Astra founders taking company private in last chance deal before bankruptcy

After being faced with a decision to be taken private or face bankruptcy, Astra Space‘s board decided to accept the co-founder’s proposal to purchase the remaining shares at a extreme discount to its original SPAC valuation. After years of struggles, its fate is still unknown.

Astra founders purchase company for $0.50 a share

Astra’s co-founders, Chris Kemp and Adam London, along with an unknown list of long time investors, will be purchasing Astra Space for a price of $0.50 a share. This was the second offer the two gave to its board, stating its only other option was bankruptcy and then liquidation.

Last year Kemp and London brought their first offer to the board to purchase the company at $1.50 a share after Astra struggled to pay its bills. While the board was looking at all options, it appears nothing else materialized and now the company’s CEO and CTO reduced their offer by two thirds.

Astra Space went public in 2021 with a mission to mass produce a small, responsive rocket for SmallSat payloads. The company also had a promising space engine department thanks to its acquisition of Apollo Fusion just prior to it’s appearance on the NASDAQ stock exchange.

Astra was a part of the frenzy of space SPACs or Special Purpose Acquisition Company, which brought many other launchers like Virgin Galactic and Rocket Lab. While the latter two have found their holdings as public companies, Astra quickly took a turn for a worse.

After failed attempts to get its Rocket 3 vehicle to an operational status and reported turmoil in its space engine devision, the company’s stock plummeted to below the $1 requirement in late 2022. Since then the company has been on a fight to increase its stock price, having to rely on an reverse stock split to only see it drop below $1 once again.

Astra’s stock traded up to about $1.50 on word of the potential purchase, however fell to close to $0.50 after the news of the new deal.

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What’s next for Astra?

The fate of Astra is now very much in the unknown. When faced with a similar fate of Virgin Orbit or going private, the obvious decision was to go private and live to fight another day. How many days will that be is unknown.

Rocket 4, Astra’s new attempt to build a rapid and reliable SmallSat launcher is still very far from ever seeing a launch pad and it’s unknown if the space engine division will ever be profitable. With the vale of being a private company returning to Astra, our knowledge of cash on hand and debt will not allow us any insight into what is happening at the company.

Kemp is determined to carve out its spot in the SmallSat launch market even though its competitors have been expanding outward. Rocket Lab is far into its development of Neutron and Relativity scrapped Terran 1 entirely for developing Terran R.

With SpaceX having the ability of undercutting the dedicated launchers with its rideshare transporter missions, the question is: Is Astra too late and to far in debt to even have a chance of survival?