Astra Space, Inc.

Good day and welcome to the Astra's fourth quarter fiscal 2022 financial results conference call. Today's call is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to Andrew Shung, VP of Strategic Finance, Capital Markets.

Thank you, operator. Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for joining us for Astra's fourth quarter and fiscal year 2022 results call. After the market closed, we released our financial results. The press release is available on the SEC's website and our investor relations website at investor.astra.com. A supplemental presentation related to our results can also be found on the investor relations section of our website. 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 as 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 the most comparable GAAP financial measures can be found in our results release. Today's call will also contain forward-looking statements. These forward-looking statements refer to future events, including Astra's future financial outlook. When using 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 are looking statements are subject to a number of risks and uncertainties. And as a result, Astros, actual future results in performance may differ materially from those discussed in this call. We encourage you to review our filing with SEC in which we describe the factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from our current expectations, including those updated risk factors included in our annual report on Form 10-K. Finally, I would like to remind everyone that this call will be recorded and will also be made available for replay via link available on the investor relations section of our website. With that, I'll turn the call over to Chris Kemp, Astra's founder, chairman, and CEO. Chris?

Thanks, Andrew. Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for joining us. Joining me on the call today are Axel Martinez, our Chief Financial Officer, and Martin Atik, our Chief Business Officer. During today's call, we will review our operational and financial results for the fourth quarter, discuss our key accomplishments during 2022, review guidance for Q1, and provide an update on our launch services and space products businesses. First, I'd like to recap our key accomplishments in 2022 for our two core businesses, launch services and space products. 2022 was a productive year for our launch services business. We successfully deployed 22 satellites into Earth orbit in March of 2022 for three different customers. This success followed Astra becoming the fastest privately funded U.S. company to place a satellite into orbit in November of 2021, just five years after we were founded in 2016. Astra also became the first company to launch under the Part 450 FAA license framework, Astra's manufacturing facilities achieved a Rocket 3 production rate of approximately one rocket per month from January through July of 2022, and we conducted two Rocket 3 launches within 33 days. After the Tropics 1 mission mishap, NASA agreed to modify its contract with Astra to launch future payloads on our new Rocket 4 vehicle. Based on customer and market feedback, we stopped launching Rocket 3s and focused on accelerating the introduction of a higher capacity 600 kilogram version of Rocket 4 that can be mass produced on our new Rocket 4 production line that we expect will be capable of producing up to one rocket per day. We continue to anticipate commencing test flights for Rocket 4 later this year. Perhaps the highlight of 2022 was significant customer traction of our space products business. We announced 278 committed orders as of today, March 30th, including customer contracts with Airbus OneWeb satellites, Astroscale, Maxar Technologies, and Leostella, among others, representing approximately $77 million of contract value, the majority of which is expected to be delivered in 2023 and 2024. We successfully delivered on three customer programs of the Astra spacecraft engine. We took important steps to scale the production of Astra spacecraft engines with the build-out of a new dedicated production facility in Silicon Valley. And we expect the facility will eventually support production of up to 500 units per year, with our production ramp beginning in Q2 of 2023. Since our inception, we have taken a long-term view on the growth of the commercial space industry. In 2022, we saw the number of satellites launched increase by 31%. global launch rate increased 27%, and the overall space economy grew by 8% to $464 billion. Each of those benchmarks validates the trajectory of the industry that we anticipated and which have guided our strategy, product roadmaps, and investments. Our strategy to become the leading provider of launch services and space products required long-term investments in our rocket and space product production lines in 2022. And in 2022 and early 2023, in spite of the challenges, we stayed the course and completed the build out of our new Rocket 4 and spacecraft engine production lines and invested heavily in the people and equipment needed to increase the quality and reliability of our products and services. Our team is laser focused on two key goals. In launch services demonstrating a reliable and scalable launch capability, Astra is one of only five privately funded U.S. companies that has conducted successful orbital launches and successfully delivered satellites into low Earth orbit. Based on the data and experience gathered from our missions in 2022, by investing in mass-produced rockets and via automation of key manufacturing and launch operations processes, we plan to lead the market in lowest-cost launch. We have designed our launch system, too, with the expectation that it could service up to 80% of the addressable satellite market. Two, space products. Scale production. We've moved into a new 60,000 square foot Astra spacecraft engine facility in Silicon Valley toward the end of March. With the expected annual capacity of almost 500 units, this facility is designed to allow us to service our customers' current needs as well as future demand. Astra's mission of improving life on Earth from space has never been more relevant than it is today. we continue to believe that frequent, reliable, dedicated launches and scaled production of space products are the keys to accelerating the growth of the space economy. In 2022, Astra launched its first customer satellites and sold spacecraft engines that will power a number of new constellations of small satellites in low Earth orbit. We are proud of the team for accomplishing these milestones. We are also humbled by our failures, and we've learned a tremendous amount from them. I look forward to providing you with frequent updates as we progress towards our first flight of Rocket 4 later this year and begin to ramp up production of our spacecraft engines in Q2. Now I'd like to provide an update on the progress we've made on the development of Launch System 2. Our launch services customers include satellite operators, manufacturers, and government agencies. Rocket 4 is now targeting deliveries of up to 600 kilograms to mid-inclination low Earth orbit. As indicated previously, we continue to expect test flights for Rocket 4 to begin in the latter part of 2023 and continue to remain on track with our key development milestones leading up to our first flight. Since the last earnings call, we've completed the qualification of our new upper stage engine, completed a full flight duration run of our new first stage engine, completed the qualification of key manufacturing processes for the new Rocket 4 propellant tanks, including completing tank burst tests, Finally, we released our payload user's guide for Rocket 4, which allows our customers to better understand the capabilities of our system and the features of our launch service. We've made substantial progress towards completion of the Rocket 4 production line. In the past few months, we've also provided details around our quality control lab and our first-stage engine mission duty cycle, among other updates. After over six months of rigorous testing and analysis, we received a formal closure letter from the FAA concluding our Tropics 1 investigation on March 1st. You can find additional details on ASTRA's website. Rocket 4 incorporates key architectural decisions that we believe address the causes of the Tropics 1 mishap, while building on the heritage of flight-proven elements of the Rocket 3 series. I'll now provide an update on our space products business. As I mentioned earlier, we finalized the build-out of our new dedicated spacecraft engine manufacturing facility this month. we believe the facility and our earlier investments in our production capabilities will allow us to eventually deliver up to 500 spacecraft engines per year. Specifically, as it relates to updates on our space products business, We announced 278 cumulative orders of the Astra spacecraft engine as of March 30th, 2023. This includes 264 new orders since we closed the Apollo Fusion acquisition on July 1st, 2021. As we've previously discussed, orders are typically delivered to customers approximately one year from the contract signing. However, actual schedules may vary from customer to customer. This brings our total contracted value to approximately 77 million, the majority of which is expected to be delivered in 2023 and 2024. We delivered on the third full customer program of the Astra spacecraft engine in Q4 of 2022. We believe that the Astra spacecraft engine is the leading electric satellite propulsion offering in the market today. We thank our existing customers for their belief and trust in Astra to deliver critical satellite components for their important missions. We also continue to maintain dialogue with prospective customers, and we believe we'll continue to see increasing demand for this product. Finally, given the feedback we've received from our customers and shareholders, I want to specifically outline how we've responded to deliver reliable products and services to our customers. Specifically, we've made the following investments, process changes, and organizational changes to maximize the reliability of both our launch services and our space products businesses. We appointed Doug Kunzman, the former launch and test lead for Blue Origin's successful New Shepard first flight, to lead launch and test operations. We've set a new tone at the top on the criticality of reliability, added reliability as a core Astra value, revised and implemented more rigorous Astra development processes that include explicit requirements for failure mode analysis, design reviews, and test-like-you-fly reviews. We've established a new top-level mission assurance organization led by Andrew Griggs. as a member of the Astra management team that includes distinct teams focused on reliability, quality engineering, safety, quality control, and supplier quality. And finally, we've invested in state-of-the-art equipment to give our engineers new tools to measure quality during our engineering and manufacturing processes. including a Nikon CT scanner, Nordstrom 2D X-ray scanners, a Renishaw direct computer-controlled coordinate measuring machine, or CMM, a Brown and Sharp manual CMM, Mitoyu vision measuring system, and FLIR thermal imaging cameras, a ferro arm, and many other new tools. With that, I'd like to turn it over to Axel to review our financials and guidance for the year. Axel?