Rocket 2

Aotearoa 2

Mission Profile

Rocket 2 (Aotearoa 2) was an early test vehicle in Astra Space's iterative development program, one of the company's first cluster-engine launch vehicles developed before achieving orbit. First flown in November 2018 from a launch site in New Zealand, it served as a propulsion and flight systems testbed rather than a commercial orbital launcher. Though modest in its own right, Rocket 2 provided critical engineering data on first-stage clustering, flight dynamics, and vehicle behavior that directly informed the Rocket 3 series which ultimately reached orbit in 2021.