Astra Space, Inc.

Good afternoon, and welcome to Astra's third quarter 2021 earnings conference call. Join us for today's call, Astra's founder, chairman, and CEO, Chris Kemp, CFO, Kellen Brannan, and Vice President of Compliance and Deputy General Counsel, Michael Fitcher. After the speaker's remark, there'll be a question and answer session. To ask a question during the session, you'll need to press star one on your telephone. Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. If you require any further assistance, please press star zero. I would now like the hand to turn the call over to Michael for introductory remarks.

And please go ahead. Thank you, Operator. Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for joining us for Astra's third quarter 2021 earnings call. After the market closed, we released our financial results. The earnings release is available on the SEC's website and our investor relations website at investor.astra.com. This teleconference is also being broadcast over the internet and will be archived and available on our investor relations website. During our call today, we will reference non-GAAP financial measures, which we believe to be useful to investors as our management team uses these non-GAAP financial measures to plan, monitor, and evaluate our financial performance. These non-GAAP financial measures exclude certain items and should not be considered a substitute for comparable GAAP financial measures. Astra's methods of computing these non-GAAP financial measures may differ from similar non-GAAP financial measures used by other companies. A description of these items along with the reconciliation of our non-GAAP financial measures to their most comparable GAAP financial measures can be found in our earnings release. Today's call will also contain forward-looking statements that refer to future events, including Astra's future financial outlook. When used in this call, The words anticipate, could, enable, estimate, intend, expect, believe, potential, will, should, project, and similar expressions as they relate to Astra are, as such, a forward-looking statement. These forward-looking statements are subject to a number of risks and uncertainties, and as a result, Astra's actual future results and performance may differ materially from those discussed in this call. We encourage you to review our filings with the SEC in which we describe the factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from our current expectations. We also refer to commercial launches in this conference call. When we use the phrases commercial launch, commercial revenue launch, or commercial orbital launch, we mean a launch conducted under an FAA commercial launch license. Additionally, each of our launch vehicles is denoted by an asset title with the abbreviation of LV, standing in for launch vehicle, followed by the serial number. For instance, our current launch vehicle is referenced as LV0007. Finally, I would like to remind everyone that this call will be recorded and will be made available for replay via a link available on the investor relations section of our website. With that, I would now like to turn the call over to Chris Kemp, Astra's founder, chairman, and CEO. Chris?

Thank you, Michael, and good afternoon, and thank you for joining us today for our third quarter earnings call. As we speak today, our small five-person launch operations team is in Kodiak, Alaska, with LB0007, preparing for another orbital test launch with the United States Space Force. Our team is working to complete pre-launch tests, and we expect this launch to occur in the next week or so. I'm incredibly proud of our team's partnership with the FAA as we rapidly identified and resolved the issues we encountered in our last test flight. I'm also incredibly proud that we were able to incorporate these learnings into design changes and ship LV0007 in less than 60 days. Developing an orbital launch system is incredibly difficult, and I admire the grit and determination of our team. And while we can't guarantee that the current test flight will be successful, We strongly believe that launching again with the changes that we just made is the fastest and most capital-efficient path to success. So back at our headquarters at Alameda, California, our manufacturing team is nearing completion of our next launch vehicle, LV0008. And I'm pleased with the increasing manufacturing efficiency with which we're bringing these vehicles together. The production of this vehicle will be the fastest in our history. And in addition, the production of LV0009 as well as LV0010 is already underway. Last week, you might have read that we submitted an application with the Federal Communications Commission for deep-end spectrum access. While today's focus is delivering our first commercial payload and scaling production and launch cadence of our launch services business, our long-term strategy that we outlined when we took Astra public earlier this year was to leverage this launch capability to build and operate a high-margin space services platform And this strategy requires that we secure Spectrum and other assets required to execute on this plan now. A constellation designed from the ground up to power our customers' applications, networks, sensors, and other assets in space will greatly reduce the cost and time required to deploy new capabilities in space. The constellation that we describe in our FCC application is the space segment of the Astra Space Platform. and the services that we will provide to our customers with this platform we're calling space services. To reiterate, our current focus is concentrated on becoming the global launch service provider providing the most frequent, flexible, and lowest cost dedicated launches. As we achieve our launch services goals, we'll begin to introduce higher margin space services, and we believe that in the not too distant future, the demand for spectrum access will significantly outstrip supply. This view of spectrum is what motivated us to file the VBAN spectrum application to prepare Astra for its next stage of growth. In space, I'm also pleased to report that we had a very successful test and first ignition of our in-space propulsion system, which we acquired from Apollo Fusion this summer. Our electric spacecraft engine was tested on a spaceflight Sherpa, which was launched in the low Earth orbit on a SpaceX Falcon 9 on June 30th. After successful deployment, Spaceflight commissioned our engine to perform a series of maneuvers in space. This represented Astra's first attempt at firing this new engine in orbit, and we're really proud to have delivered for Spaceflight and look forward to playing a continued role in their success. We view our in-space propulsion products as providing a critical solution for our future Constellation customers and partners. Last quarter, we started construction to increase the size of our headquarters and main manufacturing facility by over 100,000 square feet. Our facilities team overcame lead times and labor disruption due to COVID and kept things on schedule, and we expect to complete construction later this quarter and begin using the expanded facility before the end of this year. Recruiting world-class engineering, manufacturing, product, and program management talent is a very high priority for ASTRA. We added 70 new employees in the third quarter, and I personally interviewed most of these candidates before the extended offers, Frankly, I'm in awe of the caliber of the talent that have joined us this past quarter. We're truly building a world-class team that are inspired by our mission. Our leadership team is truly succeeding at creating a unique and effective culture that's helped us attract and retain some of the best talent I've experienced in my career. And we currently have more than 100 open positions for engineers, technicians, software architects, product and program managers to help us achieve our mission of improving life on Earth from space. So to summarize, I'm proud of the ASCA team for their tenacity and commitment to achieving this next milestone of placing our first commercial payload in orbit. And I'm also thankful for all of our customers and shareholders, partners for supporting us in our mission. We look forward to sharing the results of our upcoming test launch and all the details on the upcoming missions and the progress months and years ahead. So I'd like to turn it over to Kellan. who will discuss our third quarter financial results before we begin Q&A. Kelly?