Astra CEO Chris Kemp: Why the ‘next billionaire will be made in space’

Following last week's IPO, CEO Chris Kemp of Astra joins Yahoo Finance to discuss opportunities in the emerging space industry and Astra's strategy to provide daily launches in the years ahead.

Video Transcript

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JULIE HYMAN: Most of the pure-play space companies are still private-- not all, but many of them are. But Astra is an exception. The company completed a SPAC merger last week. The stock went up. It's gone down a little bit today, but went up in the wake of that debut. And we are now joined by the founder and CEO, Chris Kemp, of Astra, which focuses not on taking billionaires to space, for example, but focuses on taking satellites to space.

Thanks for being here, Chris. So obviously, there's a lot of demand for getting satellites into space right now. So just talk us, first of all, through your business model-- how it works, how many satellites you expect to be able to get up into space, and what the growth path looks like.

CHRIS KEMP: Sure. Over the next few years, we're seeing the number of small satellites increasing from first thousands and then tens of thousands as the decade progresses. And so most of these satellites are here to provide better connectivity on Earth, to generally help us manage the resources on Earth. And there's over $1 trillion economy emerging in this space. And most of it isn't people in space. It's putting these satellites into Earth orbit where we'll have the opportunity to better observe and connect our planet.

BRIAN SOZZI: Chris, how do you make these rockets? I'm fascinated. I was going through the investor presentation here. By 2025, you see $1.5 billion in sales. That's good, but your Capex is only supposed to be $24 million. What's your approach to making your rockets, and how focused are you on efficiency in that rocket-making process?

CHRIS KEMP: I think that's what really sets us apart. From day one, we've always focused on scale. So daily space delivery was a mantra from day one here. So we're really thinking about making rockets like an automobile company would make cars, so using inexpensive materials, inexpensive manufacturing and fabrication techniques that reduce labor. We're also completely autonomous, so the rocket will operate with very few people both in the field and also in mission control. So we're just really driving efficiencies at every level of the business.

MYLES UDLAND: Chris, whenever we talk to folks who are in one of these-- let's call it a cutting-edge industry where people will throw around the future of X-- I'm curious, as someone who's actually in the space, what the commercialization of space to you actually means. What are the opportunities that are going to be something that myself as a consumer may actually notice over, let's say, the next decade?

CHRIS KEMP: Well, as Richard Branson and Jeff Bezos prepare for their personal missions into space, they made their billions here on Earth. I think that the next billionaires will be made in space. And it's really because there's a trillion-dollar economy emerging where space is really the ultimate high ground. It's the best place to connect everything here on Earth-- all of our cars, all of our devices.

It's also the best place to observe and understand, monitor, and manage the resources we have here on Earth. So there are now hundreds of companies that have raised tens of billions of dollars in the last few years. They all need to get to space, and they all have really incredible applications. Imagine life without GPS. Imagine life without being able to forecast the weather. We're just scratching the surface of what's possible when you think about understanding and being able to manage Earth at a whole new level of fidelity.

BRIAN SOZZI: Chris, what do you think about that billionaire space battle? Do you think Branson is just rushing? He's supposed to go into space on Sunday. Do you think he's just rushing it a little bit? He should probably take a little bit more time before he goes out there and flies off into space in a rocket?

CHRIS KEMP: Well, I do know that both of those teams are incredibly, incredibly focused on the safety of their vehicles. And I'm confident that if it wasn't ready, he wouldn't be getting on it. But I do applaud of them for being the first beta testers of those systems, for sure.

BRIAN SOZZI: What is your 100-year plan for the company?

CHRIS KEMP: Well, our 100-year plan, basically, is thinking about what it would look like if the Earth could have the benefit of all of the energy, all of the visibility that we'd have from Earth orbit, all of the ability to connect everything really manifested as a new platform. So imagine if the internet expanded into space, and the sphere of human economic influence expanded into space, and there was a trillion-dollar economy. What would be happening in space if $1 trillion of economic activity was based in space?

It's an incredibly exciting vision, and I don't think that there's a monopoly there. I think that there is a competitive environment where companies, like on the internet, compete to provide services and platforms and applications. And Astra wants to be one of the key players in this new space economy.

JULIE HYMAN: Well, Chris, I do want to ask you-- we think of space as limitless, and it is in many ways. But when you're talking about near Earth orbit, it is not. And there's already a lot of stuff up there. NASA, I think, says there's 27,000 pieces of debris. Some of that's man-made. Some of it is from space, pieces of meteoroids and such. Is that at some point-- it already has been a little bit problematic in some cases for launches. How much are you paying attention to that, and is that going to be a limiting factor?

CHRIS KEMP: Julie, we think about that a lot. And there's a difference between near Earth orbit and low Earth orbit. The benefit of low Earth orbit is most things that are there don't stay there for very long. They scrape the upper atmosphere. And Earth has its own garbage collector-- gravity. So the combination of the upper atmosphere and gravity will bring these satellites back down, and they basically vaporize instantly in the atmosphere. So to the extent that we can put things in lower and lower orbits, we're not going to pollute these higher orbits where, frankly, that debris can last for hundreds or even thousands of years.

JULIE HYMAN: Interesting. All right. I love it. Getting some science lessons here this morning. Chris Kemp is the founder and CEO of Astra. Thanks for being here, Chris. Appreciate it.