Preview: Bob Zimmerman details Astra, a former publicly traded rocket company that faced failures and near bankruptcy. Now private, they abandoned Rocket 3 and plan to launch the much bigger Rocket 4 next summer.
The John Batchelor Show
John Batchelor
4.5 • 2.8K Ratings
🗓️ 24 September 2025
⏱️ 3 minutes
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| 0:00.0 | Building a coffee business? |
| 0:01.5 | Serving the best Americano in town is up to you. |
| 0:04.0 | But winning back time and growing your business, leave that to sum up. |
| 0:07.0 | Take orders and payments anywhere with the new sum up terminal. |
| 0:10.0 | Turn occasional customers into regulars with a free loyalty program. |
| 0:13.0 | And with the sumup point of sale system, you'll always know when you're running low on your best-selling blends. |
| 0:18.0 | Visit sumup.co.uk to learn more. |
| 0:24.0 | This is John Batchel, speaking with colleague Bob Zimmerman. |
| 0:27.6 | All low-earth orbit is not success. |
| 0:30.1 | There are failures, there are setbacks, |
| 0:34.3 | there are shortfalls, and there are publicly traded companies that fail. |
| 0:36.6 | Astro is one of those companies. |
| 0:40.7 | But it is reborn, reawakened, how and why, and what it intends ahead is part of the story. Here Bob explains the backstory to Astra, a booster company |
| 0:49.3 | for low-earth orbit. Much more of this tonight, and other companies like Astra, striving, risk takers. |
| 0:59.5 | Ashter is a former rocket company that's trying to become a new rocket company. |
| 1:04.3 | Astor is an American company that back in 20 and 21 and 22 had some launches of its rocket |
| 1:10.6 | three rocket mixed results. |
| 1:13.1 | They had the technical problems. |
| 1:14.4 | It was a very small rocket too, which meant financially it was questionable whether it could be |
| 1:19.1 | profitable. |
| 1:19.9 | It didn't take up enough payload. |
| 1:21.1 | So they abandoned that rocket in 23 and said they were going to focus on doing defense contracts with their electric |
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