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00:00From home garage to full fledged rocket company Astra is the latest upstart looking to make its name in the space race with big ambitions to ramp up to a rocket launch a day delivering things like satellite supplies and other cutting edge technology to space within the next four years to raise capital and fast. CEO Chris Kemp plans to capitalize on the spark craze and take the company public this year in a merger with city run by billionaire and former telecom mogul Craig McCaw. Astra wants to be the most efficient and fastest way to get to space. And so it would be natural that we would want the most efficient and fastest path to markets as well. Astra would be the latest space back since Virgin Galactic which merged with Moth Tolley happened to his social capital in 2019. Astro though wasn't founded by a billionaire. It started operations in a San Francisco garage with limited funding. The company now designs tests and manufacturers a line of small relatively cheap rockets at its current factory just over the Bay Bridge in Alameda California. A former naval base now home to Astra served as a jet engine research facility and gained popularity as the site of Discovery Channel's Myth Busters. It's a place where it was really just designed for rocket manufacturing and rocket testing and so the city and frankly the whole community here is really embraced Astra. Over the past few years as we've taken this campus we've renovated a bunch of old buildings and we have about 20 acres where we can really build and scale the business without actually having to move. The team occupies a quarter of a million square foot research facility where researchers engineers and scientists can all work under one roof eliminating the need for complex logistics. That was really one of the game changers for the team because it meant that we wouldn't have to travel to another facility or go out in the middle of a desert to go in and test everything. So engineers can really design something make it right here walk across the street tested take learn redesign re manufacture retest their cases where we've done that twice in one day in December Astra successfully launch their three point two rockets from the Pacific Spaceport Complex in Kodiak Alaska but nearly missed its orbit. Target campus said some minor tweaks itself the issue and allow Astro to fly again this summer. Base X is currently the dominant maker of large rockets designed to carry thousands of pounds of payload to orbit. But it comes with cost charging roughly 60 million dollars per launch. By comparison Rocket Lab founded in New Zealand and now headquartered in the U.S. starts at around six million dollars. Astra is now only capable of smaller payloads than both companies but will charge just three million dollars per launch over the next few years. Here at this facility we'll be increasing the production rate of rockets from monthly this year to weekly in 2023 to biweekly in 2024 to a full daily production rate in 2025. And by launching a rocket today we will be able to bring the price point down to about a half a million dollars. The first and last rocket company to go public was Orbital Sciences Corp. back in 1990. It's since merged into a subsector of Northrop Grumman. Astro will be the only publicly traded company focused solely on building and launching rockets when it begins trading later this year. If Kemp can execute his big vision as I look 50 years into the future I see a platform emerging in space and right above that thin blue line. I see competition. I see ecosystems that are that are global. I see standards emerging. And I see a really exciting opportunity for a trillion plus dollar economy as more and more players join the space race. Opportunities will become abundant for investors to enter the arena. But questions still remain around when the industry starts making money. Morgan Stanley believes a global space industry could generate more than a trillion dollars in revenue or more in 2040 up from 350 billion dollars right now. Over half the growth coming from satellite broadband technology. And as rocket launches get cheaper and more companies look to commercialize space. Profitability may soon be taking off. I'm Emily Chang Bloomberg. Alameda California.

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The Space Race Is Back and Heading to the Public Market

The return of the space race has more companies and investors looking for ways to get into the industry. Astra is the first rocket company since 1990 to announce it will go public, and the latest space SPAC since Virgin Galactic in 2019. The California garage startup, which now occupies a quarter-of-a-million square foot facility in Alameda, is valued at $2 Billion. The company provides rocket launches for $3 Million each, significantly less than that of SpaceX and Rocket Lab. Bloomberg's Emily Chang reports. (Source: Bloomberg)

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