On March 2, 2020, DARPA’s Launch Challenge came to a close with many lessons learned, including the ability to achieve launch-readiness with minimal infrastructure and little knowledge of launch conditions, but there was no winner. Less than two years from its start, DARPA’s effort to develop new and more agile approaches and processes associated with space launch ended with the lone Launch Challenge participant – Astra – scrubbing its launch attempt with less than a minute left in the countdown before liftoff. Astra faced technical and weather-related issues during the roughly two-week window of the Challenge campaign, which ran February 17 - March 2 in Kodiak, Alaska, at the Pacific Spaceport Complex - Alaska (PSC-A).
In 2018, DARPA announced its challenge to the space industry to do what no one has done before: launch payloads to orbit on extremely short notice, with no prior knowledge of the payloads, destination orbit, or launch location, and do it not just once, but twice, in a matter of days from an austere launch pad. Eighteen teams pre-qualified for the Challenge in 2018. For the final event, three teams were selected: Virgin Orbit, Vector Space, and Astra. Virgin Orbit ultimately decided not to participate in the Challenge in order to focus on other commercial pursuits, and Vector ran into financial trouble and had to close down as a business. That left Astra as the last contender standing. Despite the absence of the desired endpoint in 2020 — a successful launch program — managers consider the DARPA Launch Challenge as having met many of its goals.