Astra to Sell Electric Thrusters to Airbus Oneweb Satellites
Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:
Astra said that Airbus OneWeb Satellites will acquire an unspecified number of its Astra Spacecraft Engines, an electric propulsion system, for Arrow satellites. Astra did not disclose or answer questions about the number of thrusters ordered or the value or duration of the deal.
The Astra Spacecraft Engine is an electric thruster that uses xenon or krypton as propellants. Astra offers two versions of the thruster, one that requires 400 watts of power and produces up to 300 kilonewton-seconds of total impulse, and another that uses 1,450 watts of power and produces up to 1.5 meganewton-seconds of total impulse.
[...] Chris Kemp, chief executive of Astra, said in the earnings call that customers of the Astra Spacecraft Engine are attracted by features such as a higher specific impulse, a measure of engine efficiency, as well as experience of having operated hundreds of times" in space to date. It's very cost competitive, and as we work with our customers, we're trying to strike that balance of offering a product that is high performance and lower cost," he said.
In that same earnings call, Astra announced it was discontinuing its existing launch vehicle, the Rocket 3.3, after its most recent launch failure in June. The company is now focusing on a larger vehicle, Rocket 4, but test flights of that vehicle won't begin until some time in 2023, and executives cautioned the new vehicle might not be ready for commercial, revenue-generating launches before the end of 2023.
In the near term, Astra expects its revenue to be dominated by sales of its Astra Spacecraft Engine. If you look at 2023, what we're looking at in terms of revenue forecasts will largely be spacecraft engines," Kemp said.
Read more of this story at SoylentNews.