On Thursday, Astra announced its deal to be taken private by its founders and long time investors, closed, effectively removing it as a publicly traded company. Its new parent company, Apogee Parent LLC, will purchase all of its outstanding stock and all stock it doesn’t own.
Over the last year, and a bit longer that, we’ve been following the financial downfall of Astra Space, a hopeful smallsat launcher that, pun 100% intended, has barely gotten off the ground. After defaulting on a loan, company founders Chris Kemp and Dr. Adam London will take it private and merge it into a new company called Apogee Parent.
Astra announced the terms of the deal in early June, Apogee would purchase all outstanding Class A shares for $0.0001 and any share not owned by them for $0.50 per share. While Kemp and London already had majority voting power, through their Class B shares, they will now effectively have majority ownership of the company.
The company’s future is now directly up to Kemp and London’s ability to fund the venture. The two attempted to fund Astra after several private funding rounds with a SPAC merger. This merged the private company with a publicly traded “special purpose acquisition company” to then too become publicly traded.
Last time we checked in on Astra the company was attempting to scale its Astra Spacecraft engine program, which it acquired from another company after the SPAC deal, it has customers but has run into production issues. The company was also working on its Launch System 2, a rocket that will take up to 600 kg of payload to orbit and supposedly launch “weekly.”
Its first series of rockets ran into sever reliability issues and only made it to orbit with a customer’s payload a handful of times.
With its now private status returned to the company, Astra won’t be obligated to make regular reports to the SEC and hold public share holding meetings. This means our ability to know what is going on will solely rely on the company’s communication team and whether or not they wish to share something.
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