CEO of Troubled Rocket Startup Throws Shade at the Competition

It’s no secret that there are plenty of big egos in the spaceflight industry. While the key players typically refrain from roasting their rivals in public, that wasn’t the case at this year’s Berkeley Space Symposium. At least, not for Astra CEO Chris Kemp.

During a talk he gave at the event on September 5, Kemp threw some serious shade at SpaceX, Blue Origin, Firefly, and Rocket Lab, Ars Technica reports. While some of his remarks spoke to legitimate shortcomings amongst his competitors, they came off harsh, especially given Astra’s history of financial troubles and its rocky launch record.

Kemp co-founded Astra in 2016 alongside CTO Adam London. Five of the company’s seven operational rocket launches between September 2020 and June 2022 resulted in failure. Astra retired its “Rocket 3” in August 2022, and by March 2024, the company’s valuation had fallen from $2.6 billion to about $11.25 million, Reuters reported. Kemp and London took the company private at 50 cents per share to avoid bankruptcy.

Now, Astra is focused on developing Rocket 4, targeting summer 2026 for its inaugural launch. It’s possible that this new chapter could help Astra rejuvenate its reputation and capital, but Kemp’s recent remarks may create more problems for the struggling company. Here’s what he had to say about four of his biggest competitors.

Gizmodo reached out to each of them for comment but did not receive a response by the time of publication. You can watch Kemp’s full talk here.

SpaceX

In his closing remarks, Kemp attempted to appeal to prospective interns in the audience by arguing that Astra provides a better work environment than SpaceX’s Starbase in south Texas.

“It’s more fun than SpaceX, because we’re not on the border of Mexico where they’ll chop your head off if you accidentally take a left turn,” he said. “And you don’t have to live in a trailer. And we don’t make you work six and a half days a week, 12 hours a day. It’s appreciated if you do, but not required.”

Yikes. Up until this moment, Kemp generally spoke respectfully about SpaceX, drawing fair comparisons between Elon Musk’s approach and his own. To end on this sour note felt like an unnecessary jab. Needless to say, no SpaceX interns have ever been beheaded.

Blue Origin

At the start of his talk, Kemp described two approaches to innovation in today’s space industry: the fail-fast iterative design method and the more traditional long-term development of a single rocket.

“I call it the Blue Origin and NASA approach, where you spend tens of billions of dollars, and in 20 or 30 years you build a rocket and it works the first time,” he said. “This is super important if what you’re trying to optimize is [that] it works the first time. And for a program run by a nation-state or a billionaire that doesn’t want to have a rocket blow up, this is prudent. But it does take decades and cost tens of billions of dollars for you to do the analysis and testing.”

Astra, like SpaceX, uses iterative design. While Kemp is correct in saying that Jeff Bezos, the founder of Blue Origin, has taken the more traditional approach, neither New Shepherd nor New Glenn costs “tens of billions” of dollars. What’s more, Astra’s Rocket 3 launch record pales in comparison to New Shepherd’s.

Firefly Aerospace

In 2021, Astra signed a deal with rival Firefly to purchase its Reaver engines. Neither company ever acknowledged the agreement publicly, but during Kemp’s talk, he was eager to discuss it.

“We have a new rocket engine. There is a company called Firefly. They went public,” he said with a mocking giggle. “We bought the engine from them, and it was garbage. We literally could not get the same engine twice from them. And none of them matched the CAD. And if you’re in engineering, you know that just doesn’t work. So we basically had to start from scratch with this engine.”

In response to Kemp’s comments, a Firefly spokesperson told Ars, “Reaver engines built by Firefly have powered our Alpha launch vehicle to orbit multiple times and have performed flawlessly. In addition, our patented tap-off engine technology used across our family of engines has been hot-fired more than a thousand times and counting. Firefly has full confidence in our engineering and the design of our flight-proven Alpha systems.”

Firefly did not immediately respond to Gizmodo’s request for comment.

Rocket Lab

In the late 2010s, while Astra was developing Rocket 3, Rocket Lab was racing to build Electron, a rival small-lift rocket. This set the stage for fierce competition that still persists today, but comparatively, Kemp’s remarks toward Rocket Lab were mild at the Berkeley event.

Kemp admitted that both Rocket 3 and Electron were not large enough to serve the booming market for satellites. “That little rocket is too small,” he said of Rocket 3. “And so is Electron.”

This may be true, but Electron’s launch record far surpasses that of Rocket 3, and it continues to generate significant revenue for Rocket Lab.

Between his snide remarks, Kemp’s talk offered valuable insight into Astra’s past, present, and future. Whether his bark will stand up to his bite remains to be seen with the upcoming debut of Rocket 4.