Astra's rocket lost an engine at launch but kept flying sideways, self-correcting back on course for orbit. Range safety shut it down anyway because someone loaded the wrong trajectory into the console. The vehicle's resilience was remarkable; the failure was human.
Please don't hate me for this. I think it's in— I want you guys to succeed. Oh, actually— And I want all this just to be happy, but the sideways rocket, it may be like the rocket celebrity in some ways.
That flight had actually recovered from that maneuver. It was amazing. We'd flown through a gate, busted through a gate sideways, burned off enough fuel, right, to recover. And the engine didn't fail, by the way. As it lifted off, it actually lifted off more slowly by design. And there was a leak in one of the QDs as it separated from the pad, which caused a little explosion to occur in a little enclosed space that severed a wire to one of the engines. So the engine shut down and then it had 4 engines when it should have had 5. And so basically the thrust-to-weight ratio of the thing caused it to hover successfully. And as it was hovering, it actually— GNC hadn't enabled yet., but it was because it started to tip over and the vertical speed of the nose that would normally be in the Y-axis due to a little software bug also triggered due to the X-axis being off. And so it woke up and then it righted itself and then it flew sideways. Um, but it actually returned to its nominal trajectory and was on track to go to orbit. And, um, it was terminated by the range. Terminate sent. And they thought that it was off course because they had Loaded the trajectory of our previous launch into their console. And so this was not our mistake. It was our mistake probably not to check to make sure that they had the right trajectory on their console. But, um, that very likely would have made orbit.
Yeah, it was like heroic. I mean, it did so many things right, you know, it was, it was relentless.
That rocket embodies that, that rocket embodies the soul of Astra right there. It was gonna, it was gonna go.
