Astra Space, the launch firm that went public in 2021 at a $2.1 billion valuation, goes personal once more after months of burning money and failing to safe alternate funding.
The corporate announced Thursday that its board had accepted a suggestion from its CEO, Chris Kemp, and its CTO, Adam London, to buy the remaining Astra inventory at a worth of $0.50 per share. The deal is anticipated to shut within the second quarter of 2024, at which period Astra will stop buying and selling on the Nasdaq.
It’s a precipitous fall for the corporate, which raised practically $500 million from traders on the premise of an ultra-cheap launch automobile that may very well be scaled to execute tons of of missions per yr. In an investor presentation from February 2021, Astra touted a “mass produced portable launch system” that would launch from wherever on the earth. The corporate instructed traders it anticipated a bi-weekly launch cadence in 2024.
However the firm by no means achieved that (although they did attain orbit as soon as), dealing with a collection of setbacks together with an alarming sideways launch anomaly in 2021 and a lot of false begins for business launches through the years. Kemp’s suggestion that failure charges mattered much less the extra frequent launches have been may additionally have rattled potential clients.
Picture Credit: Astra
On the time Astra accomplished its SPAC merger it additionally acquired Apollo Fusion, an electrical propulsion developer for spacecraft, with the goal of integrating these methods into an Astra satellite tv for pc constellation. That constellation by no means got here to fruition, nonetheless, and whereas the corporate did achieve promoting many Apollo Fusion propulsion methods it has struggled to show that backlog into income.
Issues got here to a head final November, when Kemp and London proposed to take the corporate personal at $1.50 a share – round double the value the inventory was buying and selling at then. After that deal stalled, they submitted the revised provide. A particular committee of the board, assembled to overview Astra’s choices, warned in a submitting in the beginning of the month that the one various to Kemp and London’s proposal was chapter.
