Astra Space, Inc.

Good day, and thank you for standing by. Welcome to ASTRA's fourth quarter fiscal year 2021 financial results conference call. Joining us today are ASTRA's founder, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Chris Kemp, Chief Financial Officer Kellan Brannon, and Vice President of Compliance and Deputy General Counsel Michael Stitcher. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After the speaker's presentation, 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 to turn the conference over to Michael for introductory remarks. Please go ahead.

Thank you, operator. Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for joining us for ASTRA's fourth 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. Asterisk 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. These four statements 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, Master'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 earnings press release. 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 its asset title with the abbreviation of LV standing in for launch vehicle followed by the serial number. For instance, our March 15th and most recent launch vehicle was referenced as LV0009. Finally, I would like to remind everyone that this call will be recorded and it 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 chief executive officer.

Chris? Thanks, Michael, and good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for joining us today. I want to start by celebrating the historic accomplishments of our team. Since our last quarterly operating results call, Astra conducted three launches from two different spaceports, successfully delivering 23 payloads to orbit for our customers, including our first successful orbital mission for the United States Space Force. Looking forward to our next launches, we're honored to have the opportunity to serve NASA to further our vision for a healthier and safer planet as we prepare for a multi-launch campaign out of Cape Canaveral to deploy the NASA Tropics Constellation. Tropics will observe deep inside of cyclones so we can forecast storms better, improve disaster preparation, and ultimately save lives. These launches represent significant milestones for the company in our mission to improve life on Earth from space. And what inspires me the most is knowing that this is just the beginning. I'm humbled by the brilliance and the perseverance of my co-founder, Adam London, and the perseverance and commitment of our entire team here at Astra. After reviewing our accomplishments in 2021, I'd like to take a closer look at how these milestones that we've achieved since the last quarterly earnings results demonstrate measurable progress towards our objective of daily space delivery. I will then turn the call over to Kellen for a closer look at the numbers. But as we begin Astra's first calendar year as a public company, I'd like to start this call off by reviewing Astra's strategy and inviting all of you to join us in our mission. Astra is a space technology company. Our mission is to improve life on Earth from space. And our vision for a healthier and more connected planet is what inspires everyone here at Astra. And it's what unites us with our customers, many of which, like Astra, are a new generation of space tech companies themselves, all pioneers in a new era of space, racing to build new applications and services that have the potential to improve the lives of everyone on Earth. You've seen the impact of these new space services over the past few weeks in Ukraine. as pictures taken by companies that didn't exist just a few years ago are making the covers of all of our national newspapers and holding the leaders of the most powerful nations in the world accountable to their actions. New satellite broadband constellations are the only remaining connection to the internet for millions of people. The mission and vision are the foundation of Astra strategy, which we'll discuss in three phases. When we took Astra public last summer, Adam and I shared our vision for a frequent, low-cost launch system that would allow us to develop, deploy, and maintain a space services platform that would enable our customers to focus on building space applications instead of space infrastructure. We shared a vision of a multi-tenant cloud constellation composed of spacecraft that our customers can leverage, like tech companies leverage cloud computing, providing network and computing services on-demand with plug-and-play hardware peripherals that could be plugged into satellites just before a launch. We believe that this is the future of space, and frequent access to space is the critical first step to enabling this future, the first phase of our strategy. With hundreds of small satellite constellations in development and over a dozen companies that have gone public, collectively raising over $20 billion in the last year, we see launch as the critical enabler of not only Astra's long-term plans but of these new space tech companies. That's why in phase one of our strategy, launch services, we're focused on dramatically increasing access to space by scaling our launch services business as quickly as possible. However, only focusing on rockets would be like Amazon stopping at delivery trucks. As we've learned with rockets, the core technologies required to power next generation satellites are simply not available at the cost performance levels and production scale that our vision for the future of space requires. Therefore, in phase two, space technology, Astra plans to develop, license, or acquire core space technologies that will be productized and incorporated into our rockets, satellites, and other infrastructure that will be used to deliver space services. Core technologies include propulsion and solar power. And the acquisition of Apollo Fusion last summer is one example of us acquiring and productizing a core space technology. The vast majority of the value in the trillion-dollar space economy forecasted in 2040 is in space services, just as communication services and a new generation of geospatial data services. Just as the apps on your iPhone are powered by cloud services here on Earth, we believe that the future space applications will be powered by the space equivalent of today's Earth-bound cloud data centers. So in phase three, space services, we plan to vertically integrate Astra's core technologies into an Astra constellation, which will be optimally launched and maintained by the Astra launch system, allowing us to power the space economy. So let's talk about phase one. Today, Astra is focused on dramatically increasing access to space, because you can't build a space platform that improves life on Earth from space if you can't get to space. While rocket science may be notoriously complicated, Economies of scale apply like any other industry. Put simply, if you produce something at higher and higher volumes, regardless of how complex it is, it is easier to reduce the per unit cost. To get to space more economically, you can either scale up your rocket and make a really big rocket, or design a rocket that is easy and inexpensive to produce and scale out your factory to make many smaller rockets. And while large reusable rockets are ideal for transporting people and large cargo into space, our customers tell us that the flexibility of getting to the right place in space as quickly as possible at the lowest possible per launch cost is what is important to them. And this is why we've chosen to scale out our factory instead of scale up our rocket. We believe a thriving space economy requires both, and that the lowest cost leaders in each of these categories will be the winners. In addition to scale, Astra has focused on mobility and automation. Our entire launch system is mobile and can be easily and discreetly transported anywhere in the world in a standard ISO shipping container by truck, ship, rail, or cargo aircraft. What's more, a very small team, currently just six people, can deploy an entire launch system and be ready to launch in less than seven days. We demonstrated this capability earlier this quarter when we conducted our first launch out of Cape Canaveral for NASA. Astra's ability to launch quickly from anywhere a shipping container can be delivered allows us to expand our launch services to more licensed locations without fixed capital investments. Our mobile launch system also enables our allies, governments that do not have access to space, to rapidly establish their own sovereign space launch capabilities by partnering with Astra. Finally, our unique ability to mass produce and permanently and discreetly deploy turnkey launch systems could play an essential role in enabling America's strategy for a resilient national security space infrastructure. At Astra, we're focused on delivering for our customers, and with over 50 launches under contract and a $160 million backlog, our customers have spoken. They want more launches, more frequently, from more locations at a lower per-launch cost. Our long-term goal remains to reliably launch daily, and a 33-day period between our last two launches demonstrates progress towards that goal. Turning to phase two, technology. In phase two, we're focused on productizing core space technologies. The key to success in phase one has been our ability to rapidly iterate on hardware. To enable this, we invested in building Astra Factory, a vertically integrated manufacturing facility that is currently producing our launch system, including our rocket stages, rocket engines, valves, mechanisms, avionics, and more, with many parts machined out of raw materials on site. we're now expanding into over a quarter million square feet of facilities on our campus in Alameda, California. We will leverage this capability to productize the core technologies that we develop, license, or acquire, and of course, use our ever more frequently launched rockets to test and qualify these products in space. Like Tesla, selling batteries to other automakers, we believe that by productizing core technologies, such as spacecraft engines, and selling them to our customers, even our competitors, will drive scale and increase the profitability and total value of the space economy powered by the Astra platform. Phase three. Finally, we're laying the foundation for the space platform by securing licenses for Spectrum, qualifying core space technologies, and securing anchor customers for Astra services. So in summary, we recognize that this is a long-term plan. And while we're in the early innings we've demonstrated significant progress at a rapid pace astra is in this for the long haul and we strongly believe that bringing scale to the space economy is necessary to improve life on earth from space. i'd like to highlight a few events that have occurred so far this year in 2022 in January. NASA awarded Astra the venture class acquisition of dedicated rideshare contract, along with other launch providers, which represents a $300 million opportunity over the next five years. In February, we conducted our first launch out of Cape Canaveral under the very first FAA Part 450 license in history, both important accomplishments for our team. Unfortunately, an anomaly at stage separation prevented us from delivering the payloads for our customer, but we took the opportunity to understand what had occurred and quickly implemented corrective actions and fixes prior to the next flight. Two weeks ago, our successful launch from Kodiak, Alaska was a huge milestone for Astra, as it marked the first delivery of 22 customer payloads into orbit 33 days before, just 33 days after our prior flight, which is less than half the cycle time we achieved in our prior two launches. I continue to be impressed with the speed, passion, and diligence of our team as they continue to improve our production and launch operations, as well as invest in improving the reliability and future capabilities of our launch system. Let's quickly review 2021, which was a busy year for Astra. We announced our planned merger with Holicity in February, and we completed the transaction in June. This transaction added $464 million of liquidity to our balance sheet that is funding the scaling of our production and launch capabilities and development of our launch system. Throughout 2021, Astra attracted key employees to grow the depth and breadth of our leadership and broader team. There were many high-impact hires in 2021, and I am proud of the team we're building. And it's particularly gratifying to work with Benjamin Lyon, our chief engineer after 22 years at Apple, Carla Sapanich, our SVP of people, After successful roles of both Tesla and Apple, Ann Will Drury, our VP of Supply Chain, formerly of Tesla, has consistently overcome supply chain challenges in the past year to meet our rocket production targets. We also recruited a talented and diverse group of board members to help Astra navigate its path. Joining our board were Michelle Flournoy, who served as Under Secretary of Defense for two presidents and was the highest ranking woman in the Department of Defense history. Lisa Nelson, a Microsoft alumni who founded and led Microsoft Ventures. And last but not least, Mike Lehman, a leader in the tech industry, including CFO roles at Sun Microsystems, Palo Alto Networks, and Arista Networks. Our acquisition of Apollo Fusion in July marked the first core technology acquisition, expanding our launch capabilities by giving customers the ability to reach or maintain orbits with efficient electric propulsion systems and will be a key component of Astra's future satellites. In August, our first thruster ignited on orbit and its continued operation has expanded our sales opportunities in both commercial and government markets. We're incredibly pleased with how well the Astra spacecraft engine has been received by the market. In August, we launched LV-0006, the first serial number of our upgraded version of our launch system that we completed over the first half of the year. The flight had an anomaly at liftoff, leading to a single engine shutdown. but the rocket was able to autonomously recover and perform most of the first stage burn prior to being shut down by the range. Interestingly, data from recent flights suggests that this flight had enough performance to reach orbit, even with the engine out. In November, we applied for a V-band spectrum license with the FCC to support phase three of our strategy to build and operate a high-margin space services platform. And finally, late November, we accomplished a significant milestone when Astra became one of only several privately funded companies to place a spacecraft in Earth orbit with the flight of LB0007 for the United States Space Force. Looking ahead to 2022, the Astra team is excited to test our ability to execute a rapid launch cadence with the upcoming tropics launches. As our first launch system 1.0 design, has stabilized and we focused more on production and launch operations, our engineering teams are busy increasingly spending their time on the next version of our launch system, which we are designing to be more capable, more scalable than the current system. And we expect to share more details about this upgrade in the next few months. I'd like to thank all of our employees whose dedication to our mission has enabled Astra to reach orbit so quickly and within months launch again and again. We are just getting started and we're grateful for the unwavering support of our customers and investors and their commitment to our mission. For all of you who've taken the time to join this conference, call. Current investors and those considering investing in Astra, industry experts, and those of you who are as inspired as we are by the potential to commercialize space in ways that make our lives better, I want to thank you. We look forward to sharing even more detail about our strategy later in Q2 at our first annual investor day. that will host at our newly expanded rocket factory here at our headquarters in Alameda, California. So stay tuned for more information on that. So I'd like to turn it over to Kellen to discuss our fourth quarter financial results before we begin Q&A. Kellen?