Astra Targets Golden Dome With Small Rockets, Says CEO Chris Kemp

COLORADO SPRINGS, CO—Skeet shooting only works with a target. The same is true of interceptor tests.

Astra is pitching its small rockets to the Pentagon as a potential target for Golden Dome interceptor tests, CEO Chris Kemp told Payload.

“We’re going to do target practice. We’re going to make the clay-pigeon rocket,” Kemp said. “That’s great, because that will drive scale for us…and allow us to bring our cost down for commercial customers, and other government customers.”

Why it works: Kemp said Astra’s vehicle is well-suited for Golden Dome tests because the rocket is single-use and small, which is also representative of the threats the missile-defense system would actually face.

“You don’t want to shoot down a reusable rocket,” he said. “You want to shoot down an inexpensive, expendable rocket. Astra is the only—as far as I can tell—threat representative target.”

Special delivery: Astra is also working on a test mission to deliver drones anywhere in the world in less than 24 hours, from mobile launch pads that offer additional resilience compared to fixed infrastructure.

“The big-picture vision of this is millions of drones, and thousands of rockets, in hundreds of locations in dozens of countries,” Kemp said. “The Pentagon now has a button to press, and we’re now able from another country, from Walmart parking lots, from ports everywhere…we can send drones anywhere on Earth in an hour from launch.”

Words of caution: Kemp also reflected on his experience taking Astra public via SPAC in 2021, then taking it private in 2024—and offered some advice to the current wave of companies looking to go public.

“SpaceX has a trillion-dollar IPO. Everybody’s really excited about space,” he said. “Everybody was really excited about space in 2021, when we went public….Being a manufacturing company, and being public, is expensive. It’s something these companies are going to learn quickly.”

What’s next: Astra is gearing up for its inaugural launch of Rocket 4.0, set for this fall. Kemp said the company is taking a different approach than it did building its earlier rocket versions, by including automated production and intensive test campaigns.

“We had no money right? I mean, that rocket was built on a shoestring budget,” Kemp said of Rocket 3.0. “For Rocket 4.0, we raised a half-a-billion dollars. We built a quarter-of-a-billion-dollar factory. It’s all state-of-the-art, brand-new equipment designed for this rocket. So that’s a totally different thing.”