Their stock price has been very, very low for a while now. Meaning it would be incredibly hard for them to raise money. Their rocket development program was nowhere close to being finished or fully funded. And even if they could develop the rocket evidence of other such company shows that they need lots of additional money infusions even after the rocket is developed.
So the chances that they could get the rocket up and running were slim to non.
A few month ago they pulled lots of people from the rocket program to the space engines program, a move you would only do because you know you can't finish the rocket and the engines are the only thing that have even a minimal chance to make any money.
Frankly it was clear years ago that this company was going nowhere, they just raised a huge amount of money in the exact right moment. The chance that they would be viable was close to 0%. Anybody still believing in them in the last couple months was borderline delusional.
They are just the next on a list of rocket startups that will die in the next couple years.
> they just raised a huge amount of money in the exact right moment.
as a neighbor in Alameda County but not connected to anything else on this thread, it is very hard to understand as an outsider how they could "raise lots of money" and then not complete things that are being done now at scale by many others... weird to see "we signed a big contract" followed by "we aren't shipping the results and the company is folding"
Knowing nothing about this sector basically, a comparison to a different "old business" and that is real estate development. There are many, many stories about expensive projects funded, stalled, and abandoned... there are always things going on behind the scenes.. and where does that money go? Is there a Federal prosecution in the works here? someone bought NFT crypto ? company rivals pulling strings?
> not complete things that are being done now at scale by many others...
So its kind of wrong to suggest that what they try to do is done by 'many' others at scale. That basically isn't the case.
SpaceX and RocketLab lab are really the only companies that really do these things. Companies like ULA, Arianespace are basically government entities with deep connection into old school military-industrial complexes with decades and decades of history.
And the launch rate of anybody accept maybe Soyuz and the Falcon 9 would be nowhere close to what Astra needed to be commercially successful.
So in reality, what Astra was claiming when they were raising money was literally unprecedented. They basically proposed mass manufacture and mass launch to decrees unit price, as if it was a car. This simply hasn't ever happened. SpaceX is now at a launch every couple days but they have 3 launch pads and re-usability.
So the claims they could achieve these things with the money they raised was quite far fetched. In reality, because their technical execution was so bad that they didn't even get to Step 1, building a reliable rocket that you could mass produce. They were launching very aggressively with rockets that didn't work and constantly evolved never finding any stability or consistence.
Because they couldn't make their rocket work, they stopped working on that rocket, and attempted to build a rocket that was 3-5x larger instead. And to do this program they realistically needed even more money.
> weird to see "we signed a big contract"
They never signed a big commercial contract outside of maybe their space engines. Their rockets were never reliable enough for anything but companies seeking a barging bin price with high risk or government launches designed for risky small launchers.
> and where does that money go?
I don't know anything about real estate. Practically speaking in rocket development, salary are the primary cost, followed buy tooling up factory. Given how many people they hired and much they seem to invest in their factory, its not really a mystery where the money went.
Most people do not believe that Astra was trying to scam people. Their two founders seem really convinced by what they were selling. The Chief Engineer clearly loved the rocket he developed.
> Is there a Federal prosecution in the works here? someone bought NFT crypto ? company rivals pulling strings?
Very unlikely. This is just one more start up betting on concept that was fundamentally flawed in a market that never materialized.
This is where I really do think Astra is kind of scamy, their market projections were wild. Many other rocket companies were doing the same thing at the time. So this was really a thing that was all over the industry.
If you want to learn more:
> When the Heavens Went on Sale: The Misfits and Geniuses Racing to Put Space Within Reach
This is a great book about many rocket startups. The journalist was deeply embedded in Astra and tells lots of good stories. Its also about RocketLab, Planet and Firefly.
Combine that with:
> Liftoff: Elon Musk and the Desperate Early Days that Launched SpaceX
And you get a pretty good understanding of the space industry since early 2000s.
> The biggest issue for the nuclear waste disposal idea is that it doesn't make any economic sense.
No the biggest issue is that its a stupid idea in the first place. Nuclear waste is fine and perfectly reasonable to handle here on earth with close to zero chance of actual danger.
If SpaceX was willing to do the work and put in the investment they could absolutely get access to fissile material. The US government evaluates things based on regulations and not who is popular on twitter.
Yes, but... what is a "Cloud Computer"? Is it a "computer in the cloud", like e.g. an AWS EC2 instance? Or is it a fancy name for a good old fashioned server rack (on which you will probably want to run your own cloud, because everybody's doing that nowadays, hence the name), like in this case? And if it's a server rack, how come you don't need any cables? And what do you do with this "cloud computer"? Do they host it in their data center or deliver it to you? So there is some potential for confusion - nothing that can't be mostly cleared up by reading a bit further, but still...
> Or is it a fancy name for a good old fashioned server rack
In a sense. Yes, it is a rack of servers. You're buying a computer. But we've designed the rack of servers as a full rack of servers, rather than an individual 1U. Comes with software to manage the rack like you would a cloud; you don't think of an oxide rack as individual compute sleds, you think of it as a pool of capacity.
> And if it's a server rack, how come you don't need any cables?
Because you are buying an entire rack. The sleds are blind mated. You plug in power, you plug in networking, you're good to go. You're not cabling up a bunch of individual servers when you're installing.
> Do they host it in their data center or deliver it to you?
Customers get them delivered to their data center.
> like e.g. an AWS EC2 instance? Or is it a fancy name for a good old fashioned server rack
I mean, the former is just the latter with some of the setup done for you no? Anyways, it’s a full server rack, with tightly vertically integrated hardware and software. Not sure if you’ve poked around the rest of their site, but it seems like their whole software stack is designed with some really nice usability and integration in mind: there’s a little half-snippet there suggesting that provisioning bare-metal VM’s out of the underlying hardware could as trivial as provisioning an EC2 with Terraform, and if that’s the case, that’s _massive_.
> And if it's a server rack, how come you don't need any cables?
Because they’ve gone to great lengths and care to design it to not need anything extraneous IIUC. I think the compute sleds all automatically mount into some automatic backplane that presumably gives
you power, cooling and networking, and then, as above, you presumably configure all that via software, as you would your AWS setup. Not an expert here though, happy to be corrected by anyone who actually knows better.
> Do they host it in their data center or deliver it to you?
Presumably the latter, given they’re a hardware company, but if their software is even a 10th as good as it seems, I fully believe there’ll be a massive market for renting bare-metal capacity from them.
> there’s a little half-snippet there suggesting that provisioning bare-metal VM’s out of the underlying hardware could as trivial as provisioning an EC2 with Terraform,
That's what some of us are saying, it's not crystal clear what they sell.
You use words like: it seems, I think, presumably, I believe...
This is what we're arguing. A company that has raised $44 million Series A for sure can afford to clearly write what they offer.
I understand, you can't have all the people happy and no matter what you do there will always be "weirdos" that don't like your page/design/wording, but hey at least recognize it :-)
The CPU is commodity, nothing else is. Costume Mainboard and firmware without BIOS and their own BMCish thing and their own Root of Trust. Same for their router. Standard chip, everything else is costume.
Similar in some ways different in others. But in terms of not being a PC architecture. Yes it is. But in many other ways its not at all like a Mainframe.
It's similar to hyperscale infrastructure — it doesn't matter as long as it looks like a PC architecture from the OS running inside a VM. The layers and layers of legacy abstraction firmware, BMC, drivers BIOS, hypervisors you get with a typical on premise Dell/HP/SuperMicro/... server motherboard are responsible for a cold start lasting 20 minutes, random failures, weird packet loss, SMART telemetry malfunctions, etc.
This is the type of "PC architecture" cruft many customers have been yearning to ditch for years.
I’m not in the bare metal/data center business anymore at the moment, but I was for more or less the last 25 years. I never had such issues. Maybe I was just lucky?
Maybe you were. :-) And maybe this is not for you or me (I haven't contacted their sales, yet) it's not for everyone.
Personally, I have always been annoyed that the BIOS is clunky and every change requires a reboot, taking several minutes. As computers got faster over the years, this has gotten worse, not better. At the core of cloud economics is elasticity: don't pay for a service that you don't use. Wouldn't it be great to power down an idle server, knowing that it can be switched on seconds before you actually need it?
> Wouldn't it be great to power down an idle server, knowing that it can be switched on seconds before you actually need it?
considering you would still need to boot the VMs then, once the Oxide system is up, I’m not sure if this is such a big win.
And at a certain scale you’d probably have something like multiple systems and VMware vMotion or alternatives anyway. So if the ESXi host (for example) takes a while to boot, I wouldn’t care too much.
And, economics of elasticity - you’d still have to buy the Oxide server, even if it’s idle.
> considering you would still need to boot the VMs then, once the Oxide system is up, I’m not sure if this is such a big win.
To be honoust, I'm using containers most of the time these days but even the full blown windows VMs I'm orchestrating boot in less than 20s, assuming the hypervisor is operational. I think that's about on par with public cloud, no?
> [...] vMotion [...] ESXi.
Is VMware still a thing? Started with virsh, kvm/qemu a decade ago and never looked back.
> And, economics of elasticity - you’d still have to buy the Oxide server, even if it’s idle.
That's a big part of the equation indeed. This is where hyperscalers have an advantage that Oxide at some point in the future might enjoy as well. Interesting to see how much of that they will be willing to share with their customers...
Re VMware, it’s certainly still a thing in enterprise environments. Can kvm do things like live migration in the meantime? For me it’s the other way round, haven’t looked into that for a while ;)
How do you mean Oxide might have that advantage as well in the future? As I understand, you have to buy hardware from them?
Ah yes live migration, off course. We design "ephemeral" applications that scale horizontally and use load balancer to migrate. With 99% of traffic serviced from CDN cache updates and migrations have a very different set of challenges.
As to your question, I meant to say that as volumes and scales economies increase they can source materials far cheaper than regular shops. Possibly similar to AWS, gcs, Azure, akamai etc. It would be nice if they were able and willing to translate some of those scales economies into prices commensurate with comparable public cloud instances.
If you want more insight into all of the things that normally run on "PC architecture" - the 2.5 other kernels/operating systems running underneath the one you think you're running - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mUTx61t443A
Every PC has millions of lines of firmware code that often fails and causes problems. Case and point, pretty much all hyperscalers rip out all the traditional vender firmware and replace it with their own, often partially open source.
The BMC is often a huge problem, its a shifty architecture and extremely unsafe. Meta is paying for u-bmc development to have something a bit better.
Doing things like rack attestation of a whole racks worth of firmware if stacked PC is incredibly hard and so many companies simply don't do it. And doing it with the switch as well is even harder.
Sometimes the firmware runs during operations and takes over your computer causing strange bugs, see SMM. If there is a bug anywhere in that stack, there are 10 layers of closed source vendors that don't care about you.
Costumers don't care if its PC or not, but they do care if the machine is stable, the firmware is bug free and the computer is safe and not infected by viruses. Not being a PC enables that.
I imagine they are aware that this isn't a solution for many customers. A John Deere tractor makes a poor minivan. This isn't for you. That's fine. It's not for me either. That's ok. I don't need to poo-poo their efforts and sit and moan about how it's not for me.
Indeed, which demonstrates that an explicit link to Home in a visible place is never a bad idea. I didn't click on 0xide in the top left even if that's a common shortcut to the home and I didn't notice the link in the footer, which is where you bury the least interesting stuff. I kept clicking on the text links in the top bar.
> - He has turned into a pro-Putin, right wing troll, regularly spewing out falsehoods on Twitter/X.
This one is just baffling. He is literally the most important private person helping Ukraine right now.
He like once suggested that total victory maybe wasn't a viable goal and that at some point in time some compromise peace might have t be made. Something lots of political scientists have also predicted would happen.
