Latest / AST SpaceMobile Podcast / Kook’s Weekly - December 7

Transcript

Kook’s Weekly - December 7 · AST SpaceMobile Podcast

0:06
This is the AST Space Mobile podcast.
0:10
Where we just basically come your phone be seamless
0:14
regardless of where you are. We don't want the user even to
0:16
know that it's connected by satellite.
0:21
Listen, the opportunity that we have is very, very, very large.
0:27
You need everyone. I can't believe those are red
0:29
pad that is due to space right before this to suck the oxygen
0:35
out of the room. But you know, being a paid
0:39
pumper is difficult. We get evaluated every week
0:42
where the company gives us our pump points.
0:44
And you know, you can see MPMN works really hard because he
0:47
thinks it's all about how many spaces you can do.
0:50
I try to focus on quality, not quantity.
0:54
But look, you know, when the company is not positive cash
0:57
flow, their pumping budget is tight.
1:00
And, you know, so we all have to fight for those little scraps.
1:04
And some would say that this isn't even a call about
1:08
investing. And and I agree, like I said in
1:10
the comments, you know, it's just a bunch of bozos that sit
1:12
around and talk about space after football.
1:15
And it's like, yeah, we have some hobbies.
1:18
Why does everyone judge us? And I don't get it.
1:21
You know, some people just want to live in peace and talk about
1:24
Asds. Let us be.
1:26
So this week was quite a week. It started off with, again,
1:29
Anpan man, the Immaculate loser, calling me.
1:33
Literally, he called me. He's like, kook, are you still a
1:35
bag of doorbells? I'm like, who are you, grandma?
1:40
And it was true, though. I was feeling like a bag of
1:43
doorbells. And then the week took a
1:46
different turn. I I was just kind of blown away
1:48
that everyone sort of puked on Monday because there's no PR,
1:50
but I guess that's to be expected.
1:53
Shame on the company at this point for setting up that
1:55
dynamic every time. But then they sort of came up
1:58
big with the press release that really said nothing but sent
2:01
everything. And I think what we know is
2:06
there, we'll get into launching. So yeah, I'll just get into
2:09
launch. So we have FM 1 coming soon.
2:12
So that's really exciting. Should be on next Monday,
2:15
although with the time zones, I don't know if that means someday
2:18
some at some point during Sunday I'll go to I'll go check it out.
2:21
But rest assured, I think a lot of us will probably try to get
2:24
together with the spaces. If I get my DD updated by then,
2:29
what I was thinking what I could do.
2:31
I'm sure my wife would super love this, especially if it
2:33
ended up being like during the day on Sunday when I'm supposed
2:36
to be the kids is I could actually walk through the DD
2:38
dock sort of on a stream on YouTube while we wait for the
2:43
launch and just going to pass the time talk for the research
2:46
again for everyone and, and do that.
2:48
But F1 FM one's coming this satellite.
2:51
It's, it's important to think about this one.
2:54
I was debating this today with, with some guys and FM one in FM
2:59
2 are almost kind of sacrificial birds.
3:02
They're they're not using some of the well, they're not using
3:06
the composites that are, are going to be used on the 1st
3:09
batch birds. We believe they're SDA
3:12
satellites And so they're they're kind of on their own in
3:18
terms of what they mean. But as Katzie really made the
3:22
point, these were the satellites that were used to build the
3:27
satellites. And so they're really sort of
3:30
like the test, the test hamburger, going through the
3:33
hamburger machine to get the bus, which is the control set to
3:38
get that all organized and you know, working frankly and get
3:44
the new form factor ready to go, things like that.
3:47
So they were very important even without them actually ever going
3:52
up into orbit because the key is to de bottleneck the production
3:57
capabilities of this company to get to the whatever it's going
4:01
to be 6/6 satellites per month. Scott has said in some other
4:05
venues that they have the ability to double that to 12
4:07
satellites per month per month. That gets to be such an
4:10
incredible amount of capacity start to say, well, what for and
4:13
we have some some thinking on that.
4:16
But with FM 2, what's very exciting is the plot is
4:20
thickened a little bit on this as Peter Linmark commented.
4:25
And of course the filing was first discovered by Justbar 23.
4:31
The 23 probably means he's related to Michael Jordan and we
4:34
should be humble to that. He is the great one when it
4:37
comes to FCC filings. And so he quickly pointed out
4:41
that FM 2 had an STA modification and it related to
4:46
the orbit. And instead of the roughly 700
4:51
kilometer orbit, they were seeking to fly it at 460
4:54
kilometers. Instead of the, I believe it was
4:56
53° orbit or inclination that was intended, they're
5:02
petitioning to get it changed to 50.
5:04
They're making these changes because they're trying to hop on
5:07
an earlier ride. And it just kind of shows you
5:10
the point of what Scott says is that he really spends 24 hours a
5:14
day working on launch coordination.
5:17
I'm sorry, I have a little bit of a cough again, I don't, I
5:19
don't know why. And so it's complex stuff.
5:23
I can only imagine as we are sort of pre mass development.
5:28
And what I get excited about is the prospects of 2-3.
5:34
But really frankly should be, you know, in a month or two from
5:36
now launch is going to be just the on cadence thing.
5:41
We're finally going to be stacking up so many birds in
5:44
inventory. We'll really be into the pull
5:47
down of our launch options where we're just going to ship and
5:52
ship and shoot, ship and shoot. And this is that concept of
5:56
Constellation Constipation for right now.
5:59
You know, we're really stopped up, haven't had our fiber.
6:03
That fiber is about to hit. And so in a couple months this
6:07
can be very exciting. But in the interim, we're just
6:10
seeing the complexity where we're not yet having the
6:12
satellites, you know, pumped out at a fast rate.
6:15
We're really at the beginning of our launch cadence.
6:18
And so things like hopping on, you know, the soonest available
6:20
rideshare will sometimes, you know, if we missed one flight
6:24
for one reason or another, we got to jump on another.
6:27
We got to potentially go into a different orbit and that tells
6:29
us a lot potentially about what's going on with the these
6:32
satellites. I like to think that we know
6:36
that these are SDA satellites, and so these are satellites that
6:39
are being done for the government.
6:42
If anyone's watched this sort of drama around the naval ships,
6:46
what they're called, they're these cool kind of stealth
6:49
destroyers that were built in, I believe, Wisconsin.
6:52
And they were the standard design from Fincanteiri, which
6:57
is a Italian defense company and the US Navy that just couldn't
7:00
help themselves as the US Navy tends to not be able to or the
7:04
US military because we're the best.
7:05
So we have to modify the crap out of everything.
7:08
And really like what was a standard ship design?
7:10
Then all of a sudden they're like, we need to make it a
7:12
little bit bigger because we need these capabilities.
7:14
And before you know it, your standard ship was actually a
7:16
totally a custom ship. And so I can only imagine that
7:19
with the very, very fast and rapid change of the specs of
7:23
Golden Dome, I could see how there was probably, you know
7:27
thousand death by 1000 cuts in terms of little tweaks and
7:31
modifications that the US wants on FM 1 and FM 2.
7:34
And again, SDA contract, the Halo contract was for two test
7:39
satellites. So it seems hardly random that
7:42
we have two aluminum based satellites that are really kind
7:48
of two offs, you know, 1 offs by two before we get to our sort of
7:53
core commercial birds, which are all composite, much lighter.
7:56
So that's what I think is going on.
7:58
And it's ironic because what the market uses sort of delay,
8:02
delay, delay. It's like, what do you want to
8:04
do? You want to call Pete Hegseth
8:06
and be like, sorry bro, we're not making the changes.
8:10
You can take your American flag line blazer and we're going to
8:14
meet guidance and you'd be like, that's interesting.
8:18
And then he would drone you because that's evidently how he
8:22
roles. So of course we're going to be
8:24
making these changes in the mods to the FDA satellites.
8:27
And that's the type of thing that we've correlated also with
8:30
the Legato transaction. Things started changing once we
8:34
got that spectrum and we can only guess why and we think it
8:37
had something to do with some calibration with mid band stuff.
8:41
So as we look at the various industry websites, we have some
8:48
of the, what is it called, some of the launch websites are
8:53
showing again more data about our launch schedule.
8:58
And you know, that's good. There, there.
9:01
We, we know that there are launches, we know that they've
9:03
contracted, we know that they're contracted initially with
9:06
SpaceX, but then on a per satellite basis, the majority
9:10
are with New Glen. And so we're going to be getting
9:14
details of upcoming SpaceX launches because that
9:16
information's kind of out there for that SpaceX community.
9:19
They track boosters, that information is out there.
9:22
And I think that's what we're really seeing is increased
9:25
visibility about when we're going and we're going very soon.
9:31
And that's why the stock I think is starting to really rocket
9:33
there. For whatever reason, the
9:36
weakness in November was pretty peculiar, but now I think we're
9:40
finally stepping into the breach where the market goes.
9:42
OK, so we got a satellite on the pad.
9:45
I think people know, I don't know anything that's not public,
9:49
but I think as, as is often the case with this stock, the
9:52
invisible hand tends to be pretty goddamn accurate.
9:55
And so I suspect that people know about the status of the
10:02
other six satellites that are ready to go and those, you know,
10:06
there's a lot of people visiting that facility when we're seeing
10:09
posts about them. We'll get to that in a second.
10:11
So there's a lot of people in that facility.
10:12
Sometimes consultants go in things like that.
10:15
And I I'm kind of a strong form market efficiency type of guy.
10:21
And so the stock moving up like this starts to tell me like, OK,
10:24
we're we're going to get some updates on launch pretty soon.
10:28
And I was thinking about that today, like if I were Scott.
10:32
So I have FM one about to go off on Monday.
10:35
Maybe I just hold everything back after that.
10:37
And so we'll get, you know, whatever people are going to do
10:39
with the stocking to launch, usually that, you know, RIP it,
10:42
then usually there's a post launch sort of hangover.
10:45
That would be a great time to actually then give the update on
10:48
the next launches and really, you know, keep people aware of
10:52
how the progress is going. But also at that point you'll
10:56
have initial communications with the satellite and, and kind of
10:58
ET will phone home and say, hey, you know, blah, blah, blah,
11:01
things are good. And then I think if at that
11:03
point, if I were the company, you know, I would feel really
11:07
great about shipping those remaining satellites.
11:10
I'm not sure they'll stage it like that because the other part
11:12
of me thinks that they're just going to announce this tomorrow
11:14
or Tuesday. We'll find out.
11:16
So the next thing we have is this nice thread from Tech
11:19
Innovations. And so just put it out there
11:21
'cause it's a nice thread for anyone that's new to the new,
11:24
new to the case. You know the key points to
11:25
highlight $3.2 billion of cash and liquidity.
11:28
That's a lot. Over a billion dollars of
11:30
contracted revenue, that's a lot.
11:33
You know, we haven't launched a service yet.
11:36
AT&T and Verizon are signed. That's great.
11:38
Big relationship with Alphabet. Boy, that's getting exciting.
11:45
Gemini, I've been playing around with that.
11:47
Gemini is unbelievable. And so Google is really coming
11:52
for the win until, you know, when you look at these stocks
11:56
that will announce kind of like an NVIDIA partnership and then
11:59
they know double or triple. I didn't.
12:01
Google partnerships are where it's at and we know that we're a
12:07
big partner for them. They have a half a billion
12:10
dollar. I'm just trusting this guy's
12:11
numbers on this because I haven't read on that math
12:13
myself, but half a billion dollar position in in ASTS,
12:19
which is great. And you think about where the
12:21
future is going to be. Google seems like they're going
12:25
to own it. And even Elon said this week
12:27
he's like, well, I'm not an investor, but I think Google is
12:29
going to be worth a lot. And it already is.
12:32
But when you think about AI data centers in space, where are
12:36
these capabilities going to come from?
12:38
And my strongest belief is that they're already working on that
12:42
stuff, ASTS and Google and maybe we'll find out, maybe we won't.
12:47
The next we have interestingly enough, we just kind of rewind
12:52
through time is just a revisitation of the market.
12:56
And so of all things, ViaSat put out this market study on the D
13:02
to D market and it's super bullish.
13:06
They did a lot of customer surveys and it shows that a lot
13:11
of people are willing to pay quite a lot of money for this,
13:14
especially in developing markets.
13:15
Interestingly, they're willing to pay, you know, a big percent
13:19
of the ARPU, which ends up being smaller absolute dollars because
13:22
Indians, for example, are paying like 2 bucks a month.
13:25
But they're willing to add on like an extra dollar for the
13:27
service. And it just showed how many
13:29
people are out of service in the frequency of that.
13:33
But also that just goes to the perception of the need, which is
13:35
really the point I've made is there's real need, which I, for
13:40
example, have. I live in a pretty developed
13:43
part of the world and I, I don't have service easily once once a
13:49
day. And even on Thursday I was
13:52
talking to NPEN man when I was driving home and I was literally
13:55
at the inner pass on probably the world's busiest 2 freeways.
14:00
Or I don't know, can't any kept the world, but certainly in the
14:03
US, I'd say maybe the most infamous freeway and I didn't
14:07
have cell cell phone service. Something is ridiculous and it
14:10
could honestly have just been that there were just too many
14:13
cars and that the towers were overwhelmed, which which goes to
14:16
another use case of this is being able to beam excess
14:20
spectrum where you need it. And this is where shorts, I
14:22
think, just just don't really understand it.
14:25
They're not dumb. Sometimes they have like a real
14:28
big axe to grind and that's OK and but I don't ever want to
14:32
call someone dumb. I can just say when you really
14:36
dwelled on a problem obsessively for five years, you tend to
14:39
understand it better than someone who's done 15 seconds of
14:41
work. And there's a lot of nuances.
14:45
You know, for example, I don't think people really appreciate
14:47
that one of the great is that my daughter wants you for some
14:56
reason. I don't think people really
14:57
appreciate that you can add spectrum dynamically.
15:03
So for example, if there's a massive traffic jam on a big
15:07
freeway and so all of a sudden you just actually have a lot of
15:09
concentration of users in what would have been a normal beam.
15:12
You can put another beam down on there.
15:15
And then all of a sudden people don't have dropped calls even if
15:18
their phone says, oh, we have 4 bars of service, why am I not
15:20
connecting? You can add that capacity
15:23
dynamically. And the, and the stylized
15:24
example, of course is what AT&T would say it's like, well, it's
15:28
Super Bowl, make sure you can send those videos to all your
15:32
friends. And you know, you have 60,000
15:34
people texting videos at the same time.
15:36
You know, those towers are overwhelmed and ASTS is going to
15:39
be able to drop 45 megahertz of spectrum on that.
15:43
Pretty cool. But let's go back to the ViaSat
15:47
study. So they do a lot of really great
15:49
numbers and it's kind of ironies of ironies is not really pumping
15:54
this market after having previously said it didn't really
15:57
exist. They're pumping this market and
15:59
these guys had they've given us their spectrum.
16:04
That's really just the beautiful thing here is ASTS was so early
16:12
and captured so many aspects of this market so quickly that even
16:19
now would be competitors are really just handcuffed and so
16:26
well via satellite is the recipient of our legato
16:29
payments, but they don't have legato spectrum.
16:31
Many own it, but we get to use it for the next 80 years.
16:36
So it's very, very interesting to see these other satellite
16:40
companies sort of begrudgingly coming out and talking about how
16:43
awesome this market is. And our point is, you know,
16:46
space Mob is like, well, we told you so and, and here we are, you
16:53
know, about to just dominate it. But Tanner does some nice math.
16:57
And, you know, that's what's great about ASTS is you can just
16:59
sort of do some back of the envelope math from time to time.
17:02
And so if you just take the, the users of AT&T, Verizon and
17:08
Vodafone, you get to 630 million Subs.
17:11
And then if you just assume a 50% attach rate, which means
17:17
that, you know, one out of every two of those subscribers pays
17:19
for the service at $1.00 a month, pretty low, that's $3.8
17:23
billion a year. I did some math on a, on a
17:27
thread, I think it was last week where I was just doing some
17:29
quick, quick math because Scott has said publicly that we're,
17:35
you know, quote, we're building this company for 10s of billions
17:38
of dollars of revenue opportunity.
17:40
And so when other satellite companies go, well, look, we
17:42
don't really know what the market is like.
17:43
So we're not going to invest a lot of CapEx into it where, you
17:47
know, this, that or the other sort of, to put it famously,
17:52
they're not willing to put the whole ball of wax in there.
17:56
You know, this is where a bell, you know, reached into his
18:00
pocket, which was of course full of his ball of wax and whipped
18:03
out his balls and threw them on the table and said my balls are
18:06
in and he is in it to win it. And so they think that there's
18:12
10s of billions of dollars in this market.
18:14
So they're building big satellites totally dedicated to
18:18
doing that. So if it happens, they're there
18:21
to receive it. And so then the question is,
18:22
well, is there 10s of billions of dollars in market?
18:24
And I've done that math pretty, you know, many, many times and
18:28
you can measure it multiple ways.
18:29
You can measure effectively it on a spectrum reuse basis and
18:33
say, well, how much data can these satellites produce?
18:35
And then what's that's going to be worth?
18:37
I think that's the wrong way to do it because again, it's
18:41
ignoring the idea of being able to oversell your capacity, which
18:44
you will be able to do. And there's a lot of use cases
18:47
that are going to have time of day differences.
18:49
And there's going to be things where some people are going to
18:52
be paying for capacity rights as and then some people are going
18:55
to be paying for actual usage. Things like that.
18:57
Way beyond the ability for any outsider to model in Excel right
19:02
now. But you can start to work
19:04
through it. And so Tanner is just simple
19:06
math just shows, well, you know, just off this is kind of silly
19:09
assumption at a dollar a month, you know $4 billion and and we
19:14
know that's not even the half of it.
19:15
So exciting. I highly recommend, recommend
19:19
people flip through that via site report.
19:20
You know, again, it's a, it's a market report by a company that
19:24
previously had said there was no market, a company that in theory
19:27
is our adversary, a company that we will be litigating with.
19:31
Mark my words, there is going to be a nasty litigation between
19:36
AFCS Space Mobile and VSAT as they litigate whether or not
19:40
ASTS is bound to constrain its S band operations in the US.
19:46
And spoiler alert, they are not so exciting stuff right there to
19:52
read that and again, go into the market.
19:54
You know, we have these shorts which come out and they're
19:56
great. I I honestly love these guys.
19:58
So we have this guy, Doctor Silver Schnuffler, I mean, good
20:04
God, a name like that, you can only him in his personality.
20:07
It's like sour fizzy water and anpan man's.
20:15
Text me right now and said we're constrained to L band operations
20:17
and that I don't think is right. The litigation actually was
20:20
trying to tie them to both L band and S band, but look into
20:24
that. But whatever, let's go back to
20:26
the market. So these shorts coming out are,
20:29
you know, just cling to and go, well, look at this, look at
20:30
these this group of investors that are just pumping this stock
20:33
and you know, look at how little revenue this company currently
20:37
has. OK, that's silly, but this is
20:41
just going to be a service used by a tiny percentage of the
20:43
population who really, you know, go on a hike.
20:47
That's the traditional view of satellite phones.
20:50
You know, that's the the business person travelling, you
20:53
know, to go visit their far-flung.
20:56
I always think of like Medellin. It's like, well, if you're going
20:59
to go work at a cartel, it's a really great idea to have an
21:02
Iridium phone. And that turned out to be like a
21:04
big market for them, which comes rise to a whole host of other
21:09
complex issues. And, you know, that's what the
21:12
shorts think. And that's what's going to be
21:13
the most exciting part of this thesis is, you know, you'll,
21:16
you'll quickly see people concede that the technology
21:19
works, but when the Tam ends up being 10 to 100 times larger
21:23
than they think, it's the same type of thing that, you know,
21:27
frankly, we saw with the Internet and e-commerce back 20
21:30
years ago. And then SAS, this just happens
21:34
over and over again. And the amount of work we've
21:36
done on the market with, with ASTS tells us that this is
21:39
really not for, you know, when I go out on a hike.
21:43
And even when you do that math actually, so in my pin tweet, it
21:48
did some sanity checks back when I wrote that document just so
21:50
I'm like, how big is the RV market?
21:51
How big are these little niche markets?
21:54
And it was surprising actually how big many of these are.
21:56
And you can get the FCC studies as well that show how large, you
22:02
know, traditional MSS based businesses are.
22:04
They're, they're actually pretty big.
22:06
There's, you know, easily a billion dollars just in the US
22:10
alone on what are actually really high friction, super
22:14
expensive narrow band services. And even with that, it's still a
22:23
lot of revenue. And that's just in the US And so
22:26
even in your worst of worst, worst, worst cases, you're
22:30
looking at billions of dollars of revenue.
22:32
And I think in your realistic case, you're looking at 10s of
22:35
billions, if not bigger. So that's pretty exciting.
22:38
Meanwhile, then it's always good to, you know, like I said,
22:41
people are going to visit these things.
22:42
And So what do they see? There's people going with a bell
22:48
in there to get, you know, frankly due diligence sessions
22:51
on the state of the satellites and the technology.
22:55
I always try to, you know, think vicariously.
22:58
I don't it'd be cool to go to the facility.
23:01
Frankly, I would love to sign a satellite.
23:03
I think that would be kind of fun.
23:04
But I don't need to do that. And so anyway, if I went, I
23:09
don't know that I'm qualified to ask the right questions when in
23:11
fact I know I'm not. And so I'm not a, I'm not an RF
23:13
engineer, I'm a Special Situations analyst.
23:16
And so it's great when I'm getting to read the conclusions
23:21
of the Deputy Executive Director of Operations and the Chief
23:25
Technology Officer of First Net and AT&T.
23:30
And so Jeff Bracter said wrapping up a great two day
23:34
visit to Midland, TX. 2 days. OK.
23:36
That's not just sort of like, hey, check it out and then
23:40
leave. This is seminars that they went
23:43
through and they did demonstrations, live calls and
23:47
texts on the first net network. So they're actually doing native
23:51
testing. That's a big deal.
23:53
They toured the labs and the production facilities and had
23:56
great discussions with the engineers.
23:58
That's great. Then they had a bunch of other
24:00
stakeholders, personnel from other public safety departments,
24:03
and you know, the goods are there.
24:07
That's exciting. And so you can only imagine,
24:08
though, what are they actually seeing?
24:10
There's six satellites that we know of.
24:12
They're probably done. Were they signing them?
24:18
No, No. And then you have TJ Kennedy,
24:21
who's the big way to get Firstnet.
24:23
So he's good to follow him and you post it on LinkedIn.
24:26
Let's just see what he said. I forgot I wrote it at this
24:28
point. Oh, he's just quoting the Jeff
24:29
Brachter stopping. You see the pictures, you know,
24:33
they're checking their phones out.
24:34
And again, this is a point that King Tut made quite a while ago
24:37
is ASDS is actually the only company that's ever really had
24:41
extensive third party validation of all of his claims.
24:45
And we know actually now because we've we've seen the forbidden
24:47
videos. And in the forbidden videos we
24:51
have the company actually very specifically say that they
24:54
really like wearing black suits and they really don't want to
24:58
wear orange suits. And they're so hypersensitive
25:02
to, you know, basically making false claims that they've been
25:08
adamant the whole time of making sure that their press releases
25:11
are always joint with their partners to provide that third
25:14
party validation. And so it's not random, it's not
25:17
a fluke, and it's something that we should duly consider when
25:22
making judgements on this company, both long and short.
25:25
Is that unlike sort of the Space X videos where they clearly had
25:30
edited the pictures? I mean, that was the most crazy
25:33
thing. Not only would they show
25:35
so-called text messages that were jarbled and showing that it
25:38
that it actually didn't work, but they wouldn't have third
25:40
party validation. A link, same thing.
25:43
And it's like a guy showing, you know, a picture of two guys
25:45
looking like super excited, looking at their phone in a
25:47
parking lot. And it's like what?
25:49
OK, but did the parking lot have normal terrestrial service like,
25:53
you know what did you prove guys your phone worked and STS we
25:58
tracked this stuff out to offshore Maui and you know had
26:02
confusing SEC filings where the FCC is like, hey guys, like did
26:06
you mess up this filing? It looks like you're actually
26:08
testing in the middle of the ocean and that can't be right.
26:10
And and so we we know really proven that seven ways till
26:14
Sunday. But having the extensive third
26:18
party validation is something that's always giving me a a lot
26:22
of comfort. And that's different when when
26:24
shorts throw something out, they're like, whoa, so did
26:26
Nicola. It's not the same.
26:28
And that was, you know, basically GM having a freak out
26:31
moment, feeling like they needed to be cool and validating, you
26:34
know, quote, UN quote, validating things just to be the
26:36
cool kids versus very rigorous testing with hundreds of partner
26:40
engineers on partner core systems and technology.
26:43
And then very deliberately having methodical joint press
26:46
releases and media going out to the same effect.
26:50
This is a different game. And a lot of us have met those
26:53
executives like the AT&T teams, the Department of Defense teams,
26:58
the Blue Origin teams and the SpaceX teams, frankly showed up
27:01
at Escs launches as well, obviously, because they were the
27:04
launcher. And so you meet these people and
27:06
they all will say, I think this is real.
27:09
So then we think about other opportunities and what's
27:16
interesting is just the market signal on SpaceX.
27:20
And so I, I am blown away by the SpaceX valuations, 800 billion,
27:27
I don't know their numbers. So who who am I to say if that's
27:31
too high and too low? That just seems to be the the
27:35
market answer right now. And so if we just take it at
27:41
face value, what's the most interesting to me is if, if you
27:45
take a step back and I have AI have a bias here.
27:49
I mean, it doesn't take a rocket scientist to say that I'm pretty
27:51
positive on Asts. But if I look at SpaceX, I'd
27:54
say, well, hold on. Right now you're on the cusp of
27:59
real competition with Blue Origin and other launch
28:02
vehicles. Sure, no one, no one can match
28:05
Falcon 9 right now, but you're on seemingly a cusp of a lot of
28:10
capacity coming on. And these are high fixed cost
28:13
businesses. And so launch cost can and
28:15
should go down quite a lot. And that's just, you know,
28:19
decremental margins for SpaceX. The same the same time Starship
28:24
is by Elon saying, hey, we made a lot of milestones.
28:26
That's why we're stopping the valuation shit don't work.
28:30
And so I don't know how much Starship is, you know, really
28:34
driving a valuation when they can't put stuff in orbit, from
28:37
what I can tell. And Blue Origin just hits a
28:40
knock off home run. And then you have Starlink,
28:42
which is seemingly doing great, but lots of competition coming.
28:47
I was explaining to someone, I said, well, are you worried
28:49
about Kuiper and why? I mean, and I said, well, I have
28:53
a massive distribution advantage and I'm like, what do you mean?
28:56
It was like, have you heard of Amazon.com?
28:59
They know how to sell stuff. So almost every American
29:03
probably owns every American, but any American with real
29:07
spending power probably has prime account and they're going
29:10
to be able to give you a lot of inducements, I think, to do
29:13
Kuiper when they want to bring that fight.
29:15
And so there's just a lot of competition coming.
29:17
And sometimes the market, though, just misses that.
29:19
You know, it's, it will kind of peak its valuation right when
29:25
the storm clouds are kind of around the curve of the Earth.
29:29
You know, who knows? But but it does, you know, I'm
29:32
I'm not mad at it. The $800 billion valuation for
29:35
SpaceX is great news for us. It's showing everyone on Wall
29:40
Street is going to have FOMO on space because most people missed
29:44
it. And there's very few ways to get
29:46
involved on this trend. There's, you know, not a lot of
29:49
great companies and people are going to look at, well, what's
29:51
really driving this, valuations and it's actual economic use
29:55
cases in space. Launch is a means to do
29:59
something useful in space, but itself it is not useful.
30:02
What is launch? Launch is the ability to get
30:04
weight up. Unless that weight is useful,
30:09
there's no point in going up. So therefore, you know, kind of
30:13
having a reductionist view of this, the weight is what
30:17
justifies the up. Therefore who's doing things
30:21
with weight that are good? And right now the things with
30:23
weight that are good are telecom services.
30:26
The next things with weight that are good are going to be
30:29
government defense applications. That's obviously coming with
30:31
golden dough and then down the Pike some other things with with
30:35
weight that are good seemingly, and I dismissed this in a big
30:39
way early on, is AI dentist data centers in space.
30:42
This definitely hit the threshold of when I first heard
30:45
at it. I scoffed at it.
30:47
When I look back at my career, whenever I hear of something and
30:50
scoff at it, this is sort of my like I'm I'm too cool for school
30:54
kind of attitude, which I've learned to overrun by the way.
30:58
But usually that's a sign of being too dismissive.
31:04
And Wall Street tends to be like that.
31:06
So I've been thinking a lot more about this AI data center in
31:08
space thing because for me, I just had a hard time
31:12
understanding why the math would work.
31:14
I mean, putting weight in space is super expensive.
31:16
And so, and what's the real benefit of being in space?
31:20
It's cold. OK, you have solar, but you also
31:23
have solar down here. So I don't really know what the
31:26
net gain in solar efficiency is. That's something I have to work
31:29
on. But it's, you know, if you're in
31:31
front of the meter, solar is also free down here.
31:34
You have to pay for the panels and that's the same as in space.
31:38
So I'm, I listened to the Star Cloud CEO, walked through his
31:44
math and I mean, guys are doing math that seems to make sense.
31:49
He entirely relies on Starship working.
31:51
But then you have to, you have to go, well, who, who's really
31:55
solved the critical path items for AI data centers in space to
31:58
work? If it's going to work, what was
32:00
that really going to be about? It's going to be about our
32:03
generation, just like frankly ASTS businesses being in the RF
32:08
business is really about can you generate a lot of electricity
32:12
and who can generate the most electricity in space.
32:16
ASTS Space Mobile, we believe they can do about 120 kilowatts.
32:20
And now what I don't know is, is a MW in space quote, UN quote
32:27
worth X amount of megawatts on the ground because you don't
32:31
have cooling or you know, there's other avoided costs or
32:34
things like that? I don't know that answer.
32:35
That's something I need to research.
32:37
But I'm of the belief because I know I get little hints here and
32:42
there. I know that ASTS is a creative
32:45
company. We know because of the forbidden
32:48
videos that they're doing things far beyond RF.
32:52
They don't talk about it except in the forbidden videos because
32:57
I think they're trying not to look pumpy.
32:59
They're, you know, a young pre revenue company and try not to
33:04
look like they're all over the place.
33:06
So I think that their corporate view on communication is keep it
33:10
simple, keep it consistent. We have our skunk works, but
33:13
like we'll talk about that later.
33:14
We don't want to quote UN quote lose credibility in the market
33:16
by having people think we're pivoting.
33:17
We already saw the blowback when they quote pivoted by buying
33:21
Legato, which was probably one of the world's great M&A
33:25
investments. You know, time will tell, but
33:28
sure looks like they got spectrum for $0.10 on the
33:31
dollar. And so I think that they, they
33:35
know what they have, they know how to deconstruct the elements
33:38
of what they have. They have power generation, they
33:40
have heat diffusion, they have beam forming and they have a
33:43
mechanism by which they can put a lot of real estate in space.
33:46
That's the unfurling. And then I'm sure there's some
33:47
other key components I'm missing, but it's a very logical
33:51
extension that instead of having the antenna element on the Earth
33:54
side of the satellite, you just put GPUs.
33:58
And so if the market wants to go there, which it seemingly does,
34:03
market seems like it is really focused on space, space AI,
34:07
which God bless it, I don't think it's very long until
34:11
people realize like this is actually the vessel for it.
34:15
And what's interesting is again, who our partners are and so
34:23
largest telecom companies in the world are going to want a piece
34:25
of this. This is a great way to expand
34:26
their business. And then we have Google.
34:29
And so, you know, we got the guy as our partner and that guy
34:33
doesn't have its own captive space company.
34:35
I guess, you know, they do have an investment in SpaceX and they
34:39
have a really big investment in the STS PS mobile, which is now
34:42
looking pretty smart. But these big further out
34:45
opportunities really go into our non communication use cases.
34:50
And I think you really do need to think of ASTS as a platform
34:53
of space based power generation. And then it's what you do with
34:57
that power is defines the, you know, really the obviously the
35:01
commercial application of how you monetize that power.
35:05
But it's like the people in Iceland, you know, I think of
35:10
Iceland as the sun facing side of our of our satellite.
35:14
You know, they have a lot of cheap electricity.
35:17
And then the way to export electricity is to make aluminum
35:21
in space. If you have a lot of
35:23
electricity, the way to export electricity right now is RF
35:27
communications in telecom. And it can be obviously then
35:32
things like position navigation and tracking things like that.
35:38
But then it looks like the next application that could could
35:40
potentially make economic sense is AI data centers.
35:44
And then that's how you again, you export electricity from
35:47
space. Interesting concept of people
35:49
want to Stew on that. Other thing that really caught
35:52
my attention this week is John Slameka joined as an executive
36:01
advisory to a bell. John has a ridiculous background
36:07
and so he was the president of AT&T Business International.
36:13
He was the president AT&T Europe, Middle East and Africa
36:16
and Latin America. This is an important guy.
36:21
And so you look at the people that are surrounding a bell, the
36:26
advisors, he's going to have quite incredible when you think
36:30
about the company's ability to get in the room.
36:34
And this is something I've seen for Santa, my career where I,
36:38
you know, I have a deja and you know, we'll work with companies
36:40
with really cool technologies, but getting partners and
36:44
clients, you know, getting in the boardroom can be really
36:47
hard. And so a lot of what happens is
36:50
then, you know, looking in your network and trying to recruit or
36:52
get insurance to get in front of the right people in the decision
36:55
makers. And it's hard.
36:57
You need to try to get some of those consularies who, you know,
37:01
either know the regulators, and that's a huge deal.
37:04
Sometimes, you know, it's very hard to find people that are
37:07
credible enough to go walk into the Treasury Department and, you
37:12
know, make it happen or walk into the executive office of,
37:16
you know, a large bank. You just can't waltz in there in
37:19
a hoodie. And so a bell is having these
37:23
people that is just increasingly giving the company more
37:26
credibility when it comes to regulators and governments and M
37:30
and OS. It's very exciting to see that
37:32
continue to happen. And it just also speaks the size
37:36
of the opportunity because a lot of these people are very busy.
37:38
And so they're not going to do something just for, you know, a
37:41
couple shekels. They're going to want some
37:45
equity grants presumably, and they want those to count.
37:48
And that's that's pretty exciting.
37:50
So next, we also then have a tweet from Kevin and he's just
37:57
giving us an article that was from the FCC Technology Advisory
38:04
Council member. And it's an article in NX Tech
38:08
called the New High Ground How the how the race for satellite
38:11
5G will decide who sets the rules for 6G.
38:14
And this is just really about the strategic nature of space
38:17
and telecom. And it actually specifically
38:20
lists Asts as a copy that's important for national security.
38:24
And then that's really going to be the story of 2026 is ASTS is,
38:28
is going to be viewed by the market as a company that cannot
38:33
fail. And so it's going to be viewed
38:36
as vital for national security, both for its involvement in our
38:39
defense applications, but then also for first responders and
38:44
disaster relief. And then on top of that,
38:46
obviously all the connectivity issues in terms of bringing
38:50
broadband to to everyone in the US.
38:53
So great place to be certainly an early story so far and then
38:57
we have you know what what has to happen for those things to be
39:00
true. Well, FCC approval and we have a
39:04
lot of things happening with the FCC.
39:06
And so this was a big week where we had just more filings talking
39:13
about expeditious grant of SES applications.
39:17
A bunch of St. as filed cats has really followed all of them.
39:21
At this point. I've kind of just like, OK,
39:24
there's a lot of these and they're all kind of the same and
39:26
they're good. I don't know that there's a lot
39:28
of incremental importance from an investor's point of view, but
39:34
sometimes there can be some neat Nuggets on the tech and things
39:36
like that which we extract. But importantly we had the
39:41
closing of the SCS Commons. And so that is our front haul
39:44
application. That's really what connects the
39:46
satellite to your phone. The SCS application is really
39:48
the final domino for US regulatory approval.
39:52
It will be pretty important. It's going to it's going to be
39:56
approved. So that that isn't really a
39:58
risk, but but it will still be exciting when it happens.
40:02
And what's interesting about this is the comment period
40:04
closed on Friday the 5th. And my understanding is ASTS was
40:13
to wait to file its Legato FCC application until the SCSCS
40:20
application closed for comment. So we could see on Monday or
40:25
Tuesday a filing of the Legato FCC application, which true to
40:31
form with ASTS could end up maybe being a pretty positive
40:35
trigger because it's going to bring attention back on this 45
40:38
megahertz of spectrum we have. And then the NAV Bros are going
40:42
to come back and go, whoa, hold on, the company market cap might
40:47
be worth just the Legato spectrum.
40:51
And then we have all this other stuff.
40:52
And so the NAV Bros are kind of fun because they, they give us
40:56
the support. And also, I mean, you know, the
41:00
regular Bros like me have done the other math.
41:03
I'm not sort of the traditional spectrum NAV, which I think is
41:07
very conservative because people aren't paying that price for it
41:10
to be worth that value. They're paying that price to get
41:12
multiples of value creation on it.
41:15
And when I've done the Legato math of really what it looks
41:18
like to monetize 45 megahertz of spectrum, I posted that before
41:22
and it's a big number based on the spectrum reuse factor, the
41:26
special efficiency and the dollars per GB sold.
41:30
But it's very exciting. And so hopefully all this FCC
41:34
stuff really accelerates over, you know, call it the next two
41:38
months. But then the next docket we're
41:40
going to have to track is really the Legato docket and that could
41:44
that could be as soon as this week.
41:46
So as I mentioned before, the testing activity is really
41:48
surge. And Katzie did a really nice
41:50
post, aren't you? How to find all this stuff?
41:52
It's really a kind of a labyrinth of different search
41:57
features. But he generously showed people
42:00
how to do it 'cause that's the type of person he is.
42:03
And we also had this interesting little response in the SEC
42:06
docket by Jennifer Manor, who in quotes said expeditious Grant
42:12
and the modification application will promote the public interest
42:15
by helping build a quote. Golden age of communications.
42:20
What else is golden? Well, the next topic we have is
42:27
a Dome, which is golden. And so at tough for you.
42:31
He's a tough guy. Look at that profile pic.
42:34
You wouldn't want to mess with this guy, unlike me.
42:37
It's like a stupid kook. But he's really making this
42:41
point that the batches that we're seeing are pretty
42:44
important. And so we've already had the 1st
42:46
batch award and it was a bunch of sort of commodity stuff and
42:50
services. And so those are the guys that
42:52
were sort of out the door first. The second batch are much more
42:56
complex systems and include spacecrafts, unseen production,
42:59
integration contractors and are more complex.
43:03
And we're learning more about this.
43:06
We believe there's more information coming out in these
43:08
defense articles. The testing and evaluation is
43:12
also being done with a different form of risk transfer where the
43:16
Dow is making contractors actually take more of the stuff
43:20
on balance sheet initially to show it working and things like
43:24
that. And what I believe to be true is
43:27
that ASTS is competing for multiple parts of the project
43:30
and some are much, much bigger than others.
43:34
And so I think it's going to be potentially a longer process.
43:36
I don't know when we'll start to get details.
43:38
So it might be a long process, but a short process in terms of
43:41
when we actually have visibility.
43:43
But it's starting to really heat up.
43:47
And then the article I, I quoted, it's a space news
43:53
article, they said, MDA added that it must complete quote
43:56
discussions with vendors before soliciting any firm
43:58
requirements. And then there's all sorts of
44:02
different contracting methodologies they're doing,
44:04
which are a little bit beyond my ability to pare it back to
44:07
everyone. So you can read the article for
44:08
yourself and your takeaways might be the same as mine, which
44:11
are they are shifting some of the initial risks so that
44:17
there's not massive early upfront payments to vendors.
44:20
But really do it on your own dime.
44:23
Show it to us and then we'll give you the, we'll give you the
44:25
loot, which explains as we've talked about and speculated
44:29
before, is the reason presumably why ASDS really grabbed that
44:33
$1.15 billion of convertible bonds when they could, because
44:37
it put them in a position to really pursue all and especially
44:40
the biggest programs within Golden Dome.
44:43
That's what my belief is. And then we separately just have
44:46
job postings. And so we have AST space Mobile
44:51
is seeking a senior principal sat com ran architect to lead
44:57
integration design of next generation tactical
44:59
communication systems. And so we are, we already know
45:02
this. This is not new that ASTS is
45:05
deeply intertwined with defense applications.
45:08
There is the ASTS defense platform being sold into the
45:11
government, not only by ourselves as our own prime
45:13
contractor, but by multiple other prime contractor partners,
45:17
Fairfield being a big one. And so it's, it's exciting to
45:19
keep on seeing this happen and these hires show that it's
45:24
happening on a on a good pace. And that's going to be it
45:28
orthogonal business opportunity. That's not about dead spots.
45:30
That's not about the random Marines from Camp Pendleton
45:34
going on a hike. Oh, we're in a dead spot.
45:37
No, they're going to have these things in the pockets of all of
45:41
the Marines and we'll find out what that ARPU is.
45:44
But it could be a big number. And I think a lot of us were
45:47
actually talking about that movie The other day called House
45:50
of Dynamite, which, you know, whatever fine for airplane
45:53
movie, which is when I watched it.
45:55
But it's, you know, it's a classic.
45:56
It's Mr. President, I have crucial information about the
45:59
psychology of the Russian Prime Minister.
46:02
And it's like, where the hell is he?
46:05
Why can't I hear this guy? Mr. President, can you hear me
46:08
now? You know, the cell phone doesn't
46:09
work. And then even in that movie,
46:11
they had the president, Idris, I can't remember his last name,
46:16
you know, pulling out his Iridium SAT phone on the
46:19
helicopter. In all of these movies, it's
46:23
it's always about can people reach each other?
46:26
Is there clear communication? And usually there's not because
46:29
that's what creates drama of, you know, Oh my gosh, what a
46:33
nail biter. They weren't able to communicate
46:34
clearly. And you know, we served World
46:36
War 3 and so the government is going to have all this stuff.
46:39
And it mean frankly, they got into the ground based
46:42
interceptors as well of the importance of having a golden
46:46
Dome system working. And you watch that movie and you
46:49
really go, OK, I'm pretty cool. If they want to invest some
46:53
additional tax dollars to make sure I don't have a nuclear
46:55
weapon dropped on my head. It seems like something that
46:57
I'll never really feel the cost of it, but I'll hopefully also
47:02
never feel the benefit of it. But if I do, it will be very
47:04
valuable. And I think that's how the
47:07
Pentagon's thinking right now. Yeah, we also had again, more
47:12
confirmation. And so that Mobile World
47:15
Congress in Doha, which is in the Middle East, they had the
47:20
Vice President of Global Services at Nokia talk about
47:24
their partnership with AST Space Mobile.
47:26
And Kevin did us all a nice favor, as he always does, of
47:30
taking out the key points. You don't have to watch the
47:32
whole 2 hour thing. And so he talks about having a
47:35
proven, proven broadband with Asts.
47:38
Yeah, that's more than intermittent texting.
47:40
He emphasizes the importance of low latency.
47:43
So that's just the speed and the usefulness of it.
47:45
And that's because of Leo as opposed to systems that are
47:49
based in Geo. He sees future regenerative
47:52
architecture or use cases, despite starting with a
47:54
transparent architecture with Asts.
47:56
Not sure I totally understand the implications of that, but
48:00
surely it means something. And he talked about the speeds.
48:03
And so they tested at 15 megabits per second and 20
48:06
megabits per second in a 5 megahertz channel.
48:08
So divide those two numbers and that's spectral efficiency.
48:11
So 4 is really good, 3 is also really good.
48:15
And it just shows that they've been able to constantly improve
48:19
the the spectral efficiency, which allows the spectrum to be
48:27
used to greater effect. And they go on just talking
48:32
about the size of plane to launch 300 satellites globally.
48:35
And you know, again, it's good to be noticed and it's good to
48:40
be talked about. We talked again this week.
48:44
I was certainly talking a lot with an MPM man about this, but
48:47
then he did his spaces about AI data centers, which you've
48:50
already touched upon. I also included the link for his
48:53
spaces there. And then importantly, this is
48:56
all about just getting Catsy to go crazy on a topic.
48:59
And so basically we just want to slam Kathy's face in a bowl of
49:04
catnip so that he'll then take out a new project to dig into.
49:09
And to now we've seen this guy's work being right on things like
49:12
PNT, Radar, all these other applications.
49:16
We want him to help us with the math, frankly, on AI data
49:20
centers. And so now he's engaged on that.
49:22
I'm looking forward to some really great threads by him to
49:25
help us all understand it. We've been doing some math with
49:27
him behind the scenes just on things of how the spacing of the
49:31
elements currently work, just to understand how the spacing of AI
49:36
chips would work on on the arrays and things like that.
49:38
There's a lot to learn. And then we're going back
49:42
through the patents as well. So the next link is just about
49:45
the ASTS patent trove and we were looking into the heat
49:48
dissipation and things like that.
49:50
So interestingly enough, on the Star Cloud, which is AVC backed
49:55
company, they're designing their system to just work in SSO.
50:00
What is the SSL Sun synchronous orbit.
50:02
So that means that the satellite is just always in the sun.
50:05
So you know, when you think about Earth being half dark,
50:09
half light, these satellites will fly right on that.
50:12
The light part, why? They're trying to avoid thermal
50:17
change and thermal expansion. And so when the satellite goes
50:19
in and out of the sun, it goes from really, really hot to
50:22
really, really cold. And when you do that, things
50:25
break unless you design for them.
50:27
So to design for that is super expensive and also super hard.
50:32
And ASTS has done that. And so you're dealing with a lot
50:35
of crazy thermal dynamics. And that's frankly one of the
50:38
things as to why people thought ASTS was going to break up in
50:41
space. People thought that the thermal
50:42
challenges were going to be way, way too hard for them to solve.
50:46
And you know, that's why the, the, the experts, you know,
50:51
years ago thought this company would be doomed.
50:53
And they obviously showed that they can do it.
50:56
And so it gets it gets pretty interesting.
50:58
This is some of the my, my question for Catsy is presumably
51:03
you're going to want your AI data center to not just be in
51:08
the sun because time of use, people are going to also be
51:11
using the stuff other parts. And you have to have a view of a
51:15
ground station, presumably, otherwise you start, you know,
51:18
to have data sovereignty issues, things like that.
51:20
So I have a lot of questions and we're going to start to piece it
51:23
together. I won't blabber on more about
51:25
that right now because it's, it's beyond my depth, but we're
51:28
starting to really just isolate some of the key questions we
51:30
want to ask some of the known technical features and then put
51:36
together some basic math. But there's a there's a lot of
51:38
things in, in people on this call.
51:40
I know some people are involved in AI data center development
51:43
and things like that and, and have a lot of expertise.
51:46
And so it'd be great if you could just start to throw some
51:49
of the knowledge you have on some of these issues out there
51:54
so that we can, you know, start to put it all together and that
51:58
this is going to be a really great example of where the space
52:01
mob can use our use our brains, the company to use to
52:06
management. So that's normal course of
52:08
business for guys like Scott and Andrew and other key executives.
52:13
The vast majority of their compensation are their annual
52:15
equity grants. For example, I was going through
52:18
the proxy, Scott makes $250,000 a year base salary, not to Pooh,
52:23
Pooh that, but you know, he's a talented executive that would be
52:26
making a lot of cash at at a bank, something like that.
52:32
And so those RSUS, you know, he's going to get, you know,
52:34
150,000 units a year right now and then he's going to sell some
52:39
of those each year because that's actually how he gets
52:42
paid. And so guys, interestingly
52:44
enough at ASTS are really looking at this as an investment
52:47
vehicle. And so every year their salary,
52:48
they're basically getting ASTS stock is the basically the vast
52:53
majority of our competition and they're very bullish on it.
52:55
And so they think they're going to be making multiples every
52:57
year on what is their notional comp.
53:00
And this is just an example of that.
53:02
The change this year was a bell actually got a grant and this is
53:05
the first time he's gotten paid by the company, which, you know,
53:09
high time that he does. He's really developed a lot of
53:13
amazing stuff despite the odds and he's been a real, you know,
53:18
Sun Lord really showing that great leaders eat last and we
53:24
know we all appreciate all of his efforts.
53:28
We had an interesting topic come up again this week.
53:30
And so Kevin Colton was, I think kind of reflecting on something
53:34
I said, if I remember correctly, and he's doing some math just
53:37
about the sustainability of SpaceX with how many satellites
53:41
they have up in orbit and then what their deorbit profile looks
53:45
like. And then tying that to just the
53:48
amount of pollutants that go into the atmosphere from re
53:52
entry versus ASTS, I've always thought that this would matter.
53:57
And so take for example, you know, when oil was first
54:00
relevant. And if you think about what the
54:02
America looked like kind of in the late 1800s and the early
54:06
1900s, I'm always blown away when I see pictures of Los
54:09
Angeles and the whole place was just littered with derricks.
54:14
And nevermind places like Texas, which were just beyond
54:17
comprehension in Pennsylvania. And so it was sort of like
54:20
extract, extract, extract. It was early days.
54:23
And then people wised up and were like, maybe we shouldn't,
54:25
you know, literally have oil derricks everywhere.
54:29
Maybe there's a different way to do this, a new technology or be
54:32
more efficient with it. And I think that's what's going
54:34
to be happening with space. I think space just moves so fast
54:37
that they just weren't able to really keep up with it.
54:40
And Elon just really, you're went so far ahead of what
54:46
regulators could have conceived that he just spammed the orbits.
54:52
I think there's going to have to be a change with that and, and
54:56
it will catch up with him at some point.
54:58
And I think ASTS has been very conscientious about how they
55:01
thought about that. Very few satellites that are
55:04
very big, easier to manage, much lower decay factor 'cause they
55:09
can fly at a higher orbit because they actually have good
55:11
beam forming. And so that's the issue of
55:13
flying at 700 kilometers versus SpaceX flying at 300 kilometers.
55:16
It's non linear relationship to the time to deorbit this step is
55:20
stuff I think will matter from a regulatory and environmental
55:26
perspective. It already will matter from an
55:28
economic perspective. The Asts should have higher free
55:31
cash flow because of these dynamics because they're going
55:34
to have less maintenance CapEx. But that's a quote UN quote
55:37
issue or problem for another day.
55:41
And then the big thing this week was just wild.
55:43
SpaceX filed A trademark for Starlink mobile and then this
55:49
this article. Somehow no one really knows why.
55:51
Somehow this information was distributed far and wide to the
55:55
world and so everyone, everyone in the world found out about it.
56:00
I don't know who could have spread all this information.
56:03
SpaceX filed it. And then one must ask why?
56:08
So as part of this whole thing of him pumping SpaceX valuation,
56:13
which we have no problem with, but he needs to show Tam, he
56:16
needs to show these exciting stories that people can dream
56:18
and dream. We've got Mars, we've got
56:20
Starlink, we've got Starship. I don't know what else, I forget
56:26
the pitch. But now he's like, we're going
56:28
to take on telecoms and we're. And also D to D to C market is
56:34
massive. And that's why we got all the
56:35
spectrum. So ironically, he's actually
56:37
driving a ton of value expectations on D to C, but I
56:41
think he knows that he has a big problem with DC, nevermind tech.
56:44
I think he has a commercial problem.
56:46
He's not going to be able to go through the M&O partners.
56:49
That's going to be a wall for him.
56:51
And so there's there's not a way for him to access the customer,
56:54
at least there's not a cheap way.
56:56
And this has always been my contention is people don't sit
57:00
down and think about the various barriers to entry and the
57:03
various barriers to market. And I don't think that ASTS is
57:06
super wholesale model with the M and OS is totally appreciated by
57:11
people because I think SpaceX Bros, God bless their heart, are
57:14
just of the view like, you know, Papa Elon said.
57:20
So it will be. And I just don't think they're
57:23
thinking of the nuances. The Papa Elon has done well
57:26
where he can go direct to the consumer and vertically
57:28
integrate and and maybe he will start his own telecom company.
57:32
I mean, actually wouldn't put him, put it past him, but it's
57:35
an expensive proposition, you know, to do the whole stack.
57:39
And in the meantime, and maybe, maybe he can do it.
57:42
I don't know. But I do know it's going to be
57:43
super expensive to do it and take forever.
57:45
And never mind, his tech doesn't work, but so it's going to be a
57:49
crappy service. So he has to solve a lot of
57:51
problems before the service is actually good enough to go out
57:54
there. But in the meantime, he's just
57:57
totally frozen out any M&O from wanting to work with him, which
58:00
was already the case. But do they need a reminder?
58:04
Why the why in the world would they work with this guy and help
58:07
him improve his technology and get cash flow so they can turn,
58:10
you know, turn around and see a SpaceX phone.
58:13
Not going to do it. And it's the same thing, which
58:17
wasn't in the weekly, but over the weekend.
58:19
Obviously Elon went crazy on the EU and I know we have a lot of
58:23
Europeans in space pumps. I don't know, and I'm not a
58:26
European expert, so I'm not going to pretend to be, but I I
58:28
kind of started the Elon on this.
58:29
I'm like, yeah, Europe seems kind of over regulated.
58:32
And his joke of, you know, there's a government for
58:35
governments, it's like not lost. And I guess I was thinking about
58:38
it like, well, we have the federal government and we have
58:40
state governments, but we also have provincial governments in
58:44
Europe. So you really have governments
58:45
for governments for governments. That aside, but the EU probably
58:49
doesn't appreciate what he's saying about the EU.
58:52
And so the bureaucrats are probably pretty pissed off when
58:55
he's going after the bureaucrats, which is ironically
58:59
something that is different from when he went after Trump with
59:02
the big beautiful bill. He was going against Trump
59:06
because, you know, he thought he was right.
59:07
And maybe he is, but he certainly was not doing Trump's
59:11
bidding in that in that moment, which was very bad for him here
59:16
by attacking the EU, he is doing Trump's bidding.
59:19
And so this is actually what's so interesting is no one's going
59:23
to put the brakes on him. He's not going to get slapped
59:26
around and disinvited from a dinner or have Trump return the
59:30
Tesla. He's going to be having JD Vance
59:33
and Marco Rubio and Trump being like rah, rah Papa Elon.
59:36
So what's going to happen in South Cal?
59:40
I mean, this is just honestly June all over again where if
59:44
people remember in May and June, a big part of that revaluation
59:48
in my view was, yeah, sure, some expectations on FM one, FM 2, I
59:52
think the market invisible hand said there was one person on
59:57
earth that could slow Elon down and that was Donald Trump.
1:00:02
And Elon decided to piss that one person on earth off.
1:00:07
And that caused us to have a permanent change in our
1:00:10
opportunity at ASTS vis A vis government business, national
1:00:14
importance and general strategic perception.
1:00:19
And now I think we're having round two of that.
1:00:21
In in what's actually a bigger market the the European Union.
1:00:26
So it's, I don't know, is it better to be, you know, lucky or
1:00:32
smart, both. But I think the space model once
1:00:35
again, just sort of is in the right place of a, you know, a
1:00:39
competitor that is erratic and love him or hate him, you know,
1:00:43
no one made him do this. And so he's basically just
1:00:46
guaranteeing the EU is not going to use SpaceX for self-defense
1:00:52
or anything. And we already have Sacco, now a
1:00:55
German based company ready and willing to to serve.
1:00:59
And so that I think is going to have a material impact in our
1:01:02
future. There again, not a day goes by
1:01:05
where the story doesn't seemingly get better.
1:01:07
And then we also have Blue Origin, which I, I continue to
1:01:10
think of ASTS as really kind of a sum of the part investment
1:01:17
with Blue Origin. And I'm going to say that until
1:01:19
Blue Origin has a misstep and I'm going to walk that back
1:01:21
entirely and pretend I never said it.
1:01:23
But when you think about how these companies are acting
1:01:25
together, they, I think see this mutually beneficial relationship
1:01:29
where Blue Origin has by far the best looking rocket.
1:01:32
And as we all know, in defense applications, whatever looks the
1:01:37
coolest is therefore the best. And the Blue Origin rocket, I'm
1:01:41
just looking at the picture of it now, is so beautiful and it's
1:01:44
so big and so awesome and it works and it's a great
1:01:48
partnership because Bezos needs weight.
1:01:51
Again, going up needs to be for a purpose.
1:01:57
You only go up because the weight needs to go up.
1:01:59
And ACS has a lot of weight that needs to go up.
1:02:01
And therefore it gives Blue Origin purpose to do things.
1:02:05
And it seems like the US government is taking stock that
1:02:08
these two things are also a little bit of a package deal,
1:02:11
not exclusive, but Blue Origin working all of a sudden changes
1:02:15
some of the calculations, I think for the Department of War
1:02:18
and Blue Origin seems like it's really firing up its cadence and
1:02:23
that's exciting to see. I personally just never mind my,
1:02:26
you know, understanding of how I Blue Origin is important for AST
1:02:30
space mobile. I'm super excited to see them
1:02:33
really shake out the launch cadence and, you know,
1:02:36
continuing to prove this vehicle.
1:02:37
I mean, I have to believe at some point Blue Origin has a, a
1:02:40
failed launch, but knock on wood, hopefully not for many,
1:02:44
many years to come. And it's exciting.
1:02:46
We're really closely tracking New Glen Three, trying to get a
1:02:49
read on what's happening there. And so just the last thing is,
1:02:54
you know, it's a holiday season. I just put a plug in there for
1:02:56
Red Drum. I know I got my daughter a space
1:03:00
mobile necklace for Christmas and I'm going to make her wear
1:03:05
it 'cause I remind her she's an ASTS shareholder directly.
1:03:09
And I tried to explain to my kids, you know what that means?
1:03:12
Like what's a share? Like you're a boss.
1:03:14
But then I explained him you're actually a non voting boss
1:03:16
because of all his super voting shares.
1:03:17
So you really have an economic interest, but your vote doesn't
1:03:19
count. There's an interesting message
1:03:21
to send to young children. But then I was the standing.
1:03:24
I did some shopping on the official ASTS space mobile
1:03:27
website and then did some shopping on the regimen website
1:03:31
and reposted that link too because he's made some super
1:03:35
cool products and I know I value his feedback or his reception
1:03:40
feedback when you want some custom stuff mean to.
1:03:43
That's all I have for you this week.
1:03:47
Let's hope we have some cool announcements this week and then
1:03:51
stay tuned for when we do our kind of FM one launch a thon,
1:03:55
which will be pretty fun. And if anyone has real expert
1:03:59
insight on some of these math issues with AI data centers in
1:04:03
space, if you could DM me or you know, the usual suspects just to
1:04:08
say we can start to figure this out.
1:04:10
I wouldn't mind having some of this in the DD document update.
1:04:13
Doesn't have to be, you know, timely, but it's something I
1:04:16
want to get a little bit smart on, smarter on.
1:04:19
So if anyone has expertise there, I'm always looking to
1:04:21
incorporate and I'll get full attribution, of course, for
1:04:24
anyone's work because we're just trying to collect it all.
1:04:27
Have a great night. Bye.
1:04:31
Thanks for listening to the AST Space Mobile podcast.
1:04:34
If you enjoyed this episode and you'd like to help support the
1:04:37
podcast, please share it with others, post about it on social
1:04:41
media, or leave a rating and review.
1:04:43
To catch all the latest news about AST Space Mobile, make
1:04:47
sure to subscribe. Thanks again and I'll see you
1:04:49
next time. We're doing something very, very
1:04:55
big and acting with this technology we can really affect
1:04:58
billion lives. AFT Space Global is the only
1:05:01
company that had proven technology to deliver cellular
1:05:05
broadband connectivity directly from space to do everyday
1:05:09
smartphone people will just basically.
1:05:11
Turn their phone. And be simplest, regardless of
1:05:14
where you are. We don't want the user even to
1:05:16
know that it's connected by satellite.
1:05:19
Our role is to bring this into reality, always in partnership
1:05:23
with the enemy.