Latest / AST SpaceMobile Podcast / Kook's Weekly - May 25 - The End of Constellation Constipation

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Kook's Weekly - May 25 - The End of Constellation Constipation · AST SpaceMobile Podcast

• 0:07
  This is the AST Space Mobile podcast.
• 0:11
  And we just basically turn your phone and be seamless,
• 0:14
  regardless of where you are. We don't want the user even to
• 0:17
  know that it's connected by satellite, Satellite.
• 0:22
  Listen, the opportunity that we have is very, very, very large.
• 0:27
  Good evening everyone. Thanks for joining.
• 0:29
  I know it's a little late. I've gotten into hockey and I
• 0:32
  just kind of have to watch it. So anyway, always kind of anti
• 0:36
  climatic when the opposing team scores because all of a sudden
• 0:39
  it's just quiet and you're like wait, what happened?
• 0:41
  And everyone's sad. So anyway, last week this time I
• 0:47
  had sarcastically said that I thought it was going to be a
• 0:50
  very boring week and that nothing would happen and just to
• 0:52
  chill out. I was kidding.
• 0:56
  I knew it was going to be an awesome week because we had done
• 0:58
  our research, but just felt like for once just not being a hype
• 1:03
  machine, you know, I feel like they're saying a people atards
• 1:07
  clueless cult pumper, you know, like, OK guys, so fine, I'll get
• 1:12
  on my space. You know, last week and I'll say
• 1:15
  it's all just very lukewarm tepid.
• 1:20
  But that was wrong. That was bullshit, but I knew
• 1:23
  it. I hope most of you picked up on
• 1:24
  the sarcasm because this company is now ready to RIP and so you
• 1:29
  can tell by the cadence of what the company's putting out that
• 1:32
  they are feeling really good. So the blue board, blue bird
• 1:36
  convey convoy, it'd be really helpful if I could communicate.
• 1:41
  The Bluebird convoy is underway, said the company.
• 1:46
  And they showed the production cadence.
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  We now know that some of these birds are already at the payload
• 1:53
  production facility. And so it actually went in a
• 1:57
  weird order number 810, then 9:00.
• 2:00
  So we are seeing these videos. It's very clear to me that the
• 2:06
  infamous constellation Constipation is over and this is
• 2:14
  a Seminole event for the company's scaling.
• 2:17
  It is the precursor for metal in orbit.
• 2:21
  So hopefully the launches go well, but you know, like I'd be
• 2:25
  surprised if a SpaceX launch doesn't go well, but at this
• 2:29
  point we're going to now have 3 till Infinity.
• 2:31
  That is really what's happening here.
• 2:33
  These satellites are going to be pushed out of the Midland
• 2:38
  facility like widgets and there's a lot of them coming and
• 2:44
  more on the way. So it's happening and I thought
• 2:50
  that our gash at our Gash 11, who have been following for God
• 2:56
  knows how many years, had a really interesting sort of take
• 2:59
  on this. And so under the tweet, the
• 3:01
  Bluebirds flew the coop. It really is a way the company
• 3:06
  really communicated in a way that was showing the scale.
• 3:12
  So they didn't just PR everything once it was all done,
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  they did it incrementally. The bears, interestingly enough,
• 3:19
  kind of glommed onto this as usual.
• 3:21
  They're like, oh, it's a partial news announcement, something
• 3:23
  must be wrong. No company is being very
• 3:26
  transparent. And so they're showing you
• 3:29
  exactly how in wind they shipped the two satellites.
• 3:34
  They acknowledge that the third one was about to ship but hadn't
• 3:37
  shipped. Now it has shipped as stock
• 3:40
  rocketed on that and it shows no.
• 3:43
  I wonder if this was actually conscious by them or not.
• 3:46
  But by piece mailing the PR with such a tight cadence, it really
• 3:51
  did show that the satellites are rolling off an assembly line
• 3:56
  like cans of tuna right into the cart.
• 4:01
  And so like I said before, at some point, hopefully no time in
• 4:06
  the near future, there's going to be another launch mishap.
• 4:09
  Launch is not perfect, but it really won't matter.
• 4:12
  This is not the James Webb satellite.
• 4:13
  Interestingly enough, it has as many mechanisms as the James
• 4:17
  Webb satellite, but we have effectively an infinite supply
• 4:21
  of these things popping off the production line.
• 4:25
  And so they have flexibility. And now they're starting to open
• 4:30
  the kimono and show how they're doing it, the scale this company
• 4:35
  is operating at. And I think that in videos to
• 4:37
  come, we're going to see more and more automation and more and
• 4:41
  more proof of scale. And so for the naysayers that
• 4:45
  are doubting this company's ability to execute these videos
• 4:49
  directly contradict any last doubt that people should have.
• 4:54
  Again, they got to get the satellites in the air, have a
• 4:57
  lot of confidence that they will do that.
• 4:59
  But it is now prime time. And I, for one, am particularly
• 5:04
  excited about that. I started to get sort of jumpy
• 5:08
  last week where I had some little trading positions on and
• 5:10
  I just went, it is time to go full fucking tilt.
• 5:14
  And so whether that's a top or not, I hope King Tut's not on
• 5:18
  the line because he'd be like, Oh my God, I got to sell
• 5:21
  everything If Kook is is bullish.
• 5:23
  But what, what dawned on me not to get out of order is never
• 5:28
  mind that the stock always does well in the summer.
• 5:30
  And we'll get to that in a second.
• 5:32
  I think a lot of that, or at least something that coincides
• 5:35
  with that, is the Russell rebalancing that happens this
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  time of year. And with a company that's
• 5:39
  scaling, with a company that has had meaningful share price
• 5:42
  appreciation, really every summer, it creates this positive
• 5:46
  correlation where as we go up mathematically and systemically,
• 5:53
  more people have to buy it, right?
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  As we always have this massive spike in the short interest.
• 5:59
  It's it's almost comical at this point on really institutional
• 6:04
  hedge fund guys kind of going like, what's this?
• 6:08
  Is this a supplement or is it a cyanide pill?
• 6:10
  Let me crunch it and find out. And like, Oh yeah, dude, it's
• 6:14
  glass pill. It's one time use and every time
• 6:17
  these guys pick up a glass pill and, you know, ground control to
• 6:22
  Major Tom, they take the pill every time and they blow
• 6:26
  themselves up. And you know, here we have the
• 6:28
  stock, you know, pre market or whatever it is, aftermarket
• 6:32
  already up. And the last time I checked it
• 6:34
  was $112. And I'm thinking did I miss some
• 6:36
  news here? I'm just trying to live a
• 6:38
  peaceful life and, and root for Montreal.
• 6:41
  So where is this stock? Yeah, 112 and $0.20.
• 6:45
  It's just rocketing it. It feels like people are are
• 6:48
  blowing up, but also a lot of people probably were taking in
• 6:52
  the weekend to reflect and see what's what's going on with this
• 6:57
  stock. I didn't check the actual
• 6:58
  overall space basket. Maybe space in general is going
• 7:01
  up, but we had, yeah, it looks like yeah, yeah, yeah,
• 7:06
  everything's going to going up. OK.
• 7:07
  So it's not really specific to us, but space is ripping.
• 7:10
  I think people are pretty excited about Starship launch.
• 7:14
  We'll get to that in a second. But just going back to ASTS, we
• 7:19
  have just a classic example of the experts really primed the
• 7:22
  pump for us. And Tim is, you know, God bless
• 7:26
  his soul. I mean, this guy, this guy
• 7:30
  really wants to go down with the wreckage.
• 7:31
  It's incredible. I was watching Batman last night
• 7:34
  and the scene where they're in the plane and Bane is like, no,
• 7:37
  no, they're expecting one of us in the wreckage.
• 7:40
  And the other guy's like, oh, OK, I'm going to sit here and
• 7:42
  die. Like Tim Ferrar is that guy
• 7:45
  that's just a clueless dope that is going to is the guy that's
• 7:49
  going to be found in the wreckage.
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  And they get, you know, the equivalent of Bain here is
• 7:52
  Global Star via site, SpaceX, all the people that are paying
• 7:56
  Tim for R and they're going to kind of move on, sell their
• 7:58
  companies or do whatever. And Tim is the dope that is
• 8:02
  going to be just smoked. And, you know, Kevin Chen is
• 8:07
  doing doing a great job of keeping receipts, really
• 8:09
  probably for two reasons. One, the general vindictiveness
• 8:12
  of this group. God bless us, you know, we've
• 8:15
  been through a lot. I think it's OK to hold a grudge
• 8:18
  against someone, especially for sport and especially if it
• 8:20
  motivates you. But two, to help people
• 8:23
  understand the track record of these experts.
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  And so in isolation, if we didn't basically take receipts
• 8:34
  and have a record of this, then this FUD would perpetuate with
• 8:38
  a, a high degree of harm because there's a track record, because
• 8:41
  we call it out and remind people.
• 8:43
  It hopefully tells, teaches people, you know, where
• 8:46
  appropriate to ignore these guys so that they don't screw up your
• 8:49
  position, so that you don't end up selling at a low price.
• 8:52
  If you or otherwise intend to be an owner, no one's telling you
• 8:54
  to buy the stock. No one's telling you to hold.
• 8:56
  No one's, no one's doing any of this stuff.
• 8:59
  But what Space Mob is really trying to do is for people who
• 9:02
  share a common conviction, ideally where people are sharing
• 9:06
  their own research and what drives their own conviction with
• 9:08
  a broader, I don't want to say group, A broader community of
• 9:13
  people, then then that's self reinforcing learning.
• 9:17
  But what you really don't want to have is people in isolation
• 9:20
  being picked off by nefarious actors.
• 9:23
  And so here, Tim, you know, quite rightly would have scared
• 9:27
  a lot of people if he, you know, came out and said they cannot
• 9:31
  launch on Falcon 9:00 because of the New Glen 3 mishap.
• 9:35
  And these things won't fit. Someone looking at this business
• 9:38
  plan would go, Oh my God, if they can't launch on SpaceX, if
• 9:43
  New Glen is grounded for years, which of course, was instantly
• 9:46
  proven as also wrong and they have no other launch providers,
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  Again, wrong. They're launching on ula they're
• 9:54
  going to launch on MHI. If you ignore all of these other
• 9:58
  facts which we've uncovered, someone could go, well, this,
• 10:02
  this company's cook, they have a critical path dependency.
• 10:04
  It's like someone trying to spin up a data center business and
• 10:07
  they, they cannot get NVIDIA chips.
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  You wouldn't buy that business. You'd go, well, they have a
• 10:12
  critical path dependency. This is a problem.
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  But they, you know, we're proven wrong instantly.
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  We've shipped our satellites to the SpaceX payload processing
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  facility. That should go a pretty long way
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  of convincing people that they can fit the satellites on the
• 10:27
  rocket. And that's why we keep records
• 10:31
  of this. Because if you just rewind in
• 10:33
  April, I remember the night I was calling Tanner late at
• 10:38
  night. I'd spent the morning listening
• 10:40
  to all the Teega's calls sort of in succession.
• 10:42
  And I remember just being kind of bummed out going, you know, I
• 10:44
  understand why shorts are attacking this thing.
• 10:48
  You know, I listen to this stuff and you know, as I internalize
• 10:53
  what I hear, nevermind what I believe, it certainly can be
• 10:57
  sobering to hear these negative expert calls this, you know,
• 11:00
  especially by competitors. And then you take into context
• 11:05
  some events like New Glenn 3. It's easy for people to spiral
• 11:10
  into negativity. Well, that was at $63.
• 11:13
  That's when the short interest went to all time highs.
• 11:16
  This is what happens with the stock.
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  It's very emotional because it's pre revenue effectively it's
• 11:22
  early, early in its development curve.
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  So it's very susceptible to changing opinions that Vol will
• 11:28
  at some point die down. I personally hope it doesn't.
• 11:31
  There's a lot of fun things you can do with a stock that has
• 11:33
  100% implied volatility. But at some point, this
• 11:38
  confidence interval around the company will go down.
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  But right now, buckle up. You know, as we saw just in the
• 11:45
  past two months, we've gone through violent extremes of
• 11:49
  sentiment, but going back to, again, what really matters, the
• 11:53
  constellation Constipation is over, or at the very least in
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  the advanced stages of ending. And so as we see these trucks
• 12:03
  just barreling out of the facility with these massive
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  boxes online, this is the beginning.
• 12:10
  This is the thing that for a lot of us, we've waited five years
• 12:14
  for. So I'm really excited about it.
• 12:19
  I'm an excitable person. I will refrain from posting
• 12:23
  pictures of the as TS cheerleaders message has been
• 12:26
  received. I've taken your feedback, but at
• 12:30
  200, can I please do it is my request.
• 12:33
  But I sat here this week just thinking we're really just
• 12:36
  thinking, you know, what is what is the path from here?
• 12:40
  And, and I always think, well, first of all, I think stocks are
• 12:43
  fascinating, but I'd always had this belief that if the stock
• 12:47
  were worth 20, then it would instantly go to 200, which is to
• 12:51
  say that the distribution isn't normal.
• 12:54
  As you pass various unlocks, which is sort of my terminology
• 12:57
  for critical path items. Once you've knocked down a
• 13:01
  domino, the market can race ahead to the extreme on whatever
• 13:05
  that domino represented. And so once you've got
• 13:07
  regulatory approval for the US, the market can instantly go bang
• 13:10
  U.S. market is ours. There's still going to be ARPU
• 13:14
  assumptions. There's going to be speed of
• 13:18
  deployment assumptions. These are big assumptions, but
• 13:21
  you've knocked out and that instance a big binary domino.
• 13:25
  Pretty important with this JV with the MN OS, we might have
• 13:31
  just increased our U.S. market exposure by 50%, going from 2/2
• 13:37
  of the market share. MN OS each kind of split 1/3, a
• 13:40
  third, a third to three pretty exciting.
• 13:44
  So that should be good for a pretty big jump in the stock
• 13:46
  price. Again, with the other other
• 13:49
  variables still having their appropriate risk weightings.
• 13:52
  But once you knock down a certain variable or change a
• 13:55
  risk weighting from perceived as risky to perceived as UN risky,
• 13:59
  these revaluations can be violent to the upside.
• 14:03
  And so this is something I understand really well.
• 14:05
  I've been doing this for a really long time and I have I
• 14:09
  think a pretty good visceral understanding of how securities
• 14:12
  are, are repriced. I've studied everything ever
• 14:17
  going back as far as market history is recorded.
• 14:19
  And I find that the human psychology of it all is, you
• 14:23
  know, sort of a labyrinth that you can spend your entire life
• 14:27
  studying, never perfected, but certainly get better at it.
• 14:30
  And so I thought to myself, you know, basic question is I think
• 14:36
  being in the space mob is really fun, but one of the biggest
• 14:38
  risks to me of space mob is falling in love with the stock
• 14:44
  for Love's sake and not being the brutal capitalist that you
• 14:49
  need to be to make sure you own a security.
• 14:51
  Because your belief of future value, magnitude of future value
• 14:58
  change, durability of the business, which is to say that
• 15:02
  it's not just going to implode on you.
• 15:04
  You need to be thinking about these things every day.
• 15:07
  And so I'll often respond to people that say whoa kook, you
• 15:10
  know you're good. You already made your money.
• 15:13
  Well, I still owe my shares. So there is literally no
• 15:17
  difference to a person plopping down 9 figures tomorrow to go
• 15:22
  buy an equal ASCs position as I have to me waking up tomorrow
• 15:27
  and holding it with I can press that red button on my brokerage
• 15:32
  account and go to cash, I can make it go away.
• 15:35
  And the reason I don't is because rightly or wrongly, I
• 15:39
  think that tomorrow morning at the open it is a good
• 15:43
  investment. And So what does that mean to
• 15:46
  me? Not everything is going to be a
• 15:49
  gazillion bagger and certainly the dynamic of the stock is
• 15:53
  different at $112 versus $2.00. At $2.00 it was a, I hate to
• 16:00
  admit it, a very binary option where the company had a very
• 16:05
  real possibility of going to 0, at least in perception.
• 16:10
  I didn't believe that, which is why I owned it too.
• 16:13
  The stock at $112 is less likely to have the sort of rapid
• 16:18
  resolution to financial distress type rallies that you see with
• 16:21
  low dollar price stocks. It's just math.
• 16:24
  It's harder for that to happen with a company with a $40
• 16:28
  billion market cap versus one with whatever we had $600
• 16:31
  million. So those sort of rapid moves are
• 16:36
  are probably off the table in terms of the type of resolution
• 16:40
  of financial distress moves we've seen in the past.
• 16:42
  But at this point our downside is very different.
• 16:46
  And so it, we have a lot, we're not going to jump to 0.
• 16:50
  The, the company is in a dramatically different financial
• 16:53
  position. And for me, it really comes down
• 16:56
  to where do I think the velocity of good news is, is going to be.
• 16:59
  If the velocity of good news is, is going to peak or go down, the
• 17:03
  stock is, is probably going to go down.
• 17:05
  If the velocity of good news is likely to go up and accelerate,
• 17:09
  stock is probably going to go up.
• 17:11
  It's very hard for a stock to go down when the velocity of
• 17:13
  surprises is picking up. And so when when I think about
• 17:17
  what's likely to happen over the next year, the velocity of
• 17:21
  positive surprises is going to really pick up.
• 17:24
  So we've de risked a lot of things market sort of market
• 17:30
  adoption, we'll get to that in a second.
• 17:31
  Regulatory outlook, commercial outlook, the performance of the
• 17:35
  satellites, the balance sheet financing, these sorts of things
• 17:38
  that took us a long way. But what the market has yet to
• 17:43
  see it's pricing in some of this is what scaled execution looks
• 17:48
  like. What is it really look like when
• 17:52
  the company is popping out 6 to 10 satellites per month?
• 17:57
  What does it look like as they start to stack that into a
• 17:59
  monetized constellation? I really want to find out.
• 18:06
  And so I think it's going to be really exciting because the
• 18:08
  wrong way to look at this in my view is on 2027 revenue.
• 18:13
  People are going to go, Oh my God, it's trading at like 40
• 18:15
  times revenue. No, the markets going to
• 18:20
  ultimately see through it. So again, on my construct of if
• 18:23
  it's worth 20, it's worth 200. If this company has a certain
• 18:27
  amount of value, it implies that satellites have certain unit
• 18:31
  economics. Then what happens is if you can
• 18:34
  build 45 satellites, you know, you can build 450.
• 18:41
  And so then the remaining question is, is there any
• 18:43
  diminishing return to scale? I, I don't know, we could
• 18:47
  discuss that later, but my initial view is probably not.
• 18:51
  There is likely to be near infinite demand for a premium
• 18:55
  data service within the realm of the imagination.
• 19:00
  And so in that respect, the market can look out very far
• 19:04
  once it's sort of wets its whistle on some near term
• 19:07
  success. And so the crux of this tweet
• 19:11
  was really around knocking down the necessary components the
• 19:17
  market needs to really look further out.
• 19:20
  The analogs to this are SpaceX itself, Palantir, crowd strike,
• 19:27
  Tesla, those companies each did enough for the market to go.
• 19:31
  It is no longer a question of success.
• 19:33
  It is an issue of how far out or willing to look and that
• 19:37
  question of how far out you're willing to look is going to have
• 19:40
  a lot to do with the underlying market.
• 19:42
  For one, if if you could make a case that there is going to be a
• 19:45
  secular decline in mobile data usage, well then that would be
• 19:49
  something you want to consider. I don't think any person on
• 19:52
  earth would make that argument. So then you would say really
• 19:58
  competitive dynamic. And so if you can look out three
• 20:02
  to five years and not really see a strong competitive change.
• 20:09
  Your stock can go to the moon. Now we can argue about SpaceX
• 20:12
  because that's certainly within that five year horizon or could
• 20:15
  be within that five year horizon.
• 20:16
  And that's going to be a wall of worry that the stock is is
• 20:20
  probably going to have to climb from increasingly high dollar
• 20:24
  valuations. But very quickly over the next
• 20:28
  six months to a year, the bear case of can't build and launch
• 20:32
  the constellation is going to be disproved.
• 20:35
  The bear case of Starlink is going to win.
• 20:37
  DDCI think the S1 is is really showing that they are not and
• 20:42
  that may be really what's helping the stock.
• 20:45
  The bear case of M and OS are going to compress economics.
• 20:48
  We'll see. I think there's been a lot of
• 20:51
  discussion around the JV and I talked about it a lot last week.
• 20:56
  I know AMPAN man has a lot. So we'll see.
• 20:58
  But it worth noting that ASTS has a line the nose for
• 21:04
  profitability and growth. They're on the cap table and
• 21:08
  they participate on a revenue basis and they don't view ASTS
• 21:12
  as a cost. We're about to get a lot of
• 21:15
  spectrum, which adds a completely different dynamic to
• 21:18
  our company. And then we could get some big
• 21:22
  time, I hope some big time government deals which solidify
• 21:25
  us as really too big to fail. So those things happening, which
• 21:29
  I think are likely could allow us to have, you know, I, I think
• 21:35
  an an incredible upside price participation.
• 21:40
  And one thing I, I learned actually, and I actually see him
• 21:42
  on this call, you know, I'm always learning from this
• 21:44
  community. It's really been the, I don't
• 21:48
  know, most certainly most rewarding thing I can remember
• 21:51
  doing. It's it's basically the the
• 21:52
  parts of my old job that I used to love, but on absolute crystal
• 21:56
  meth, like I used to be really networked guy and and have my
• 22:00
  communities, but they're all in real life through idea dinners
• 22:03
  and things like that. I really enjoyed it.
• 22:05
  But when you digitize that on a global basis with no barriers,
• 22:09
  like very few people on these calls, I think actually work at
• 22:12
  hedge funds and things. So this is really just
• 22:13
  crowdsourcing raw intellect and talent.
• 22:16
  So you, you learn a lot of new things at a rapid rate and one
• 22:19
  kind of frame of mind aspect I learned, which was new to me and
• 22:24
  again, also kind of just tells you learn from the culture is
• 22:28
  the idea of a moon bag. And so Luttrell, what is his
• 22:32
  actual ticker? There is Luttrell, Luttrell
• 22:36
  Spackwell and I've been chatting for years.
• 22:40
  I haven't talked to him directly in a in a long time, but he just
• 22:45
  had always gave me this advice when I think he was seeing how I
• 22:49
  generally traded. And I'm always kind of a zero to
• 22:52
  1 type of guy and a one to zero type of guy.
• 22:55
  I think I drive and pan man and talk crazy about this because if
• 22:58
  the second I kind of change my mind on a name, I just blow out
• 23:00
  of it. I just want to get it off my
• 23:02
  books. I don't want to be half in, half
• 23:04
  out. I'd rather just be all in, all
• 23:06
  out. And Latrell really kind of
• 23:08
  emphasize the concept of keeping your moon bags because on, on
• 23:12
  something that has kind of white space upside, it's very
• 23:16
  difficult to have a target price.
• 23:18
  I I don't really believe in the target price idea.
• 23:20
  Again, I go back to the idea of the velocity of good news and
• 23:24
  understanding the competitive position in the platform effects
• 23:27
  of the business. If those things are intact on a
• 23:30
  big secular winner, don't overthink it.
• 23:34
  You know, start to size things based on your own personal
• 23:36
  preferences. You know, do you need money for
• 23:38
  a house? Are you destroying your family
• 23:41
  life because of position sizing? You know, are you on margin?
• 23:45
  Don't be on margin, You know, and like, do you own your stuff?
• 23:47
  They're astx. Don't do that either.
• 23:49
  So, you know, a lot of things can drive position choices and
• 23:53
  you shouldn't be bullied by anyone on what's right for you.
• 23:58
  But the idea of a moonbag is an interesting concept on something
• 24:01
  like ASTS because there's going to be a lot of people to blow
• 24:04
  out of this thing If we RIP to 130 and imagine they're
• 24:08
  surprised if we conform to my framework that I posted and
• 24:13
  we're on our way to, you know, something much, much higher.
• 24:16
  And I saw someone doing a poll today.
• 24:18
  I think it might have been an AMPAN man on, you know, what we
• 24:21
  think the stock price might be in June.
• 24:23
  And someone in the comments was like, well, that would be very
• 24:25
  surprising. And the point was, yeah, that's
• 24:27
  the point. People can be very surprised how
• 24:30
  quickly and how high things can go.
• 24:33
  I don't think a lot of people thought SpaceX was going to be a
• 24:35
  $2 trillion company that might be the opening price.
• 24:41
  So it's very interesting dynamic.
• 24:43
  I'm always very humble to the power of momentum.
• 24:46
  Certainly at my firm, we have this humility of, you know,
• 24:49
  thinking we've had a good return, you know, sell a company
• 24:51
  and then someone else 10 XS after they buy it from us and we
• 24:54
  go like, Oh yeah, stab me in the neck.
• 24:58
  You know, it's just brutal. And so you want to keep keep
• 25:01
  moon bags if you have a secular winner in a growing big market
• 25:04
  with defensibility, I think simple as that.
• 25:07
  But you really don't want to ask me for advice.
• 25:10
  And you just look at what's going on.
• 25:13
  And so Bezos, who knows a thing or two is out there.
• 25:17
  Just saying space is going to be a gigantic industry.
• 25:25
  What does this guy know? When has he been right?
• 25:29
  What has he done? You know, who is this kook?
• 25:32
  You know, Bezos is I really respect him.
• 25:34
  The more I've kind of listened to him speak because you can
• 25:36
  just tell he's he's very quiet, but he is ruthless.
• 25:40
  And so he doesn't have the same histrionics as Elon Musk.
• 25:44
  He seems much more of just put his nose down and and do it.
• 25:47
  And he's saying, here's another thing from Chez Velour.
• 25:51
  Jeff Bezos says space based data centers are a quote very
• 25:54
  realistic. But two to three, your timelines
• 25:56
  are probably too aggressive. OK, that seems fair.
• 26:01
  But the market is going to start to look through this stuff and
• 26:04
  they're going to start to ask what is the space economy?
• 26:08
  And this is something I've been talking about for a couple weeks
• 26:11
  because I always thought space economy was sort of like, yo-yo
• 26:13
  language for dopes, one of these broad sort of Kathy Wood things
• 26:18
  that really said nothing. And the space economy previously
• 26:22
  has just been telecom. That's really been it.
• 26:25
  You have some sideshow stuff, like some imaging and things
• 26:28
  like that, but the big meat on the bone do something business
• 26:32
  has been telecom. And you could say TV too, but
• 26:35
  that was kind of a dud. I think we're rapidly coiling
• 26:39
  where scalable economic space applications starts to rapidly
• 26:46
  change. Telecom is the very obvious one.
• 26:49
  SpaceX showed that ASTS is hopefully about to show that.
• 26:55
  And then military applications for core infrastructure I think
• 26:59
  is the easy, easy follow with radar and PNT and things like
• 27:04
  that. I think it's a very easy follow
• 27:06
  for that. Certainly not as big as telecom
• 27:08
  or I wouldn't think as big, but pretty big.
• 27:12
  And then the big kahuna appears to be power generation.
• 27:17
  And the corollary to power generation is the AI data
• 27:21
  centers. And so there are going to be
• 27:23
  platform businesses that are early that build big moats that
• 27:28
  are able to then adapt with changing trends in the changing
• 27:32
  nature of the space economy. And that's where the multi
• 27:35
  trillion dollar outcomes happen. When I think back, just just off
• 27:40
  the cuff talking right now, this again, I never do any real prep
• 27:43
  for this. You get what you pay for, but
• 27:47
  people that are early to a big idea start to have degrees of
• 27:51
  freedom that other people cannot get.
• 27:54
  A great example, really a great example in so many ways is
• 27:58
  Amazon. They built out the
• 28:00
  infrastructure for online commerce.
• 28:03
  Books was just the test case because you could have
• 28:08
  incredible depth of inventory, which was valuable to the
• 28:11
  consumer. And books don't go bad and
• 28:14
  they're pretty easy to ship. And people know when their book
• 28:17
  is a book is a book. So it's high trust to buy
• 28:20
  online. And then they moved around, you
• 28:23
  know, they would test some things.
• 28:25
  You remember Zappos, that guy, that CEO read his name.
• 28:28
  But he certainly was a kook and learned a valuable lesson about
• 28:32
  drugs the hard way. So don't be like him.
• 28:35
  But people were like, you can't sell shoes and you know, you
• 28:39
  could. Not that that's a huge business.
• 28:40
  But they started to experiment and grow.
• 28:42
  And then Amazon really obviously grew to everything.
• 28:46
  But to beat Amazon once they had already accelerated down the
• 28:50
  path with books was very difficult.
• 28:52
  They had a head start. They started to have logistics
• 28:54
  infrastructure. They had the trust.
• 28:56
  They had solved so many of the problems.
• 28:59
  That is very good. And it was very hard to catch.
• 29:03
  You had jet.com, you know, make a go of it and you know, sort of
• 29:07
  Aqua hired them themselves to Walmart.
• 29:11
  And then take things like Tesla, you know, I don't know if that's
• 29:14
  the perfect example, but they're so far down the line with EV
• 29:17
  technology, low on the cost curve that it's hard for people
• 29:21
  to replicate. Take NVIDIA.
• 29:24
  They started to really have a deep expertise in, and I might
• 29:29
  get this wrong in terms of how I say it, but matrices and so
• 29:35
  doing a different type of semiconductor compute than the
• 29:39
  X86 platform that was perceived in niche, but they were the best
• 29:43
  at it and it gave them degrees of freedom to solve very
• 29:46
  different problems. And so I think that the space
• 29:49
  economy is, is going to go down this line.
• 29:52
  If you're starting to build state level satellite production
• 29:56
  scale, you're going to have a kick ass advantage on whatever
• 30:01
  business comes next because you're going to already have all
• 30:04
  that infrastructure. There's three companies that can
• 30:08
  do that. Screw MAG 7, how about MAG 3?
• 30:14
  And so this is what gets really exciting.
• 30:15
  How many of us are going to be around when all this comes out
• 30:18
  to play? Who knows?
• 30:20
  These are champagne problems at the end of the day.
• 30:22
  But it is an interesting thing to really think about.
• 30:25
  I don't want to get people bowled up or or overly excited,
• 30:28
  but these are the types of things I wrestle in my mind
• 30:31
  because there's lots of stocks, there's lots of incredible
• 30:34
  opportunities in the market, there's lots of ideas, but this
• 30:37
  one is mine. And so I've chosen to focus on
• 30:43
  what I believe is a great idea and own it and not let all these
• 30:50
  tangential things interfere with my thinking or hop around or get
• 30:53
  confused. But try to think like an owner
• 30:55
  and think like a founder. Jeff Bezos, not a trader, you
• 30:59
  know, who traded Bill Gates countless hundreds of billions
• 31:04
  of dollars of wealth destruction because he just didn't own the
• 31:07
  thing he knew the best. Steve Ballmer just owned
• 31:11
  Microsoft. You don't have to trade to be
• 31:14
  one of the richest people in the world.
• 31:16
  You just have to know what you own.
• 31:18
  So that's what I'm focused on. I think I probably beaten that
• 31:21
  saying to death, but things that matter when you think about the
• 31:27
  long term scalability of business really comes down to
• 31:30
  structural advantage. And so my friend just Justin at
• 31:34
  just bar 23, which everyone, everyone already does follow
• 31:37
  him. But if you don't, you should.
• 31:39
  He just, I didn't check this math, but intuitively makes
• 31:41
  sense to me that a Block 2 satellite will cost $23 million
• 31:44
  to build and launch in its final state.
• 31:46
  So again, that's not what these satellites cost yet because
• 31:48
  we're really on the production curve.
• 31:51
  It's it's kind of think of like a Rivian.
• 31:53
  Everyone that bought an early Rivian was, was buying like a
• 31:56
  $200,000 car that they bought for $70,000.
• 31:59
  Rivian to make money needs needed scale.
• 32:03
  I don't know the latest with Rivian, but early satellites
• 32:06
  certainly cost more. But as they absorb the cost,
• 32:08
  they will go down. So just use the $23 million as a
• 32:11
  long term cost. But this is the equivalent of 16
• 32:15
  Starlink satellites in cost. But those satellites are block 2
• 32:20
  satellites will have 100 times the capacity.
• 32:24
  And so that's really the scale benefit here.
• 32:27
  And so what's really driving that simple, the Micron a bell
• 32:36
  invented the sun sandwich. On one side of the sun sandwich,
• 32:40
  we have solar collecting energy from the sun.
• 32:44
  On the other side of the sun sandwich, we have the thing you
• 32:47
  do something with. So you create a lot of
• 32:50
  electricity and then you do something and that's what is
• 32:52
  market driven. That can be beaming power down
• 32:55
  through microwave beams in the future.
• 32:57
  That can be AI data processing in the future.
• 32:59
  That can be radar in the future. Right now it's radio frequency
• 33:05
  generation processing. So that's sandwich means that
• 33:08
  our entire square footage is being dedicated to power and
• 33:12
  commercial application. That's not how SpaceX is
• 33:15
  designed. They have a separate solar array
• 33:17
  and then they have their array. Two different things and so
• 33:27
  useful to know, but that capital efficiency thing is important.
• 33:31
  We would note that Abell and Scott, we'll get to Scott in a
• 33:34
  second. We're really on the offense this
• 33:36
  week and that got me pretty excited because you don't often
• 33:39
  see Abell out doing interviews for for one, I don't think he's
• 33:44
  particularly comfortable doing this.
• 33:45
  He's an engineer. I don't think he likes to be out
• 33:49
  really not pumping, but like talking about himself.
• 33:51
  I think he likes to be in the factory floor getting stuff
• 33:54
  done. So, you know, when he's out
• 33:55
  doing it, he's he has Scott to do that.
• 33:59
  So that means he's doing it on purpose and that means it's
• 34:01
  about to rain because he's making big things happen.
• 34:06
  So he was out there doing interviews and then he implied
• 34:09
  in no uncertain terms that we got T-Mobile, which again is the
• 34:16
  final boss really. And so Abell said, quote
• 34:20
  including now we will have access to every operator in the
• 34:22
  United States. Really amazing space mob called
• 34:26
  this shot from a mile away and and we got it so pretty
• 34:32
  exciting. And then we also had John Stanky
• 34:36
  from AT&T talking about the JV. And so Ann Penn man did a spaces
• 34:41
  that summarized it, but he also did a nice job providing some
• 34:45
  notes. Let me find those notes and so
• 34:50
  yeah, this is actually a very long tweet he did, but all this
• 34:53
  summary is out there from Anpan man.
• 34:55
  So thank him for for doing that. And what can you say the, the JV
• 35:05
  is something that initially that I look at this Tut, this Tut
• 35:08
  post where they summarize what AT&T said.
• 35:13
  And they said we've had a great relationship with AST space
• 35:15
  mobile. The technology and the approach
• 35:17
  that they're using is unique for direct to device.
• 35:19
  I think it's going to be a great path for the first product that
• 35:21
  comes out that is effectively a, a seamless and straightforward
• 35:27
  product for a consumer to use that extends the network.
• 35:30
  And we're going to continue down that path.
• 35:31
  And Tut's remark is this is usually what you hear before a
• 35:35
  company goes to 0. He's being sarcastic.
• 35:39
  And so we have a lot of great things happening.
• 35:41
  You know, again, not the least is you're going to have or you
• 35:44
  are having all of the MN OS coalescing around Asts, really
• 35:51
  the way chip makers coalesced around ASML, that analog which
• 35:55
  we had talked about for years is looking to come true.
• 36:00
  And again, it goes down to a lot of the reinforcing modes that
• 36:03
  this company has, not the least of which is the tech, but also
• 36:07
  the regulatory. And then by the MN OS
• 36:10
  acknowledging the tech and the regulatory advantages ASTS does,
• 36:17
  they create our commercial mode. And then it's a really just for
• 36:22
  reinforcing because then as more MN OS join, this becomes the
• 36:26
  absolute low cost best service, which causes more MN OS to join,
• 36:30
  which then definitionally makes it much harder for any other
• 36:33
  satellite competitor to have an economically viable solution.
• 36:38
  I hope it plays out like I've said it, because a reinforcing
• 36:43
  buried entry is a very good reason why a company should
• 36:47
  trade at a high trading multiple, which is a way to pull
• 36:53
  for your returns. And so next we have a tweet by
• 36:57
  Doctor Ollie. Doctor Ollie is certainly an OG,
• 37:02
  and whether he's correctly or incorrectly sort of followed and
• 37:08
  acknowledged, I don't know. But certainly when Doctor Ollie
• 37:11
  tweets, I drop everything. It's sort of like on a cat sea
• 37:15
  level of insight. So I just suggest everyone read
• 37:19
  all of his tweets and he comes out really kind of builds on the
• 37:25
  the cat Sea works in a way here and he goes.
• 37:27
  One of the most overlooked details in the AST space mobile
• 37:30
  thesis is the company stating that Bluebird satellites can
• 37:33
  operate using four different frequencies simultaneously.
• 37:36
  I think that completely changes how investors should think about
• 37:39
  the network architecture. A lot of people originally
• 37:42
  assumed that this would become an exclusive competitive
• 37:44
  advantage for AT&T and later Verizon, which is why many
• 37:47
  believe T Noble would never be allowed into the ecosystem.
• 37:51
  But I never really viewed Asts as a traditional carrier
• 37:54
  relationship. I always viewed it more as a
• 37:56
  tower company. At the end of the day, while the
• 37:59
  technology is revolutionary, it is still infrastructure.
• 38:02
  Tower companies do not really care which carrier is paying to
• 38:05
  use the real estate as long as the infrastructure is monetized
• 38:08
  efficiently. This is why I think the recent
• 38:10
  JV and AT&T's move into nationwide 600 megahertz
• 38:14
  spectrum may end up being far more important than most people
• 38:17
  realize. My current theory is that this
• 38:19
  could evolve into a roaming style framework where AT&T
• 38:22
  utilizes Band 71 satellite coverage while leveraging
• 38:25
  portions of T-mobile's terrestrial infrastructure and
• 38:28
  ecosystem in exchange for T-Mobile joining the ASTS
• 38:31
  network. Wow, this is interesting.
• 38:35
  When you combine the idea that ASTSASTS has ability to support
• 38:39
  4 frequencies simultaneously, the puzzle pieces start fitting
• 38:42
  together. Huh.
• 38:45
  Spoiler alert, grain, you could theoretically have Band 5
• 38:49
  carrying AT&T traffic, band 13 carrying Verizon traffic, band
• 38:53
  14 supporting Firstnet, and Band 71 extending rural and dead zone
• 38:58
  coverage for T-Mobile and potentially AT&T, all on the
• 39:01
  same orbital infrastructure layers simultaneously.
• 39:06
  Pretty exciting. You can start to see where all
• 39:11
  of these frequencies find the most efficient platform, which
• 39:16
  is what Katzie had said all along.
• 39:19
  And we become a spectrum holding company either directly because
• 39:23
  of our ownership of the spectrum or synthetically because of the
• 39:27
  partner relationships we have, which aggregate all of it.
• 39:30
  It's killer. So thanks to Doctor Ollie for
• 39:34
  that. Again, you should really look at
• 39:36
  all of his tweets. He's been contributing and
• 39:38
  leading as a contributor to Space Mob for years and years
• 39:43
  and years. We also had Scott out there.
• 39:46
  So Scott had an awesome interview at JP Morgan.
• 39:49
  I listened to that seems like a year ago at this point.
• 39:53
  Listen to that entire thing. And he really just states what
• 39:57
  they're doing right out there, you know, business as usual.
• 40:01
  So they're in clear execution mode.
• 40:04
  You should listen to Scott speak whenever he's in these fireside
• 40:09
  chats. Because he gives a lot of not
• 40:12
  even clues, he just tells you what they're going to do.
• 40:15
  And so some of the key highlights were free cash flow
• 40:19
  positive before $1 billion in revenue, not after.
• 40:23
  So what that's telling you is assume 80% margin, that's $800
• 40:28
  million of gross margin. What he's telling you is they're
• 40:31
  going to scale their OpEx because they're going to they're
• 40:33
  going to hire, but they're going to very quickly move into
• 40:37
  operating leverage mode and then it's it's game over.
• 40:42
  And so his definition of free cash flow, you know, he
• 40:45
  obviously was speaking off the cuff.
• 40:47
  So we don't know if that's after maintenance cap backs and growth
• 40:50
  cap backs or whatever, but with fixed cost of about $400
• 40:54
  million, this company starts to generate a lot of free cash flow
• 40:58
  very quickly. He talked about the one $2.2
• 41:01
  billion in revenue backlog. That's really exciting.
• 41:04
  He talked about 10 distinct government use cases.
• 41:07
  I think there's three of which which are meaningful in terms of
• 41:10
  revenue right now, could get that wrong, confirmed SpaceX.
• 41:15
  It's exciting. And then he talked about the
• 41:19
  different launch providers. We have Falcon with three per
• 41:25
  launch, New Glen from 4 going to 8, Vulcan at 5, ISRO with two
• 41:31
  MHI at 3:00 and then Ariana six at 5 per launch.
• 41:35
  That's a lot of rockets that we can launch on.
• 41:38
  I'm excited to try to go to all these, maybe not the Ariana one
• 41:41
  because I don't even know if you can go to French Guyana, but
• 41:45
  it's going to be really exciting to see all the launch capacity
• 41:47
  that we are going to be using and we have a well diversified
• 41:52
  base. And so this goes back to what
• 41:55
  the shorts are finding out that they had done incorrectly, which
• 42:00
  is they thought that there was a critical path partner for this
• 42:04
  company's success and that that critical path had gone wrong.
• 42:07
  They thought with New Glenn three, our key critical path
• 42:12
  launch provider relationship was toast.
• 42:14
  Not true. They're finding out the the hard
• 42:17
  way as we literally ship our satellites to SpaceX.
• 42:21
  He talks about Vodafone and their $1 billion investment in
• 42:26
  ASTS. Of course, $1 billion in
• 42:28
  appreciated equity. They've made a fortune, they
• 42:31
  have exclusivity across Europe and Africa, They're really
• 42:36
  locking up market share everywhere and trying to think
• 42:39
  of what else was important. But there's quite a lot in this
• 42:43
  interview and I recommend everyone if you have a chance to
• 42:46
  read it. We're really starting to go
• 42:49
  gloves off in terms of talking about the government
• 42:53
  applications now. And so Kevin had a nice summary
• 42:58
  of of specifically what Scott talked about related to the
• 43:02
  government opportunities. And importantly, one thing that
• 43:07
  I've always found interesting, I'd speculated on this last
• 43:09
  summer is ASTS building out a government only shell.
• 43:14
  And Scott confirmed that that if the US government wants to go
• 43:18
  that way, they can do it. That would be consistent with
• 43:21
  the massive expansion in factory space that the company has
• 43:26
  rolled out. You wouldn't necessarily go
• 43:29
  build all that capacity out if you didn't know you're about to
• 43:31
  get something big that would utilize that dedicated capacity.
• 43:35
  And so a lot of us think that ASTS is already or or will
• 43:39
  shortly be doing government microns in a separate security.
• 43:43
  Something like that would fit very well with a big Golden Dome
• 43:47
  award and we will find out. And then we also saw some
• 43:52
  interesting stuff out of Anderol this week.
• 43:55
  Andrew came out with a new, whatever they call it, click on
• 43:59
  the link. It's some tactical gateway,
• 44:01
  which looks pretty cool and sure looks like it's the type of
• 44:08
  thing that would pair with AST Space Mobile.
• 44:11
  The device will not be using MSS connectivity, it'll be using
• 44:14
  global cellular broadband connectivity.
• 44:16
  And to our knowledge, there's only one company that can do
• 44:19
  that and that's AST Space Mobile.
• 44:21
  So never mind that. It would be cool to have an
• 44:24
  official partnership with Andorrell.
• 44:27
  It would also be cool just to watch the shorts scald
• 44:31
  themselves with the hot water of being mispositioned on a really
• 44:35
  fun PR that says ASTS and Andorrell doing some cool stuff
• 44:39
  together. That's certainly not the type of
• 44:41
  thing that if you're short stock, you want to see because
• 44:44
  you do not want to be short Andorrell derivatives.
• 44:47
  I can promise you that. And then the shorts might be
• 44:52
  having that hit them in the near future.
• 44:56
  So back to what can drive exciting stock outcomes because
• 45:01
  again, that's hopefully everyone is on this call.
• 45:04
  There might be a few enthusiasts here and there.
• 45:06
  I was in a Twitter, Twitter debate today with a guy, I think
• 45:09
  from Oregon that was saying, I don't know why you guys are
• 45:13
  saying bad stuff about space XI care so deeply because I'm just
• 45:16
  a space enthusiast. And I, I told him I was like,
• 45:19
  hey, dude, you did the meme. And he's like, what do you mean?
• 45:22
  Well, there's all these actual paid shorts that claim to be
• 45:26
  just enthusiasts, but they work for VSAT.
• 45:29
  And you know, the real, the real thing here.
• 45:32
  If you're not an enthusiast, but if you're a capitalist, which I
• 45:37
  am, you are really trying to study your competitive mode.
• 45:42
  That is the great question. And so one thing I learned from
• 45:47
  from one of My Portfolio company CEOs, which he in turn learned
• 45:51
  from one of his mentors, he said, Kook, the question you got
• 45:55
  to ask yourself as a as a founder and really as an
• 45:59
  investor is if I invent something cool, what happens
• 46:05
  when everyone copies it? Do I still have a great
• 46:09
  business? And that's the question you
• 46:12
  should ask yourself on any of your companies or any of your
• 46:15
  investments. If you actually have identified
• 46:17
  a great idea at the company level, once everyone understands
• 46:21
  it's a great idea, can they copy it?
• 46:25
  If so, what will that impact have on your company?
• 46:30
  Will it totally commoditize it and drive it to zero?
• 46:32
  Well, you should be very careful.
• 46:34
  Is it something that is fundamentally very difficult to
• 46:37
  copy? So it's not clear at all that
• 46:39
  there will be competition. Does competition have incredible
• 46:43
  challenges because of a self reinforcing buried entry that
• 46:46
  the first mover had? That's where I think ASTS falls
• 46:51
  in. Maybe people can engineer around
• 46:54
  the patents, maybe they can't, we'll find out.
• 46:57
  But the comments from Scott around this issue are very
• 47:02
  encouraging. And so as the AT disgusting
• 47:06
  plebe says, my God, and he's referring to what Scott said, we
• 47:11
  were always prepared for competition.
• 47:13
  While there will be a healthy market over time in the near
• 47:16
  medium and potentially 5 to Year 5 to 10 year term, this will be
• 47:21
  a high growth market where we will hold a leadership role.
• 47:25
  And so when I've gone through this pains, Deakinly, I think I
• 47:28
  tweeted some of this last week. When you actually go through all
• 47:32
  the different long pole items, if someone were to really start
• 47:35
  today to compete, it's years before you could be in striking
• 47:41
  position. And then even then, I don't know
• 47:44
  how you get commercial access to the users.
• 47:47
  And so people can fret about SpaceX it it sure looks like a
• 47:54
  paper tiger to me. And if that's true, then this
• 48:01
  opportunity, the ASTS is, is really, really good.
• 48:04
  I don't know how companies like Equisys or you can't even say
• 48:07
  it, the ViaSat JVI just have no idea how these are going to get
• 48:10
  off the ground. I don't know how Amazon is going
• 48:15
  to really make it happen. I'm not totally convinced Amazon
• 48:19
  is going to do D to C in the way they've described it.
• 48:21
  I think they're going to do their own flavor in sort of a
• 48:24
  Fire Phone type of way, whether it's an actual phone or not or
• 48:29
  like a really cool Kindle or who knows, you know, it would make a
• 48:34
  little bit more sense. But the length of our
• 48:38
  competitive advantage is something that I think the
• 48:40
  market is going to come to appreciate is quite long.
• 48:44
  The other thing that's a surprise is how long our
• 48:47
  satellites last. And so we have Doctor Ollie back
• 48:50
  for seconds this week and pointed out a tweet from another
• 48:57
  Smith here who's another incredible diligencer of this
• 49:00
  company. So pay attention to the account
• 49:03
  at 1. So #1 Moore Smith here, very
• 49:07
  smart person, clearly has a background in the industry and
• 49:10
  found in a Legato filing that our satellites are now supposed
• 49:14
  to have a useful life of 15 years.
• 49:17
  So this is likely as a result of changing our altitude because
• 49:22
  it's a non linear relationship between drag and altitude as it
• 49:27
  relates to how long satellites can station keep.
• 49:31
  And so this is probably the answer.
• 49:33
  And so what's great is if our satellites last 15 years that
• 49:36
  massively reduces our maintenance CapEx.
• 49:39
  And so as people point out, you might have the issue of the
• 49:44
  useful life of satellites in terms of the underlying
• 49:46
  technology, but having the physical satellites in air for
• 49:49
  that long is certainly something you'd rather have than not have.
• 49:53
  It reduces the potential for maintenance CapEx, which means
• 49:56
  we can be investing more toward growth before we get into
• 49:58
  replenishment, which is a really big problem SpaceX has.
• 50:01
  I was talking to another guy this week.
• 50:04
  SpaceX is really starting to get into a wall where the decline
• 50:07
  rate of their satellites. So think of them as almost an
• 50:10
  oil company where they have wells, which are their
• 50:12
  satellites up in the air, and those are deorbiting.
• 50:14
  And so they have to spend a considerable amount of their
• 50:16
  resources every year just to stay still.
• 50:20
  Their satellites are flying at a low altitude, I believe 300
• 50:23
  kilometers. And so they do, they do orbit
• 50:26
  quickly. And that means that a very
• 50:27
  significant portion of Falcon 9 capacity is going just to
• 50:31
  preserving the existing capacity before you get to augmenting it.
• 50:35
  That's why Starship is so important for the Starlink
• 50:38
  business, in fact might be vital for it.
• 50:42
  But if ASTS can push off its replenishment needs yet further,
• 50:47
  that just frees up capital going to growth.
• 50:51
  And then down the line, I wouldn't be surprised if we do
• 50:53
  have massively different innovations in next, next Gen.
• 50:58
  satellites. I'm sure that the old ones will
• 51:00
  be useful for for providing different services.
• 51:03
  And so just like telecom can, you know, still, I forget when
• 51:07
  like 3G or 2G were deprecated. I don't know if 3G has been, but
• 51:12
  some of these other network layers still exist because
• 51:14
  you've hung the towers and then you just push demanding traffic
• 51:18
  to the new stuff. So let's get to the seasonality
• 51:22
  of the stock we had at here in Harini PK.
• 51:28
  Just do the simple seasonality chart of what happens to ASTS
• 51:32
  space mobile whenever we get to June.
• 51:34
  And the answer is the stock just goes straight up.
• 51:37
  And I personally think that has a lot to do with the Russell re
• 51:39
  weightings. And we've also tended to have
• 51:42
  launch activity and de risking type stuff that has that has hit
• 51:51
  at this this time of year. And so in 2025 we had block 1
• 51:58
  going up. I'm actually really can't even
• 52:01
  remember 2024. I believe we had AT and TDA then
• 52:05
  Verizon DA. So that was really, you know, a
• 52:07
  kick, a kick in the butt for this horse to get going.
• 52:11
  And now this year, if you're looking for what a future
• 52:14
  narrative is going to be, you have all time high short
• 52:17
  interest, you have all eyes on space because of SpaceX, and now
• 52:21
  you have the end of Constellation Constipation,
• 52:24
  which is really one of the great final unlocks for the thesis.
• 52:28
  The remaining ones are going to be market size, ARPU,
• 52:31
  competitive dynamics and things like that.
• 52:33
  But the point where you can ask those questions and have those
• 52:38
  debates is entirely reliant on the company actually getting
• 52:42
  metal in orbit, which is now what they're proving that they
• 52:45
  can do. And so the debate down the line
• 52:48
  from a stock price, which my guess is higher that will happen
• 52:53
  is going to be around the network usage until you have
• 52:56
  things like T-Mobile saying that satellite represents .0002% of
• 53:05
  their network traffic. Well, I haven't done the
• 53:06
  calculation of what their network traffic is.
• 53:09
  That is surely a GARGATOU in number.
• 53:13
  And what they're not saying in that statement is the value of
• 53:19
  the long tail. And so satellite service is
• 53:22
  going to be capacity constrained.
• 53:24
  It's going to be a premium service.
• 53:27
  And so never mind that Starlink doesn't really have any
• 53:31
  capacity. Some of these T-Mobile
• 53:35
  statements aren't all that particularly useful to think
• 53:40
  about, especially when you have SpaceX, which is a crappy MVP
• 53:45
  service. But you're going to have those
• 53:48
  things out there and it's going to cause some consternation for
• 53:50
  people from time to time. But looking forward, what really
• 53:54
  matters is the aggregation of spectrum.
• 53:56
  And So what we had, we talked about this last week, I think is
• 54:01
  ASTS getting authorized by Brazil's Anitel to operate the
• 54:06
  constellation on S Band in Brazil.
• 54:09
  And so ASDS is getting a 10 by 10 megahertz swath of spectrum.
• 54:14
  And so ultimately, when someone says, hey, you know, the network
• 54:18
  usage is this small percent, well, it's definitionally going
• 54:24
  to be a small percent for SpaceX because they only have this, I
• 54:27
  think it's a 5 by 5 sliver of S band that they're working with,
• 54:31
  small amount of spectrum. So even if everyone in the world
• 54:34
  wanted to use it, they couldn't. There's just no spectrum.
• 54:38
  And so ASTS keeps aggregating this low band and hopefully
• 54:42
  increasingly so these big swaths of low band and then
• 54:45
  complementing it with the MSS spectrum.
• 54:47
  Spectrum equals the ability to push data, which is the ability
• 54:52
  for people to use it. It's always going to be
• 54:55
  constrained. This is always going to be the
• 54:57
  premium segment of the market, which will ultimately get us to
• 55:01
  an RP discussion. But another paper just to
• 55:05
  switch, switch gears a little bit, we have the Hennessy letter
• 55:09
  came out really I believe last week.
• 55:14
  It might have missed the weekly, I can't remember, but I think I
• 55:18
  did talk about it a little bit. But it's just worth revisiting
• 55:21
  the Hennessy letter because these guys have also been in the
• 55:25
  stock for quite a while, which means a couple of things.
• 55:28
  They've been in the stock as a small position.
• 55:30
  It became a huge position. They kept it as a huge position.
• 55:33
  That is uncharacteristic. That means that they've made an
• 55:36
  exception for their risk management protocol, which means
• 55:38
  that they learn something, they saw something, they know
• 55:40
  something, They're professional investors.
• 55:42
  They're going to have the access and the ability to pick up the
• 55:44
  phone. People will pick up their call.
• 55:47
  Who knows what they know in the granular details, but they very
• 55:52
  generously shared the high level details of their conclusions.
• 55:57
  And so they're expecting Asts to generate 2.4 to $4.4 billion in
• 56:02
  annual revenue from worldwide military and 1st responder
• 56:05
  opportunities. And then in addition to that,
• 56:09
  U.S. National intelligence adding on
• 56:12
  top of that. And I would just say that based
• 56:16
  on my knowledge of Hennessy, based on my general belief in my
• 56:21
  own St. smarts, I would say that their numbers are probably not
• 56:25
  random. And you could look at something
• 56:28
  like that and go, what do they know through induction?
• 56:31
  Can I just guess it what they know?
• 56:34
  And wow, $4 billion for a business line that wasn't even
• 56:39
  contemplated by investors five years ago, that's pretty
• 56:44
  exciting. That's probably worth 2 times
• 56:48
  the current stock price by itself.
• 56:51
  And so that's going to always be the little addendum to these
• 56:55
  market sizing questions around consumer.
• 56:57
  And I don't want to say that I'm bearish on the consumer market.
• 57:00
  I'm not at all. But it is so easy for people to
• 57:04
  lose sight of the diverse applications and market segments
• 57:09
  that this technology has that they could very easily be
• 57:13
  blindsided by what could happen here.
• 57:18
  And the inflection around the overall sentiment is something
• 57:26
  that is also rapidly evolving. And so at the JP Morgan
• 57:30
  conference, we had this quote. Wilst direct to device was
• 57:35
  initially seen as complementary to the wireless ecosystem.
• 57:38
  A number of developments have raised concerns this technology
• 57:42
  could, over time, develop into a threat.
• 57:46
  We see a need for Deutsche Telekom to take bolder steps to
• 57:49
  protect its Moat. Well, you know, that's what
• 57:54
  happens in life. Disruptive, great technology
• 57:58
  starts small, can be easily ignored, and then the next thing
• 58:03
  you know it, it's knocking at your door.
• 58:05
  It eats you alive. Just like EVs were going to be
• 58:08
  this like small little niche. Just like cell phones are going
• 58:11
  to be the small little niche. Just like the personal computer
• 58:14
  was going to be the small little niche, All of these things
• 58:17
  started small and expensive, but ultimately gave consumers
• 58:21
  incredible amounts of utility and convenience.
• 58:24
  With scale, prices went down. If they're seamless and low
• 58:29
  friction at a low cost, people will want them in the extreme
• 58:36
  and technology improves. And so we've looked at this with
• 58:40
  Katzie's work that as the spectral efficiency improves,
• 58:46
  the cost competitive nature of satellite starts to take on your
• 58:50
  highest cost towers. As it improves more, you take on
• 58:55
  more of those towers and more you start to eat American Tower
• 58:58
  alive. American Tower very obviously
• 59:01
  saw this problem. They realize it was probably
• 59:04
  inescapable, which is why they hitched their wagon to ASTS.
• 59:07
  So it's, if this is going to happen anyway, we might as well
• 59:11
  A, know a lot about it by being an investor and being on the
• 59:14
  board and B, have a big stake in this company to make a lot of
• 59:17
  money from it. But the telecom saw that this
• 59:20
  was knocking on their door and that's what led to the JV.
• 59:24
  And so they're all bear hugging ASTS to at the very least keep
• 59:29
  SpaceX at Bay. And they're hoping that ASTS
• 59:33
  will honor their gentleman's agreement to be a carrier
• 59:36
  neutral technology, which is best as I can tell is the most
• 59:40
  efficient business plan for Asts to have anyway.
• 59:43
  But the sentiment around DDD can very quickly change from it's
• 59:49
  only good for national parks, don't worry about it to Oh my
• 59:53
  God, it's coming for us. And that's the exciting thing
• 59:56
  about how stock prices can inflect that goes back to the
• 59:59
  Luttrell Spackwell moonbag concept.
• 1:00:02
  It's an interesting concept. It's very difficult to spot the
• 1:00:06
  terminal upside of a secular winner if it's a good business
• 1:00:10
  model with defensible modes, especially self reinforcing
• 1:00:12
  modes with good capital allocation.
• 1:00:15
  That last part rains to be seen. I'm pretty sure a bell won't do
• 1:00:18
  won't do dumb things with cash flow once he has it.
• 1:00:21
  But it if if we continue to see those things being true, you got
• 1:00:24
  to test those things. Then just go all the guns good.
• 1:00:30
  You know, that's kind of what it is.
• 1:00:32
  So next we have a long Kathy tweet.
• 1:00:34
  I don't know if I have the mental energy to go over that
• 1:00:38
  with everyone right now. But cats.
• 1:00:40
  He's doing catsy stuff. I'll just leave that tweet there
• 1:00:42
  for people that want to read catsy stuff.
• 1:00:46
  But let's go to SpaceX. So I think the world realizes
• 1:00:49
  it's actually funny. I was talking to one of my one
• 1:00:51
  of my buddies and he's like, yeah, this morning I was
• 1:00:54
  watching the news. Well, my wife wanted me to get
• 1:00:56
  my kids ready. And I learned that SpaceX is
• 1:00:59
  really just the world's most expensive Internet service
• 1:01:01
  provider. And I'm like, yeah, that's
• 1:01:04
  that's what it is. And people are learning that
• 1:01:07
  launch is sexy to watch, but as a business model might not
• 1:01:11
  actually be really that exciting and certainly might not be that
• 1:01:14
  scalable. Where have you heard that
• 1:01:16
  before? And, you know, like, yes, do the
• 1:01:18
  Rocket Lab Bros hate me forever? Yeah, yeah, whatever.
• 1:01:22
  I am rooting for their success regardless.
• 1:01:26
  And I think Peter Beck is a total bad ass.
• 1:01:27
  But I don't think launch is really the space economy.
• 1:01:32
  It is the conduit to the space economy.
• 1:01:34
  If there is valuable stuff to do in space, you need launch.
• 1:01:38
  If there is not valuable stuff to do in space, you do not leave
• 1:01:41
  need launch. Launch in and of itself is not
• 1:01:44
  useful, but for the cargoes that you are launching.
• 1:01:47
  And so launch should start with, are there useful cargoes that
• 1:01:52
  initially started with governments.
• 1:01:53
  We need spy satellites, we need ISS, things like that.
• 1:01:56
  There's a limit to how much governments will spend.
• 1:01:59
  It's going to be a big number. What you really want to do is
• 1:02:02
  hit the infinite money glitch of commercial applications.
• 1:02:07
  That's what Starlink proved, that broadband is a product
• 1:02:12
  people like. And so it goes back to telecom.
• 1:02:17
  I'm increasingly of the view that the AI data center thing
• 1:02:20
  will be right. That's that is really big, and
• 1:02:22
  that's probably what people are going to get really excited
• 1:02:25
  about when thinking about the SpaceX IPOI really find it hard
• 1:02:31
  to believe that bonafide investors are actually buying
• 1:02:36
  SpaceX because of launch. I just don't think that there's
• 1:02:42
  that many people that think that that's really the thing.
• 1:02:46
  Launch is really a means to an end for them that happens to be
• 1:02:49
  vertical, vertical integration because of design choices they
• 1:02:52
  made and lack of what had then been a substitute launch
• 1:02:57
  provider because it didn't exist for the Starlink business.
• 1:03:00
  And then subsequently there are other brave endeavors that they
• 1:03:03
  want to do. But as people read the SpaceX I
• 1:03:07
  PS1, they're starting to realize space economy is real.
• 1:03:10
  Telecom is a massive scalable opportunity and I think they're
• 1:03:14
  going to glom onto the Facebook analog.
• 1:03:15
  I've been screaming at the clouds for the past five years
• 1:03:19
  of Facebook desktop was the entree with the appetizer.
• 1:03:25
  Sorry, Facebook mobile was the entree.
• 1:03:29
  Mobile is where the money's AT&ASTS is mobile broadband from
• 1:03:36
  space. That's big brain thinking.
• 1:03:41
  And to do that you need the terrestrial spectrum, and that
• 1:03:46
  means you have to make nice with M and OS.
• 1:03:50
  Do you guys see the problem SpaceX has?
• 1:03:53
  Wolf has hard time making friends with highly educated
• 1:03:58
  sheep. How are they going to do mobile?
• 1:04:02
  They're going to have to go direct, which reinforces the
• 1:04:05
  fear of the sheep of the wolf. Onward and onward the world does
• 1:04:10
  the great cascading hug into ASD space.
• 1:04:14
  Mobile. That's what I think people are
• 1:04:16
  going to be really figuring out. But let's check in with only 6
• 1:04:22
  inches. Another great space mob
• 1:04:24
  contributor. If you followed his stuff, you
• 1:04:26
  realize that he absolutely knows what he's doing and he's a
• 1:04:30
  professional and probably is being overly generous with his
• 1:04:34
  time by posting on X when he has a day job.
• 1:04:37
  But the summary of the S1 is 1. They are extremely reliant on
• 1:04:44
  one MNO. That's T-Mobile and this is core
• 1:04:50
  to DDD and SO if they don't have a lot of M and OS, they really
• 1:04:55
  don't have a viable business. They are extremely reliant on
• 1:04:58
  manufacturers to modify both hardware and software in the
• 1:05:01
  phones because their spectrum does not work with existing
• 1:05:06
  phones. So how generous are Qualcomm and
• 1:05:11
  Mediatek and Apple and Samsung going to be with a company with
• 1:05:17
  a demonstrated excellence at the mass production of affordable
• 1:05:22
  consumer hardware? If you can make a car, which
• 1:05:25
  itself is a big phone, you can probably make a phone.
• 1:05:30
  So I just would have a hard time believing that Apple is going to
• 1:05:33
  prioritize helping out SpaceX, but I could be wrong.
• 1:05:38
  The other most fascinating thing is just simply that SpaceX
• 1:05:40
  hasn't launched any other DDD satellites since June 2025.
• 1:05:45
  So that's a year I've questioned sort of half joking but half
• 1:05:51
  serious when and if SpaceX is actually just going to abandon
• 1:05:55
  the DDC market because I just don't see how this is viable for
• 1:06:00
  them. There's opportunity cost to
• 1:06:02
  launch. If you launch your own payload
• 1:06:06
  that is $70 million or $74 million, you're not getting from
• 1:06:10
  someone else in a market that has demand for launch.
• 1:06:13
  If you're launching ADDC payload, that's mass in orbit
• 1:06:17
  that could otherwise be going to support your broadband business.
• 1:06:20
  These are basic capital allocation questions.
• 1:06:23
  I don't know what. What I do know is Elon is not
• 1:06:26
  dumb. That I do know.
• 1:06:28
  I do know that Elon understands math.
• 1:06:30
  And so for him to put up more DVD satellites where there seems
• 1:06:35
  to be mass rejection by the M and OS just doesn't make a whole
• 1:06:39
  lot of sense unless he feels the need that he has to have that
• 1:06:42
  constellation in position to do some other things down the line.
• 1:06:46
  But it's a real mystery to me what they're actually going to
• 1:06:50
  do. And importantly, again, Kevin
• 1:06:54
  Chen keeping everyone honest is the S1 confirms that Spacex's
• 1:07:01
  partnership quote UN quote with Apple was, quote, bullshit.
• 1:07:04
  After all, how many times did our stock get destroyed because
• 1:07:09
  of Mario Narwhal, Dipshit head and Bloomberg?
• 1:07:14
  Should be nice to see those guys I guess.
• 1:07:15
  But they did call me a Zany Furu so I don't know.
• 1:07:18
  Sana, if you're listening, I already did send her my comments
• 1:07:23
  actually on things that I disagreed with.
• 1:07:25
  But anyway, how many times did we have people put out BS rumors
• 1:07:29
  about Apple and SpaceX and then ASTS got demolished?
• 1:07:33
  S1 clearly says we do not have direct contractual arrangements
• 1:07:37
  with handset manufacturers. Instead, we expect M&O partners
• 1:07:41
  as major purchasers of mobile devices to encourage or drive
• 1:07:44
  such adoption. Guys, please help us, Please
• 1:07:47
  help us. David versus Goliath, please
• 1:07:50
  help us, said Gwen Shotwell. To literally no one listening to
• 1:07:56
  her or taking her seriously in that plea for help.
• 1:08:00
  So good luck getting other people to help you.
• 1:08:02
  It's called have a business model that does not challenge
• 1:08:05
  your would be partners and maybe they will help.
• 1:08:08
  There's also quite a lot of drama on the Internet about the
• 1:08:10
  SpaceX Tam. I didn't really pay a whole lot
• 1:08:13
  of attention to this, but there's a 720, seven, $40
• 1:08:17
  billion number put out. We all know intuitively that
• 1:08:21
  mobile broadband is a monstrous market.
• 1:08:23
  I know intuitively that I don't need to worry about it because
• 1:08:25
  it's really big. But what is neat is that the
• 1:08:28
  ARPU is really high. And so they had a global
• 1:08:30
  weighted average of $8 per user and that's $710 million of
• 1:08:35
  annual revenue for Starlink, which is 10 months after
• 1:08:38
  commercial launch of a minimally viable product with a second
• 1:08:43
  rate MN OS. It's pretty exciting to see
• 1:08:47
  actually what they've achieved because you start to think about
• 1:08:50
  what's the likelihood of ASTS smashing.
• 1:08:52
  It's 2027 number seems pretty high to me.
• 1:08:56
  And that's really goes to the, we'll call it the the Kuka 900.
• 1:09:04
  You know, thinking of the Indy 500, you know the Kuka 900 race,
• 1:09:07
  you know, between now and next year, if the market can see
• 1:09:12
  through and go, we are comfortable with X dollars of
• 1:09:16
  ARPU, ARPU per user. And we know you have these MNO
• 1:09:20
  contracts with 3 billion people and there's going to be some
• 1:09:22
  attach rate which will go up over time as people learn about
• 1:09:24
  the service, come in and out different ways in which you pack
• 1:09:27
  up the service, importantly increase overall capacity,
• 1:09:32
  market can start to look ahead. That gets pretty neat.
• 1:09:38
  So now we get to Starship. So I was glued to my computer on
• 1:09:43
  Friday watching it. Reason why Starship is in a way
• 1:09:47
  something we have to follow is not just as enthusiasts.
• 1:09:52
  And so as someone who has become a space enthusiast, it is.
• 1:09:55
  It's pretty great cinema to watch these launches.
• 1:09:58
  They do an amazing job. How these cameras survive or
• 1:10:01
  little re entry is really a question I actually pose to Elon
• 1:10:04
  Musk because I just can't understand how those don't blow
• 1:10:08
  up. But the ship survived.
• 1:10:11
  The booster did not. They made it to 100 kilometer
• 1:10:14
  altitude, which I think was the wrong altitude or the wrong
• 1:10:16
  orbit. They landed it, the Starship
• 1:10:20
  exploded, whatever. But I think it it proved that
• 1:10:23
  they could get a Starship down intact.
• 1:10:25
  But the booster was problematic. It didn't they didn't reignite
• 1:10:28
  the vac vacuum engines in space. They didn't make the right
• 1:10:31
  orbit. The booster blew up and we have
• 1:10:33
  no idea if the ship is reusable. But other than that, it was a
• 1:10:36
  great success. And so as a layman looking at
• 1:10:40
  this, I watched that launch and went, holy crap this is amazing.
• 1:10:48
  As someone who's tried to become more of an expert on all this, I
• 1:10:52
  start to wonder how long is this program going to take until it
• 1:10:57
  is commercially usable? It sure seems like that.
• 1:11:01
  That is well over a year away. They haven't really gone to a
• 1:11:08
  usable commercial orbit yet. I think there's lots of
• 1:11:13
  questions around the reusability of ship.
• 1:11:16
  I have no doubt they can land the booster.
• 1:11:18
  This was the new version of the booster, so I'm sure there's
• 1:11:20
  some tweaks. They're probably we're just
• 1:11:22
  torquing it anyway for fun. Give the people a show.
• 1:11:25
  Who knows? But when I take a step back, I
• 1:11:28
  wonder. They made a choice.
• 1:11:31
  So I, I don't know this to be true, but intuitively ship costs
• 1:11:37
  a lot. The basis of ship is that it's
• 1:11:40
  reusable. So something that cost a lot,
• 1:11:42
  but reusable means your amortized cost is presumably
• 1:11:46
  lower than your consumable cost. If ship were just a normal
• 1:11:50
  second stage, New Glenn seemingly went with solving
• 1:11:54
  solvable problems first. So the boosters reusable,
• 1:11:58
  they've demonstrated that, but then they use a standard second
• 1:12:01
  stage, they're pumping out a lot of those.
• 1:12:02
  I think they have 15 of those. Intuitively, those seem like
• 1:12:05
  they're much cheaper. They're engineered to a very
• 1:12:07
  different standard because they just have to go up and then they
• 1:12:11
  deorbit. So a real basic question I have,
• 1:12:14
  I'll pose here and if anyone has views, just comment me.
• 1:12:17
  What is the break even price that Starship ultimately
• 1:12:22
  underwrote where its entire design philosophy ever made
• 1:12:26
  sense? Because we have no idea what the
• 1:12:28
  refurbishment cycle is going to look like on ship.
• 1:12:31
  So their ultimate cost to delivery relies on how FIS fast
• 1:12:35
  ship could turn around if it's successful and the cost of
• 1:12:39
  refurbishment. We don't know any of those
• 1:12:41
  variables. But what we do know is for New
• 1:12:43
  Glenn, what it caught, I don't actually know this, but but they
• 1:12:47
  know the Royal. We knows what a just an
• 1:12:51
  expendable stage 2 cost and they can pump those out real quick.
• 1:12:55
  Choices were made and I don't, we really don't know if Starship
• 1:13:00
  made the right choice and also what they were solving for.
• 1:13:03
  They might have made the right choice for doing something wild
• 1:13:06
  like humans traveling on a Starship.
• 1:13:10
  Obviously an expendable second stage isn't very good.
• 1:13:13
  It's like, all right, people, we're now boarding your flight
• 1:13:16
  from New York to Shanghai and you will all die on re entry.
• 1:13:23
  Yeah, that is not going to be a great spaceship airline.
• 1:13:26
  And so you can see why New Glenn is not marketing the guaranteed
• 1:13:30
  death on re entry vehicle for people, whereas Elon was solving
• 1:13:35
  for a far greater ambition. But when we isolate his ambition
• 1:13:40
  to just the one thing that people on this call care about,
• 1:13:43
  which is launching satellites into orbit, did he make the
• 1:13:47
  right choice? Or did he choose something
• 1:13:49
  that's fundamentally so difficult, solving for a use
• 1:13:52
  case that is so wildly beyond the one we're thinking of, that
• 1:13:57
  he might have A, bitten off more than you can chew, but B, might
• 1:14:01
  actually not really be cost competitive with something like
• 1:14:03
  New Glen for the satellite launch application.
• 1:14:09
  I haven't seen anyone talk about it like that, so maybe what I'm
• 1:14:12
  saying is easily disproven. But if anyone has any views on
• 1:14:16
  that, please start a thread and let's have a discussion because
• 1:14:19
  I've been thinking about that a lot.
• 1:14:23
  And then Katzie, you know, always puts out this just
• 1:14:25
  incredible thought leadership. Who is this guy?
• 1:14:30
  But you know, he he's certainly coming to conclusion that
• 1:14:32
  Starship might be, you know, again, something really
• 1:14:36
  problematic. And he came up with this
• 1:14:41
  observation that they might have taken a Russian approach to the
• 1:14:44
  problem, which is interesting. But by using too many engines,
• 1:14:49
  just statistically where you have one engine out, you start
• 1:14:53
  to have cascading failures. And so your rocket is really
• 1:14:56
  just doomed mathematically because you just have a system
• 1:14:59
  that is too complicated because of too many engines.
• 1:15:03
  And so just reading his thread, I'm not a rocket engineer, is I
• 1:15:07
  hope everyone in the world understands reading his thread
• 1:15:11
  and kind of looking at what the Russians did, what they ended up
• 1:15:14
  pivoting to versus what the US program did and what was
• 1:15:18
  successful and what was not. You start to see some logic in
• 1:15:21
  in what he said. And then we just look at what is
• 1:15:24
  what happened with with SpaceX. They're having a lot of engine
• 1:15:28
  failures on this. And then you have vehicles start
• 1:15:31
  to fail. So I don't want to get buried in
• 1:15:33
  the SpaceX bro fights on the Internet with enthusiasts, but
• 1:15:40
  it is a really interesting dynamic.
• 1:15:47
  But switching gears to New Glen, New Glen is going to be back on
• 1:15:50
  the pad real fast, and that's exciting.
• 1:15:54
  And then we also learned that New Glen 3 was literally just a
• 1:15:59
  plumbing accident. And so that's important in
• 1:16:02
  knowing that it wasn't a structural design flaw.
• 1:16:04
  It was a leaky valve which caused, I think propellant to
• 1:16:07
  drain out, which, you know, just kind of a learning lesson.
• 1:16:11
  And so I think there's also been a rapid shift back to an
• 1:16:16
  understanding around New Glen and that that program is really
• 1:16:21
  back on track. So lastly ula I'm getting tired
• 1:16:28
  ula Vulcan is on next Space Flight and we'll see.
• 1:16:35
  That's going to be exciting launch.
• 1:16:38
  Whether it happens this year or not.
• 1:16:40
  I think there's a lot of room to doubt, but almost certainly
• 1:16:44
  they're going to be launching on ula Vulcan as well.
• 1:16:47
  And that just goes to the point of more launch vehicles.
• 1:16:50
  So I'll end it here. I think we've been going for
• 1:16:52
  like an hour and a half. I'm exhausted.
• 1:16:57
  So next week we'll see. Looks like space is just bid up
• 1:17:01
  across the board. Congratulations to all the
• 1:17:03
  people that own red wire. Zoe's like the I don't know, I
• 1:17:09
  don't know if I want to choose violence this late at night, but
• 1:17:12
  all the people that like own like the levered piece of crap
• 1:17:15
  companies, you know, that make money in the rallies think
• 1:17:17
  they're heroes and good for those people.
• 1:17:20
  But I'm not going to get stuck buying low quality kind of space
• 1:17:24
  engineering services businesses. I'm going to go down on my first
• 1:17:28
  principles. But it looks like things are
• 1:17:29
  pretty strong out of the gate and that's exciting.
• 1:17:32
  And I would just keep in mind, you know, my, my sort of
• 1:17:35
  thinking that I had this revelation last week.
• 1:17:40
  It's easy to forget all the things we have going on, but I
• 1:17:43
  am personally pretty humble to these Russell rebalances.
• 1:17:46
  And I had forgotten about it, even though I posted incessantly
• 1:17:49
  about it. And so just never underestimate
• 1:17:51
  the power of incremental dollar flow coming into a stock as the
• 1:17:57
  velocity of good news is increasing, as overall market
• 1:18:01
  liquidity is moving into a space.
• 1:18:04
  And so it really does seem like we have the trifecta of exciting
• 1:18:12
  things going on. And so I certainly made sure in
• 1:18:15
  my book, I don't have any short call position for one, because
• 1:18:20
  when the stock starts to trade, sort of like an uncaged animal,
• 1:18:24
  I've certainly had my face ripped off violently before I
• 1:18:29
  was absolutely obliterated last October.
• 1:18:31
  I had some covered calls and holy crap, it was like someone
• 1:18:35
  electrocuted a bull that I happened to have been riding and
• 1:18:38
  I was just hanging on for dear life and having a total mental
• 1:18:41
  breakdown that my shares were going to get assigned.
• 1:18:43
  And I had to manage out of that pretty pretty carefully and
• 1:18:47
  ultimately did did get out of it.
• 1:18:49
  But right now, you know, this is an investment advice.
• 1:18:52
  It's just sort of kooks musings on his own personal failings of
• 1:18:56
  yore. When ASTS starts acting like a
• 1:19:00
  good stock, I would be very careful about being too cute.
• 1:19:06
  If you want to sell because of your portfolio needs, whatever.
• 1:19:09
  But if you start to like get a little cute and sell some
• 1:19:13
  covered calls on shares you actually really want to own, I
• 1:19:16
  would just chill out a little bit.
• 1:19:19
  Let the stock run because June has proven to be crazy for the
• 1:19:27
  stock. And I don't know that the market
• 1:19:30
  is fully absorbed, that we could be very easily shipping our next
• 1:19:34
  batch of satellites inside of two to four weeks.
• 1:19:40
  And that is something I want to see how the market really reacts
• 1:19:44
  to. I don't think people have
• 1:19:47
  totally internalized what operational execution looks like
• 1:19:51
  for this company. I don't think the people have
• 1:19:53
  totally internalized the weak position that SpaceX is in.
• 1:19:56
  I don't think people have totally internalized the
• 1:19:59
  importance of the MNOJV. There's a lot of things that I
• 1:20:04
  don't think people have totally internalized.
• 1:20:06
  So look inwards. My friends and I look forward to
• 1:20:10
  another week of people doing really great diligence.
• 1:20:13
  And I would be remiss if saying that I left out some very
• 1:20:18
  thoughtful tweets from my new friend Leo Edge.
• 1:20:21
  He did some great analysis, but when I'm doing the weekly I
• 1:20:24
  don't always catch everyone's tweets.
• 1:20:28
  Or if I catch the content, I don't necessarily catch those
• 1:20:31
  who wrote some of the other great content.
• 1:20:34
  And so I like to try to include a diverse group of people
• 1:20:37
  contributing so everyone can be on the weekly.
• 1:20:40
  But sometimes I miss and I did realize that this week Leo Edge,
• 1:20:44
  who's sort of new to Space Mob has a pretty cool background and
• 1:20:48
  ASICS and things like that. So someone who is bringing real
• 1:20:51
  meat to the bone and real meat to the discussion.
• 1:20:54
  I was looking back and noticed he had done some really awesome
• 1:20:56
  tweets and I had not included them, but I just want to make
• 1:20:59
  sure everyone knows that he had made some really cool
• 1:21:02
  contributions this week as well. Have a wonderful Monday night.
• 1:21:08
  I really wish it were Memorial week.
• 1:21:10
  I do not want to wake up and go to work and I'm sure I'm not
• 1:21:15
  alone. I need to recover from the
• 1:21:18
  weekend so talk to everyone soon.
• 1:21:20
  Bye. Thanks for listening to the AST
• 1:21:30
  Space Mobile podcast. If you enjoyed this episode and
• 1:21:34
  you'd like to help support the podcast, please share it with
• 1:21:37
  others, post about it on social media, or leave a rating and
• 1:21:40
  review. To catch all the latest news
• 1:21:43
  about AST Space Mobile, make sure to subscribe.
• 1:21:46
  Thanks again and I'll see you next time.
• 1:21:52
  Or doing something very, very big.
• 1:21:54
  And I think with this technology we can really affect billion
• 1:21:57
  lives. ASP Space globally is the only
• 1:21:59
  company that has proven technology to deliver cellular
• 1:22:03
  broadband connectivity directly from space to do everyday
• 1:22:07
  smartphone. People will just basically turn
• 1:22:09
  their phone and be seamless, regardless of where you are.
• 1:22:13
  We don't want the user even to know that it's connected by
• 1:22:15
  satellite. Our role is to bring this into
• 1:22:19
  reality, always in partnership with the MMO.