In the face of multiple failures, the company is changing its strategy.
I bought a bunch of November calls on ASTR at fourteen bucks each as lottery tickets after the most recent failure, when the stock price fell to a buck and a half, on the hope that the next launch this summer would be successful. Now they may expire worthless, and I’ll lose about three hundred bucks. But November is still three months away, and the stock could still rally on news.
Unlike a dead cat, a rocket doesn’t bounce if dropped from a high enough altitude. Their plan sounds like a recipe for bankruptcy.
Yeah, trying to decide whether to dump the calls now and cut my losses, or hang on until expiry as lottery tickets.
Better a callamity than a catastraphe.
Except they have quite a bit of money and just got an additional hundred megabucks. If Astra can get Rocket 4 working within a year or so, they might just pull this off.
It looks like they will be in a race to see whether they can develop a viable launch vehicle before they run out of money. If I was a launch customer, 2:5 odds probably wouldn’t be attractive for any price. They don’t seem to be climbing the learning curve at an acceptable rate. A bigger rocket presumably gives them a bigger budget for design assurance. Getting an entirely new rocket working in a year is a really tall order.