The company is no longer flying the flawed Rocket 3 line that made its last flight in June 2022, when it failed to deliver two NASA cubesats to orbit after a second-stage failure.
Watch Astra's LV0010 rocket launch failure with NASA satellites
The upper stage burned through its fuel too quickly because of a flaw in the combustion chamber wall that created a rupture or"burn-through," investigators determined. The principle flaw was in the rocket's regenerative cooling system, which keeps the chamber wall cool during the extreme heating experienced during rocket launches.
"In a regeneratively-cooled rocket engine, cooling is achieved by routing the fuel through many cooling channels, embedded within the combustion chamber wall. This allows heat from the wall to be absorbed into the flowing fuel, keeping the wall at a low enough temperature to prevent failure."In the case of the TROPICS-1 launch failure, the primary cause of this diminished engine chamber cooling was a partial blockage of the fuel injector.
Finding the source of the fuel injector blockage also took some time, but the ultimate cause was issues with gaseous fuel. Ground testing showed that the fuel never got to boiling or even close to boiling in the cooling channels, but again, differences showed up during the flawed flight of Rocket 3.
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