After a significant problem shortly after liftoff, an Astra rocket carrying two small hurricane-tracking satellites for NASA failed to reach orbit Sunday (June 12).
After blasting off from a pad at the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida, the Astra rocket, designated Launch Vehicle 0010 (LV0010), suffered a second-stage failure. Two NASA cubesats were lost, the first of a six-satellite series launched as part of a $30 million effort to track storms.
"We had a nominal first stage flight; however, the upper-stage engine did shut down early and we did not deliver our payloads to orbit," Astra's Amanda Durk Frye, senior manager for first stage and engine production, said during live launch commentary.
The first satellites of NASA's Time-Resolved Observations of Precipitation Structure and Storm Intensity with a Constellation of Smallsats (TROPICS) were carried aboard Astra's LV0010 mission.
"TROPICS will give us very frequent views of tropical cyclones, providing insight into their formation, intensification, and interactions with their environment and providing critical data for storm monitoring and forecasting," Scott Braun, a research meteorologist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, said in a statement before launch.
The TROPICS mission was the first of three planned by Astra this year, each carrying two NASA cubesats approximately the size of a loaf of bread to complete the hurricane-watching constellation. Astra's three-mission TROPICS contract with NASA is worth $7.95 million in total.
NASA wanted to monitor hurricanes and tropical storms every hour by utilizing three pairs of TROPICS satellites, each in a different orbit. It's unclear whether the agency can accomplish this with only four satellites or if the two lost in today's launch accident will be replaced.
Astra's unsuccessful launch on Sunday was the company's second this year. In February, Astra failed to launch four NASA cubesats as part of the ELaNa 41 mission, which was also launched from its Florida launch pad and marked the company's first effort to launch payloads for a client. A problem with the rocket's payload fairing was to blame, and Astra fixed the problem to prevent it from happening again.
A month later, Astra successfully launched its LV0009 rocket into orbit with client payloads from the Pacific Spaceport Complex on Alaska's Kodiak Island, where the company had previously launched four test missions. One of those test flights resulted in the company's first successful orbital launch in November 2021.
