means more complicated mechanisms and therefore testing. Payloads usually have more sensitive electronics and are therefore not as easy to find easy drop in replacements for when the parts you had originally specced are now backordered until literally this time next year. And to end on good news: You're right that building more satellites is cheaper, which is partly why constellations have become the new hot trend. They might have enough parts and enough cash reserve that the RE is cheap enough to build 2 more satellites. Especially for PCBs, like 90% of the cost is set up and tooling, so it's usually more cost effective to buy 20 PCBs as it is to buy 5. Buying components in bulk also leads to cost savings (not as much as PCBs, but savings nonetheless).

We were there. After a delay with boats they had to detank, rechill, and then refuel. Could they have had an issue while refueling?

LOL digging around behind the couch on SLS. Thanks Scott!