{"id":12616,"date":"2020-03-03T21:34:06","date_gmt":"2020-03-03T13:34:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wp-productionenv-bjg9h2g2bgg5b8aa.southeastasia-01.azurewebsites.net\/news\/after-last-minute-abort-darpa-launch-challenge-ends-without-a-winner\/"},"modified":"2020-03-03T21:34:06","modified_gmt":"2020-03-03T13:34:06","slug":"after-last-minute-abort-darpa-launch-challenge-ends-without-a-winner","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/news\/after-last-minute-abort-darpa-launch-challenge-ends-without-a-winner\/","title":{"rendered":"After last-minute abort, DARPA Launch Challenge ends without a winner"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Astra\u2019s small satellite launcher stands vertical at Pacific Spaceport Complex on Kodiak Island, Alaska. Credit: John Kraus\/Astra<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Astra engineers scrubbed a launch attempt Monday at Kodiak Island, Alaska, to assess troubling data from a guidance, navigation and control sensor on the company\u2019s new small satellite launcher, ending a bid to win up to $12 million in prize money from a U.S. military research agency.<\/p>\n

Monday\u2019s countdown was aborted on the final day of a 15-day window set by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, which offered Astra a $2 million prize if it successfully placed three small CubeSats into orbit.<\/p>\n

DARPA announced the Launch Challenge in 2018, offering an incentive to commercial launch companies to demonstrate the ability of their orbital-class rockets to the off from any launch site, and on short notice.<\/p>\n

If Astra succeeded in reaching orbit on the first launch of the challenge, DARPA would have offered $10 million more to Astra if it could do it again from a different launch pad before the end of March. Part of the challenge was the late notice DARPA gave Astra about the launch site, payloads and target orbit.<\/p>\n

For the first launch of the challenge, DARPA gave Astra details about the payloads less than 30 days before the opening of the launch window. And Astra was not allowed to deliver its rocket or portable ground support equipment to the launch site until a few days before liftoff, forcing the company to demonstrate its ability to quickly set up for a flight.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt was a hard challenge,\u201d said Todd Master, program manager for DARPA\u2019s Launch Challenge. \u201cWe set it to be achievable but certainly DARPA holds a bar for really hard tasks that we ask our competitors to do. They got almost there, almost made it to the finish line, didn\u2019t quite make it.<\/p>\n

\u201cBut we learn a lot from these challenges, and we think that even being able to get to the point we got to will demonstrate to folks that this is something that is something that is right on the cusp of possible, and we anticipate that in the very near future we\u2019ll be able to see those approaches succeed,\u201d Master said.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe were really hoping to hand over a big check today, but we are very hopeful that the sort of things we put in place and the incentives we provided will continue to spur some innovation and get us to where we want to be,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

Astra was attempting to launch its first orbital-class rocket to meet the goals of the DARPA Launch Challenge. The two-stage vehicle, which stands 38 feet (11.6 meters) tall, was set to lift off from Pacific Spaceport Complex on Kodiak Island, Alaska, with three CubeSats and an on-board tracking beacon.<\/p>\n

Astra calls its first satellite launcher Rocket 3, or Rocket 3.0. The specific vehicle slated for Astra\u2019s first orbital launch is named \u201c1 of 3.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThis was our first test launch of Rocket 3, and we called it 1 of 3 because we believed that it would probably take three launches before we could successfully deliver a satellite into Earth orbit, so we knew that this was a long shot going into it, but understood how strategically important responsive launch was to the government,\u201d said Chris Kemp, Astra\u2019s co-founder and CEO.<\/p>\n

Headquartered in Alameda, California, Astra was established in 2016 and operated in stealth mode until early February, when Bloomberg published an exclusive story about the company\u2019s progress and plans.<\/p>\n

Monday\u2019s launch attempt came after several delays in late February caused by minor technical issues and bad weather. After poor weather thwarted attempts to launch Astra\u2019s Rocket 3 over the weekend, DARPA gave Astra an extra day Monday to ensure the company had a shot to launch the mission on a day with favorable conditions.<\/p>\n

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Mike Curie, host of DARPA\u2019s Launch Challenge webcasts, and DARPA program manager Todd Master. Credit: DARPA<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Monday\u2019s countdown appeared to go well until the final minute before launch.<\/p>\n

\u201cAs we neared the end of the count, 53 seconds before launch, we saw some data from a sensor that really concerned us, and we huddled up as a team and made the call that as wonderful as it would have been to take that check off your hands (speaking to DARPA), we wanted to try to get to orbit in these (first) three launches, and if that data were real it could have caused problem in flight,\u201d Kemp said.<\/p>\n

\u201cOur top priority is safety, and anything that we knew that could impact the trajectory of the flight was just totally an unacceptable risk,\u201d he said. \u201cWe wanted to make sure we had a full (investigation of the) root cause of it.\u201d<\/p>\n

The suspect data came from a sensor in the rocket\u2019s guidance, navigation and control system, according to Astra officials. Kemp said the technical issue was \u201cfrustrating\u201d but serious enough to warrant examination.<\/p>\n

\u201cOur team now is looking at the sensor and looking at what might have caused the data we saw, so that we can get back out there and fly again,\u201d Kemp said.<\/p>\n

Although the Launch Challenge ended without a winner, Master said the program achieved many of its objectives.<\/p>\n

Three companies qualified for the competition last year. But Vector Launch, one of the launch firms, ceased operations and filed for bankruptcy last year before ever conducting an orbital launch attempt. The other company, Virgin Orbit, withdrew from the DARPA Launch Challenge to focus on commercial missions, according to DARPA.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe think we\u2019ve been able to enact from a regulatory standpoint and getting people\u2019s heads around how do you do this quickly, when most folks really seek to this very long in advance, will help us as we look toward future use of responsive space in the military,\u201d he said. \u201cWe also think that our push or incentive from the government side for launch vehicle providers to develop systems that are inherently sort of flexible and responsive \u2026 has helped us a lot to get closer to that, and Astra has certainly designed a system that appears to be very capable of doing that.\u201d<\/p>\n

Astra plans to try again within weeks, DARPA eyes follow-up to Launch Challenge<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

Astra aims to try again to send its first satellite launcher into the sky within weeks, once engineers determine the cause of the technical issue that thwarted Monday\u2019s countdown.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe are focused on \u2018root-causing\u2019 the anomaly we saw with the sensor,\u201d Kemp said. \u201cWhether it\u2019s an issue with the actual sensor, whether it\u2019s something on the vehicle that we need to better understand, as soon as we address the issue definitively and can get a license and put the regulatory stuff in place, we\u2019ll launch again.<\/p>\n

\u201cThat probably is not a day or two,\u201d he said. \u201cIt\u2019s more like a week or two, but it\u2019s certainly not a month or two.\u201d<\/p>\n

The payloads provided by DARPA for the Launch Challenge will be removed from the rocket and returned to their owners, according to Master.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe put out a call for payload providers and folks who were \u2026 looking either for space access on what was, more or less, a free basis, and\/or or had a particular interest in responsive space,\u201d Master said.<\/p>\n

The payloads selected for DARPA\u2019s Launch Challenge included a Prometheus CubeSat developed by Los Alamos National Laboratory for the Department of Defense, one in a series of Prometheus CubeSats aimed \u201creducing tasking and data dissemination timelines to provide military operators with tactically relevant information.\u201d<\/p>\n

Two identical CubeSats from the University of South Florida were also slated for launch on a mission named ARCE-1.<\/p>\n

The twin CubeSats \u201cwill fly together in the same orbit and perform inter-satellite networked communications and a high degree of system autonomy,\u201d according to DARPA.<\/p>\n

\u201cOur intention is to de-integrate the payloads from the launch vehicle and get those payloads back to the providers,\u201d Master said. \u201cWe\u2019re taking somewhat of a risk with a rocket that they hadn\u2019t flown on before.\u201d<\/p>\n

When DARPA solicited proposals for CubeSats to fly on the Launch Challenge missions, the satellite owners did not know which rockets their payloads would ride into space.<\/p>\n

\u201cSo those folks really kind of stuck their necks out in a big way, and we want to afford them the possibility to get their payload back to take another chance to get to orbit on someone else,\u201d Master said. \u201cIf they chose to do something with Astra directly, that\u2019s certainly something that they could choose to do. But otherwise, we\u2019re just basically going to de-integrate those payloads and return them to their respective providers.\u201d<\/p>\n

Kemp said Astra has a \u201cnumber of customers\u201d interested in securing capacity on the next launch attempt.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere\u2019s a big line of folks waiting,\u201d he said Monday evening in a conference call with reporters.<\/p>\n