Astra just got some help in getting its new rocket off the ground.
The California-based company announced today (Oct. 23) that it has signed a contract with the Defense Innovation Unit (DIU), a U.S. military organization that focuses on adopting and adapting commercial technologies.
The deal, worth up to $44 million, "supports advancing and scaling the production capabilities of Astra's unique tactically responsive launch system, to achieve the prototype objective of launching Rocket 4 to orbit or suborbit and from the U.S., Australia, or other locations," Astra wrote in a statement today.
Rocket 4 is Astra's planned next-gen launch system. It's bigger and more powerful than Rocket 3, which the company retired in 2022 after it experienced a reported five failures out of seven orbital launch attempts.
One of those failures was the final Rocket 3 flight, a June 2022 liftoff that did not deliver its payload — two hurricane-tracking NASA cubesats — to the proper orbit.
Video: Watch Astra's LV0010 rocket launch failure with NASA satellites
Those troubles forced some shakeups at Astra. For example, the company had been publicly traded since 2021, but its two co-founders, Chris Kemp and Adam London, took it private earlier this year to avoid declaring bankruptcy.
Kemp, who also serves as Astra's CEO, alluded to such travails in the company's statement today.
"This award is a testament not only to our team's perseverance this past year, but also a validation of our vision for tactically responsive space," he said. "We're proud to have so many partners who understand and support the importance of point-to-point space delivery for national security and defense applications."
Astra's two-stage Rocket 4 will stand 62 feet (18.9 meters) tall and be capable of hauling 1,320 pounds (600 kilograms) of payload to low Earth orbit, according to the company's spec page. Astra aims to launch the rocket on a roughly weekly cadence once it's up and running.
