Alta Q&A
The Bay Area is home to sports teams, restaurants, museums, and all the other wonders you’d expect to find in a world-class urban area. But a space rocket company? That impossible thought was running through Alta Journal editor and publisher Will Hearst’s mind when he recently visited the former naval station on Alameda Island. Yet there it was: a sprawling 15-acre campus that included a 250,000-square-foot factory, engine-testing facilities, storage tanks for gases and liquids, and overseas shipping containers presumably filled with materials and parts for space travel. Near the testing area, a gleaming silver-and-white rocket stood silhouetted against the San Francisco skyline across the bay.
The spacecraft had been made by a company named Astra (disclosure: Hearst was an early investor in the company). The rocket was diminutive compared with SpaceX’s 229-foot, 1.2-million-pound Falcon 9s or NASA’s 363-foot, 6.1-million-pound Saturn Vs. Astra’s lithe missiles stand about 40 feet tall and, according to one report, weigh approximately 20,000 pounds. Yet the small stature of the company’s rockets does not reflect a smallness of ambition. The opposite is true. A Falcon 9 can carry payloads of up to 50,000 pounds to low Earth orbit; the current Astra model is designed to take payloads of up to 330 pounds to low Earth orbit. In practice, the Falcon 9 is the equivalent of a giant tanker ship moving a large amount of cargo; the Astra rocket aims to be a FedEx truck delivering packages to space—think compact satellites to monitor weather systems, track deforestation, and measure climate change. Further, while Astra’s rockets
