Astra Rocket Factory Tour

my name is chris kemp i'm the co-founder and ceo of astra i started about five years ago working with dr adam london my co-founder trying to figure out how we could take some of these satellites that were being built here in silicon valley by a bunch of new companies into low-earth orbit and as we looked at the data we had on what it cost to build a small rocket stage and thought about what happens if you scale that what happens if you make a lot more engines it was pretty clear that there's a big opportunity to capture economies of scale and so we're trying to solve the problem of our customers which is they have a lot of satellites that need to as quickly as possible get to the right place in space and we want to solve that problem as directly and simply as inexpensively as possible so from a very high level we're inside of a building that's about 200 000 square feet right now we're occupying about a third of the space um against one wall we have our machine shop over here and that's all the fixed infrastructure both hit straight to the ground uh and then everything else in the factory is on wheels it's on wheels so we can rearrange the factory essentially in a weekend if we need to and we can keep expanding into the rest of the space that we have available to us our thesis is that we can actually make a super low cost rocket by taking advantage of the last 10 20 years with automotive technology bringing them to the rocket industry very unique to our approach welcome to the astro machine shop the machine shop is where the rubber meets the road all day long we're cutting forming and grinding metal and turning it into the parts that our engineers need at our shop we're making almost every part on the rocket we use three axis vertical mills five axis mills many two axis lathes we have a rather large and beautiful vertical turning lane and assortment of manual machines grinders water jet and a cnc brake press amongst some other things we're lucky to have a clean and bright temperature controlled shop with a very effective lineup of modern machine tools staffed by some of the brightest machinists around one of the first things that you'll notice is that we're not using exotic materials here everything is commonly available and easily sourced in order to ensure quick lead times in the shop this is a result of collaborative efforts that come about when designers and builders are working under the same roof so as you walk through the rocket factory what you'll find is that we've invested in the machines and the infrastructure to produce rockets at scale and we tried to avoid making investments in the kinds of tools and technologies that will drive costs and drive labor and make it hard for us to scale so you won't find 3d printers and you won't find composites and composite shops here what you'll find is the kinds of tools and technologies that we can use to scale production very easily in the future fundamentally asterisk philosophy that simple scales we are designing the simplest rocket we possibly can and that scales both in the dimensions of being able to produce many of these and in being able to iterate them quickly that philosophy of designing a simple rocket drove the architecture decisions and the engineering decisions all along the way and that's been a really neat process to watch happen with this rocket so this is a dedicated small satellite launch vehicle uh the anatomy of it is it's a two-stage rocket so if we start on the back end of the rocket we have five boost stage engines we call those the delphin engine that's a 6500 pound thrust engine then once we're out of the atmosphere the fairing opens up uh the second stage is released and fires and then takes the payload the rest of the way to orbit and on the top of that assembly sits the payload deployer and payload for the customer my name is andrew pratt my role here is head of test and launch so we're currently located in orion test facility it's a very unique facility for example we've got two foot reinforced concrete walls explosion proof circuitry we have four kilovolt power coming directly into the building that we can transform down so we're not limited on any kind of power requirements that we have for the facility it has its own water deluge system that's built in historic and uh we can tap into that as needed to suppress sound suppress the heat that comes from the engines most companies have to go out and they have to go all the way into the middle of the desert they have to drive fly to texas they have to go to these remote sites whereas two to three hundred feet across the street is our factory skyhawk where we design the rocket we build the rocket and do all this in-house work and then we just walk it across the street put it on the stand and run a test what excites me the most about space is all of the positive impacts that it has on human life on earth from the gps in our phones to energy improvements materials technology medicine even agriculture the world is going to be a very different place when it's as easy to put a satellite into orbit as it is to send a package across the country we're going to see new applications that no one has ever imagined that will help improve life here on earth and we're excited to be building a platform that will enable these entrepreneurs to build companies to build these new killer apps that'll change our lives in ways that we never imagined possible you

Channel: Hashim

Views: 55,377

Keywords:

Id: BKWG4RMgcgY

Length: 5min 26sec (326 seconds)

Published: Sun Apr 18 2021