The first SPAC bust of 2024 in the space industry is Astra

After squandering funds for months and failing to find further funding, Astra Space, the launch business that went public in 2021 with a $2.1 billion valuation, is going private once more.

The business revealed on Thursday that its board has approved a bid to buy the remaining Astra shares at $0.50 per share from its CEO, Chris Kemp, and CTO, Adam London. Astra will stop trading on the Nasdaq after the purchase closes, which is anticipated to happen in the second quarter of 2024.

The company, which received around $500 million from investors on the promise of an extremely affordable launch vehicle that could be scaled to do hundreds of missions annually, has seen a sharp decline in success. Astra boasted of a "mass produced portable launch system" that could launch from any location on the planet in a February 2021 investor presentation. Investors were informed by the corporation that a biweekly rollout was planned for 2024.

However, the business never succeeded in doing so (despite once making it to orbit). Over the years, they experienced a number of false starts for commercial launches, in addition to an unsettling sideways launch anomaly in 2021. Kemp's implication that failure rates were less significant for frequent launches would have alarmed some prospective clients as well.

In addition to acquiring Apollo Fusion, a spacecraft electric propulsion developer, around the time of Astra's SPAC merger, the company intended to incorporate such systems into an Astra satellite constellation. But the constellation never materialized, and although the business was successful in selling a large number of Apollo Fusion propulsion systems, it has had difficulty converting that backlog into income.