Chris Kemp unplugged—Astra’s CEO dishes on the space company’s struggles

Enlarge / Chris Kemp, founder and CEO of Astra. (credit: David Paul Morris/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

Chris Kemp is a fighter. That's the price of admission if you want to compete in the brutal small launch industry. He is the co-founder, chairman and CEO of Astra, founded in 2016 with a goal of essentially commoditizing small satellite launch services, or at least getting a lot closer to that than anyone else.

But there are a lot pressure points for Astra in 2023. The company abandoned its first orbital rocket design, called Rocket 3, last year after a string of failures. With higher interest rates, raising money in 2023 isn't as easy as it was a few years ago. And calling Astra's competition stiff is definitely an understatement.

Kemp argues that Astra finds itself in a different position than, say, Virgin Orbit, a small satellite launch company that went bankrupt earlier this year. Astra has diversified, and can lean on a separate source of revenue in a promising business building electric thrusters for small satellites. This business, which Astra calls spacecraft engines, was made possible by the acquisition of a company called Apollo Fusion in 2021.