Astra, an American private spaceflight company, suffered a major setback on Thursday after its rocket failed to reach orbit, losing its entire payload of NASA satellites.

The launch had initially been scheduled for Monday but was called off later due to technical issues. While Astra’s 43-foot-tall Launch Vehicle 0008 (LV0008) did not face any issues during lift-off on Thursday, the mission to deliver four NASA satellites into orbit soon went awry as LV0008 lost control shortly after lift-off.

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The launch, which was being livestreamed, showed the upper stage of the LV0008 wildly out of control after the rocket engine was cut-off and the boosters separated. The feed was cut out shortly afterwards.

At the time of writing this, it was unclear what had gone wrong, and Astra released a statement apologising to NASA for losing its CubeSat payload. The company also said that it would provide an update about what went wrong following a “data review.”

“I’m deeply sorry we were not able to deliver our customer’s payloads. I’m with the team looking at data, and we will provide more info as soon as we can,” Astra CEO Chris Kemp added via a Twitter statement.

However, NASA praised Astra’s attempts, with Launch Services Program (LSP) mission manger Hamilton Fernandez telling media, “Missions like these are critical for developing new launch vehicles in this growing commercial sector. The Astra team demonstrated dedication to supporting NASA’s mission.”

Astra’s failed mission to deliver four NASA CubeSats into orbit was its first one from the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida: the California-based start-up had carried out earlier launches and test launches from Kodiak in Alaska.

The failure saw the rocket maker’s stock plummet by 32% initially, but it recovered shortly afterwards to register a 26% fall overall.

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Astra was founded by Chris Kemp and Adam Londoner in 2016 and has a business model that focuses on bulk, low-cost production of rockets with an emphasis on speed of production and efficiency. Astra CEO Kemp had earlier told TechCrunch that its business model meant that its rockets have a higher chance of failure than its competitors, something that evidence also suggests to be true.

Thursday’s failure marked Astra’s second failure in less than a year: the company had previously failed to send a US Space Force payload into orbit in August 2021, which, incidentally, was its first commercial launch. While the company did successfully launch a commercial payload into orbit in its second try in November last year, Thursday’s failure is unlikely to leave investors impressed, as the company’s stock price crash clearly indicates.