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And, he says, the bruises of his previous failure have taught him important lessons about cost discipline.Ĭantrell says that he sees his company mainly competing with Virgin Orbit and Astra, and that firms like Rocket Lab, Firefly, and Relativity Space, which aim to build larger rockets for bigger payloads, face more pressure from SpaceX, the leading private rocket builder. Now, Cantrell says his new firm has raised enough money to build four demonstration rockets that it will launch by 2023. Cantrell founded his own rocket firm, Vector, but it went bankrupt in 2019 after its key backer, the venture fund Sequoia, pulled out following test and production delays. It was founded by Jim Cantrell, another veteran of the private space world who was an early advisor to Elon Musk. Phantom Space has its own unusual history. Astra’s current vehicle, which will attempt to fly again at the end of the month, is designed to carry just 150 kg. The vehicle may have arrived before its time, but now Thompson says the market is ripe for a vehicle capable of delivering 500 kg of payload to orbit. Thompson says part of his decision was driven by unfinished business-he played a key role developing SpaceX’s first rocket, Falcon 1, a small launcher that was ultimately taken out of service when the company chose to focus on its larger Falcon 9. But…from an operations perspective, there is reality of what physics will allow you to actually go do-not only physics from a mechanical sense, but the physics of how many launches can I really do in a given year?” “There’s a lot of things on the horizon that…are going to be truly amazing. “Astra is in an interesting kind of evolution right now,” Thompson says of his decision to leave the publicly traded firm, which has plans to become a platform for space entrepreneurs and has set a goal of launching weekly in 2023.