Liftoff will occur over a three-hour window beginning at 2:10 p.m. EST (1910 GMT).
12 p.m. ET UPDATE: NEW LAUNCH TIME Astra is now aiming for a 2:10 p.m. EST (1910 GMT) launch from Florida today, the company’s initial East Coast flight.
As mentioned above, the launch will commence 60 minutes before liftoff.
On Saturday (February 5), Astra will launch its inaugural mission from the Lower 48, and you can watch the action live.
The California-based business intends to launch the ELaNa 41 mission from Florida’s Cape Canaveral Space Force Station on Saturday at 2:10 p.m. EST (1910 GMT) within a three-hour window that closes at 4 p.m. EST (2100 GMT).
Astra, formed in 2016, hopes to capture a big piece of the small-satellite launch industry with its range of mass-produced, cost-effective, and constantly improving rockets.
So far, the business has executed four orbital launches, all of which were test flights that took off from Alaska’s Pacific Spaceport Complex.
On Two of the Four Trips, Astra Made it into Space
The firm’s 43-foot-tall (13-meter) Launch Vehicle 0007 (LV0007) made it to orbit on the most recent flight, a testing mission for the US military that blasted off this past November, a significant milestone for the Bay Area business.
During a December 2020 test flight, an Astra rocket reached space but ran out of fuel before reaching orbital velocity.
If all goes as planned, Saturday’s launch will build on that previous success, setting three new milestones: ELaNa 41 will be Astra’s first orbital mission from the Lower 48 states, as well as its first flight with functioning satellites.
These are four miniature CubeSats launched by NASA’s Educational Launch of Nanosatellites (ELaNa) program.
From the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida, an Astra rocket is set to launch the ELaNa 41 mission.
The launch date is set for February 5, 2022.
From the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida, an Astra rocket is set to launch the ELaNa 41 mission. The launch date is set for February 5, 2022. (Photo by John Kraus on courtesy of Astra)http://https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XEYS7d1CHso
The Bama-1 cubesat, constructed by a team at the University of Alabama, will put to the test a “drag sail” intended to let spacecraft deorbit in a controlled manner at the end of their lifetimes.
The Ionospheric Neutron Content Analyzer, or INCA, developed by New Mexico State University, will study the latitude and time dependencies of the neutron spectrum in low Earth orbit for the first time to improve current space weather models and mitigate threats to space and airborne assets, NASA officials wrote in an ELaNa 41 update on Tuesday (February 1).
QubeSat, a technological demonstration from the University of California, Berkeley, is aimed to explore how the space environment impacts quantum gyroscopes.
And NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston contributed the R5-S1 cubesat, which will exhibit technology that might enhance in-space satellite inspection and pave the way for new techniques to create tiny spacecraft rapidly and inexpensively, according to NASA officials.
According to previous reports, the University of California, Berkeley’s two-spacecraft CubeSat Radio Interferometry Experiment (CURIE) will also sail on ELaNa 41.
However, according to NASA’s Tuesday report, this does not seem to be the case.
