The launch of the rocket took place from the Pacific Spaceport site on Kodiak Island in Alaska.
The carrier rocket of the American company Astra with the test cargo of the U.S. Space Forces successfully entered the Earth’s orbit. This was announced on Friday by the company on its Twitter page.
The launch of the rocket from the Pacific Spaceport site (Pacific Cosmodrome) on Kodiak Island (Alaska) took place at 21:16 local time.
Earlier, the company postponed the launch of its launch vehicle scheduled for Thursday by a day.
The previous similar launch, which took place at the end of August, ended in failure: a few minutes after the launch, the rocket’s engines shut down, it lost stability, and did not deliver the cargo of space forces into orbit.
The Astra launch vehicle, about 12 m long, is designed to launch small satellites into low Earth orbit. The company that created the rocket from San Francisco (California) expects that its cheapness and small size, allowing the carrier to be delivered to the launch site in conventional containers, will provide competitive advantages in the space services market.
In 2020, Astra twice made test launches of its rocket, but they ended in failure.
