The launch window for the NASA ELaNa 41 mission—which will see one of the company’s rockets lift off from Florida’s Cape Canaveral Space Force Station—runs from 1 p.m. to 4 p.m. EST on February 7.
A previous attempt of the launch had to be called off on Saturday due to radar system issues, the company announced.
If you would like to watch the launch, NASA will be providing a live broadcast of the event that can be viewed here. Coverage will begin around an hour before liftoff.
Astra was founded in 2016. According to its website, it delivered its first commercial payload into Earth orbit in 2021, making it the private company that has reached this milestone in the shortest amount of time—five years after being set up.
As a comparison SpaceX needed six years and four months to successfully reach orbit with its Falcon 9 rocket, while other private space companies took seven years, or even longer.
Astra says it offers the lowest cost-per-launch “dedicated orbital launch service of any operational launch provider in the world.”
The company has managed to move quickly by focusing on an iterative design approach, where less time is spent designing its cost-effective rockets and more time is used for testing in real-world conditions, Ars Technica’s Eric Berger reported.
Previously, the company has conduced four orbital launches, all of which were test missions that lifted off from the Pacific Spaceport Complex in Alaska. Two of these missions reached space, including the most recent in which the company’s 43-foot-tall Launch Vehicle 0007 (LV0007) successfully made it into Earth orbit.
If all goes well, Monday’s mission will be the first Astra launch from the Lower 48 states, and the company’s first to carry operational satellites, Space.com reported.
The ELaNa 41 mission, which is being operated on behalf of NASA, will launch four CubeSats—a type of small satellite used for space research—into orbit.
The four CubeSats have been developed by the University of Alabama, New Mexico State University, the University of California, Berkeley, and NASA’s Johnson Space Center respectively.
This will be the 41st launch as part of the ELaNa (Educational Launch of Nanosatellites) program and NASA’s first mission under the agency’s Venture Class Launch Services (VCLS) Demonstration 2 contract.
“As the first VCLS mission to lift off from Florida’s Space Coast, this launch is ushering in new opportunities for CubeSat developers and small class launch vehicle providers,” Hamilton Fernandez, a mission manager supporting the Launch Services Program, said in a statement.
“Through our commercial partners, NASA is providing dedicated rides to space for CubeSats, which helps meet the agency’s objectives of transporting smaller payloads and science missions into orbit.”
To date, NASA has launched more than 100 CubeSat missions, with more than 30 scheduled over the course of the next 12 months.