Last year, Astra Space began its first rocket test launches at one of the most isolated spaceports in the world. Until now, it had seemed that the rockets failed to launch. But Â鶹´«Ă˝ has learned that the rockets did take off — before malfunctioning and damaging the spaceport. Remediation work has included sending more than 200 tonnes of soil for decontamination.
These days, rocket tests are often the subject of viral internet videos, thanks to firms like Elon Musk’s SpaceX. But not every fledgling space company is so forthcoming. Astra has no website and no social media presence. It does have a profile on networking website LinkedIn — but it calls itself by another name: .
Many space start-ups, like SpaceX and Virgin Galactic, publicise their work long before their first rockets fly to help raise money. Astra took a different route. Founded in 2005, it spent several years working on aerospace projects with funding from NASA and the US Pentagon. Then, in 2016, it began quietly developing a rocket.
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In July, Astra , with an experimental US Air Force communications satellite on board. It has yet to do this, but if it can demonstrate a successful suborbital launch, the start-up could unlock funds from contracts with NASA, the US Army and Air Force.
Astra chose the most private spaceport in the US for its test flights, the Pacific Spaceport Complex – Alaska (PSCA) on Kodiak Island. It is a sleepy place that shares its land with wild berries and herds of bison. A request under the Alaska Public Records Act showed that Astra and PSCA signed a confidentiality agreement in October 2016.
On 20 July 2018, Astra carried out its first test launch. The US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) quickly said it was a “mishap”, a word that has previously been used to describe catastrophic accidents, including the explosion of a SpaceX capsule. But it was unclear exactly what happened. Craig Campbell, then president of Alaska Aerospace, the public corporation that runs the spaceport, at the time: “there was no material damage to our facilities as a result of this launch”.
We now know more. In its first public statement, Astra told Â鶹´«Ă˝ that it had anticipated an engine failure during the rocket’s maiden voyage, that the flight ended earlier than hoped for, and that the rocket came down within the spaceport. Minutes from say that this episode damaged one of PSCA’s hangar-like buildings and an insurance agency became involved.
On 29 November, Astra tested another rocket. In December, an FAA official  that this flight had again encountered a mishap, saying: “Rockets are complex, powerful vehicles that fail every now and again… Even though all five engines failed, all debris landed in the spaceport boundary.”
Astra now says that only two of the rocket’s engines failed and the rest were shut down automatically to ensure the rocket stayed on its planned trajectory. It confirmed that the rocket landed on spaceport land.
Mark Lester, Alaska Aerospace’s president, confirms that the spaceport was damaged twice in 2018, with a total of 232 tonnes of soil removed for treatment in Anchorage. The soil was heated to 315oC to vaporise residual hydrocarbons, then a thermal oxidiser subjected the gases to temperatures of 870oC.
Not the best day
What happened? “Normally, these vehicles land almost empty,” says a commercial rocket expert, who asked not to be identified. “But if your thrust terminated early, you’d fall down and still have propellant left on board. That’s not the best day but it’s a hell of a lot better than having it go off course and having to destroy it, or having it blow up mid-flight.”
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In a statement to Â鶹´«Ă˝, Lester said that the damage to the spaceport was superficial. “While we take every precaution to avoid environmental impacts, when such an incident occurs, we work diligently with authorities to ensure proper remediation,” he wrote.
“At a rocket launching facility, this is not an uncommon impact,” says Sally Brown, a soil scientist at the University of Washington in Seattle. “But this was a very heavy-handed approach to get rid of the contaminants. Scraping up that much soil and shipping it far away can cause more damage, in some cases, than the contamination itself.” She says bioremediation using micro-organisms and plants can be a more sensitive way to handle such incidents.
PSCA did not immediately respond to a request for comment on why it did not use bioremediation.
Article amended on 2 October 2019
We clarified that Â鶹´«Ă˝ learned about the confidentiality agreement between Astra and PSCA using the Alaska Public Records Act
