In a time when every rocket launch is livestreamed on Youtube, millions of people get a front row seat to a space company’s successes and failures. Astra, a rocket startup-turned-public company, has had a few of both. But according to CEO Chris Kemp, perfection is not the point.

“The expectation I think that a lot of people have is every launch has to be perfect,” he told TechCrunch. “I think what Astra has to do, really, is we have to have so many launches nobody thinks about it anymore.”

How many launches? Eventually, Astra wants to achieve a daily launch cadence; in the interim, the company is aiming for weekly launches as early as next year. It’s a critical part of how the company’s aims to win amongst an increasingly crowded field of small launch developers – not by being flawless, but by being so low-cost and high-volume that the relative risk of a few catastrophic failures ceases to matter.

To get there, Astra is moving at breakneck speed. Notably, it became the fastest company in history to reach orbit in November, six years after the company was founded.

Kemp summarized the approach on Thursday, at Astra’s “Spacetech Day”: “The approach that we took was not to design and create PowerPoints and do all the analysis and then five or 10 years later, finally maybe build a rocket,” he said. “It was within 18 months of founding the company in that garage, getting a launch license, and launching our first rocket and then doing it again a few months later, and again and again and again.”

“This was not the popular way to approach this problem,” he added.

Image Credits: Astra (opens in a new window)

Small, cheap and light

Can the market support a daily launch cadence? Astra is betting that it can. The way Astra sees it, the launch industry is like a curve: on one end are companies like SpaceX, serving crewed missions, delivering cargo into space and even, eventually, even attempting to colonize other planets. On the other end of the curve is Astra: small, cheap, and light.