SEOUL — Astra Space ended more than three years as a public company July 18 by completing a deal to take the company private at a tiny fraction of what it was once valued at.
The company announced before the markets opened that it had closed a deal announced earlier this year with the company’s co-founders, Chris Kemp and Adam London, to take the company private at 50 cents per share. Shares had closed at 53.9 cents July 17.
The agreement ends Astra’s time as a publicly traded company a little more than three years after it made its debut on the Nasdaq. Astra went public through a merger with Holicity, a special purpose acquisition company (SPAC). Such mergers offered a shortcut for companies to go public compared to the traditional initial public offering process.
The market, though, soured on SPAC mergers in general and Astra in particular. Shares in Astra, when corrected for reverse stock splits, have fallen by more than 99% from its peak in the days after going public in July 2021. The company’s market capitalization went from several billion dollars to about $12 million.
Astra, running low on cash, considered bankruptcy several times in recent months before electing to accept the deal offered by Kemp and London, even after they slashed the per-share price by two thirds. A board committee concluded the only alternative to the deal was a bankruptcy filing that could liquidate the company.
Astra went public with plans to offer high-frequency, low-cost launches of small satellites on its Rocket 3 vehicle. However, that vehicle managed only two successful orbital launches on seven attempts, and the company retired the vehicle after a failure in June 2022 on a NASA mission.
The company planned to develop a larger vehicle, Rocket 4, but that have been delayed by the company’s financial problems. It has generated modest revenues from sales of electric propulsion systems using a design from Apollo Fusion, a company it acquired in 2021.
The announcement of the deal to go private offered few clues about the company’s future plans and how it will finance them. Kemp, appearing at the June 15 premiere in Washington of Wild, Wild Space, a documentary about Astra as well as Planet and Rocket Lab, said he had raised a “ton of money” to take the company private but did not disclose specifics.
“The team is super excited to, as a private company, just put our heads down, get focused on putting Rocket 4 back on the pad,” Kemp said at the screening. “Hopefully that will be a much more successful flight.”
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