Latest / AST SpaceMobile Podcast / Kook' Weekly - April 19 - Off-nominal: New Glenn, Amazon's Move, and the SpaceMobile Ramp

Transcript

Kook' Weekly - April 19 - Off-nominal: New Glenn, Amazon's Move, and the SpaceMobile Ramp · AST SpaceMobile Podcast

• 0:00
  You shouldn't have to do this to impress me, Sir.
• 0:02
  The possibility of successfully navigating an asteroid field is
• 0:05
  approximately 3720. To what?
• 0:07
  Never tell me the odds. This is the AST Space Mobile
• 0:12
  podcast. We just basically turn your
• 0:16
  phone and be seamless, regardless of where you are.
• 0:19
  We don't want the user even to know that it's connected by
• 0:21
  satellite. Listen, the opportunity that we
• 0:26
  have is very, very, very large. How do I clean up my schedule
• 0:32
  while I'm waiting for my departure for the airport?
• 0:36
  And figured there might be some general interest to talk out
• 0:40
  loud as a lot of people are freaking out on the Internet,
• 0:44
  quite predictably. But you know, I have a job to do
• 0:49
  which is the weekly, so never mind that we might have just had
• 0:53
  a news event of some minor interest to people.
• 0:56
  I still feel like it's my obligation to go through all the
• 0:59
  week's news, but let's start with the elephant in the room.
• 1:04
  So a lot of us this morning had a truly spectacular opportunity
• 1:09
  to watch the New Glenn 3 flight, which for feedback next time I
• 1:15
  think we want to be at this jetty beach so that we're a
• 1:18
  little closer to it. Because I, I personally like to
• 1:21
  have that visceral feeling of my rib cage being shattered by a
• 1:26
  rocket and I, it got of a daredevil.
• 1:29
  So I'd like to get closer. So next time let's see if we can
• 1:31
  do it on the beach and get it catered or whatever.
• 1:33
  But still amazing nonetheless. And so New Glenn got to orbit.
• 1:38
  How high is the question and successfully relaunched the
• 1:41
  booster. Some questions that we have are
• 1:45
  what exactly went wrong and what does that mean for future New
• 1:51
  Glenn flights? So the question is really is
• 1:53
  that stage 2 having any issues? Is it reliable?
• 1:56
  What does it mean for Blue Origin certification which is
• 2:01
  important for everyone? Some questions on if it doesn't
• 2:04
  count as a certification flight, does that mean actually some
• 2:08
  free Blue Origin flights open up for any sort of risk seeking
• 2:13
  companies that want to donate some non concrete cargoes TBD.
• 2:19
  But in any respect, if this were a Starship flight, could you
• 2:24
  imagine the SpaceX valuation pushing to 3 trillion people
• 2:28
  would go, they landed the booster, they got to orbit.
• 2:31
  Otherwise perfect. And maybe the sablets got put in
• 2:34
  the wrong place. But hey, progress is progress.
• 2:37
  But because we live in a world of double standards, the
• 2:42
  Internet has immediately got to be quite negative on what was
• 2:45
  otherwise truly astonishing where there's only one country
• 2:49
  in the world that can do this and it was just done in front of
• 2:53
  our eyes. So what we don't know as it
• 2:55
  relates to the cargo is where it is.
• 2:59
  And so it says off nominal. But when I was just looking at
• 3:02
  the tweets, it did not say that there's an anomaly which is
• 3:08
  which is important. The anomaly would suggest that
• 3:14
  the rocket had some failure state.
• 3:16
  And so Blue Origins, not saying that, which is important because
• 3:23
  if it were a failure state of the rocket, it could give more
• 3:26
  evidence to the idea that we did not reach a certain altitude as
• 3:31
  opposed to getting high enough but being in the wrong
• 3:34
  inclination or something like that.
• 3:36
  And why that matters is if you're too low, then it just
• 3:40
  might just too much drag. And it might be, you know,
• 3:43
  something where you can't unfold it or if you do, you're in a
• 3:46
  deorbit too quickly. If you're in the wrong orbit,
• 3:49
  whether or not altitude is an issue, altitude for domain a
• 3:54
  question as well. You're in the wrong orbit,
• 3:56
  though. The problem is whether you pose
• 3:59
  a collision risk because, you know, you got popped into the
• 4:02
  wrong neighborhood and you got to reassess what what's the HOA
• 4:07
  says about you spinning around and their area?
• 4:10
  So we don't know that yet, but I, I personally, a lot of people
• 4:14
  are ripping you apart on the Internet.
• 4:15
  I don't care. It's going to probably block
• 4:17
  most of it. But when you think about it as
• 4:19
  an owner, what what did you learn today?
• 4:22
  You learned Blue Origin is continuing de risking their
• 4:26
  rocket landing. A booster says that booster is
• 4:30
  still in the recycle inventory. They got to orbit.
• 4:34
  We don't know which one. Our satellite was alive once it
• 4:39
  was deposited into said unknown orbit.
• 4:42
  And so then you really think about it.
• 4:45
  What did you not get? Well, we don't really know what
• 4:47
  the revenue would have been on one in particular satellite, but
• 4:50
  in the context of present value of future growth, truly
• 4:55
  immaterial. What you did get, but you
• 4:58
  already had was proof that the production shakedown for the
• 5:03
  Blue Origin. But more importantly AST has
• 5:06
  continued to de risk and we're closer to batch.
• 5:08
  So I get it that there's going to be a lot of people in
• 5:11
  particular retail that start selling when the overnight
• 5:15
  market opens tonight and in the morning, I'm sure I'm going to
• 5:18
  get my face ripped off by people, but I'm not very sure
• 5:22
  that I'm going to get face my get my face ripped off by the
• 5:25
  market And I get probably too jaded.
• 5:28
  And I'm too, I don't want that too comfortable with what I own,
• 5:31
  but I do know what I own. And so in my time horizon, which
• 5:36
  is longer than a day, this doesn't really matter to me.
• 5:40
  I'm I'm obviously disappointed. I'm more just sort of dreading
• 5:44
  the reaction of others. But as it relates to business
• 5:49
  continuity or financial risk to the company, it's effectively
• 5:52
  immaterial or it is immaterial. And whether you get insurance
• 5:56
  proceeds or not doesn't doesn't matter at all.
• 5:59
  And so that's what I think. And and so what's the market
• 6:04
  going to do? I also don't know in a prior
• 6:06
  life, I would have been positioning in front of launch
• 6:10
  sort of a trepidation. This is sort of the risk I don't
• 6:13
  really want to deal with with a portfolio manager on like, I
• 6:16
  don't know if the rocket will work or not.
• 6:19
  What I do know is that the tech works in that over a year or two
• 6:24
  we'll have a lot of satellites up.
• 6:25
  But on this individual little thing with jump risk, I don't
• 6:29
  really want to deal with it. And so I would have gone in
• 6:35
  lighter and if I were a convert guy, I would have gone in with a
• 6:37
  heavier delta. So then you see what might be a
• 6:40
  gap down tomorrow. I'm covering like crazy.
• 6:43
  And then, you know, the market should see the general
• 6:46
  trajectory, what's going on both in Blue Origin and this company.
• 6:50
  And so I don't really see a strong reason why.
• 6:53
  Well, there is no material change as far as I'm concerned.
• 6:56
  And for all we know, the satellite was put into a high
• 6:59
  enough orbit where they can just position it where they want with
• 7:03
  the thrusters, potentially impacting the total life of the
• 7:08
  spacecraft, which really doesn't matter whether it's in orbit for
• 7:12
  three years or seven. If that is the result by then,
• 7:16
  this will have been antiquated technology anyway.
• 7:18
  And so so we'll see. That's the big news.
• 7:23
  Most of the people on this call are not the people that are
• 7:28
  likely to be overnight dumpers because the fact you're on this
• 7:31
  call means you've taken part of a considerable effort to know
• 7:36
  what you own and think things through.
• 7:39
  But there's a lot of people that don't.
• 7:41
  And I'm seeing this on Twitter, people already having like full
• 7:44
  crash outs saying this is like, whatever, these are people that
• 7:49
  are probably unlikely to be successful investors in their
• 7:52
  life. And that's that's a shame.
• 7:55
  So I don't really have much more to say on this point as I don't
• 8:00
  know the answer. And I'm certainly putting out my
• 8:04
  feelers and people who might know the answer to collect more
• 8:07
  facts as they're allowed to share them.
• 8:10
  But I think it really just comes down to a company right now is
• 8:14
  almost certainly aware of how high the satellite is.
• 8:18
  And then provided that it's high enough, they'll know that in
• 8:22
  theory they can use it. But they're going to be having
• 8:25
  to run a whole lot of calculations, presumably coral
• 8:28
  coordinations with NORAD to figure out again the lay of the
• 8:34
  land in their new neighborhood. And so just imagine being
• 8:37
  dropped off all of a sudden and Shanghai versus your intended
• 8:44
  neighborhood of Atherton. Well, you got to like figure out
• 8:49
  where you're going to go for dinner and all of a sudden you
• 8:54
  had some unexpected changes. So those are the things they're
• 8:56
  going to be doing right now. Based on my best understanding
• 8:59
  of this, which which informs whether or not it's safe for
• 9:03
  them to proceed further or as an uninvited guest into an
• 9:08
  unintended orbit, they have to do something else.
• 9:11
  So let's what I know about this, but otherwise was a pretty
• 9:17
  incredible that very nice of a company to host this and learned
• 9:22
  a lot from some of the people I interacted with just in terms of
• 9:25
  the trajectory of the company, their expectations for the
• 9:29
  future of the technology, which I won't get into right now.
• 9:33
  But I certainly learned some things that were inspiring that
• 9:37
  are hitting on things that have previously talked about in terms
• 9:41
  of product road map and the importance of continuing to
• 9:44
  innovate, which I will touch you on in a second.
• 9:47
  So what we also got on Friday was a satellite production
• 9:51
  update. And this is again why I would
• 9:54
  say that the failure of anyone satellite isn't a big deal if
• 9:58
  this satellite in fact failed. So if PW Three had failed, the
• 10:02
  company would have gone bankrupt.
• 10:06
  If Block One had failed, the company would have more likely
• 10:10
  than not gone bankrupt. If FM one had failed, it would
• 10:15
  have been disappointing, but you would have just been looking to
• 10:18
  FM 2, this satellite to learn what you needed to learn about
• 10:23
  unfolding. And I'll use unfold right now
• 10:25
  out of out of respect and deference for Scott's loss
• 10:29
  today. You would you would not have yet
• 10:32
  learned about the unfolding mechanics of the next year in
• 10:37
  satellite, but we did learn that already from FM 1.
• 10:40
  So FM 2 was the spare satellite meant to work as a pair with the
• 10:45
  SDA for sure. But in and of itself because of
• 10:49
  the success of FM 1:00, not that important.
• 10:52
  Sure, teaching for them is now we look to batch one, which we
• 10:56
  learned more about from the production fees.
• 10:58
  And so I have this chart that I post there in weekly which shows
• 11:04
  really my T account looking at satellites in WIP work in
• 11:08
  progress versus things that you are crediting from that account
• 11:14
  as they are shipped. And what we don't know is the
• 11:18
  stages of work in progress with that IT account.
• 11:21
  But we do know just cause Space Mountain has a lot of
• 11:23
  information about the status of the composite rings, the
• 11:28
  movement of those in the arrival of buses, which are then
• 11:32
  informing our view of of the 25 satellites that are in
• 11:36
  production, how many of those are at certain stages, which
• 11:41
  then gives you an early lead time look on ultimate shipments.
• 11:47
  And so I still maintain again look like an idiot on the short
• 11:51
  term because every word really observes the stock on a day by
• 11:55
  day, week by rate basis. But I'm thinking on a quarterly
• 11:58
  semi annual scale, we're a little slipper, slipper dip here
• 12:02
  and there. Sure, I get bashed on Reddit,
• 12:06
  which I apparently did a lot this week, but it it won't
• 12:10
  matter. And so we're seeing all the
• 12:12
  right things, which is ultimately what matters is the
• 12:16
  net present value of future growth opportunities.
• 12:18
  And so the stock is not discounting FM 2, the stock is
• 12:22
  discounting FM 243 and the entire path to get there.
• 12:27
  And so each day I'm asking myself the question of where are
• 12:30
  we on that path to get there? And a lot of snarky people will
• 12:33
  say, well, briefly, since you haven't shipped, well, whatever,
• 12:36
  take a report this, this is this is developing and it will
• 12:39
  develop in our way. And then you have to ask
• 12:42
  yourself the question of what does our market look like?
• 12:45
  What does our business look like as we get to 243?
• 12:49
  But the company continues to scale.
• 12:51
  We had the Antonov arrive with more rings.
• 12:56
  We got pictures of the flight control systems which are
• 13:01
  showing all the right movements and scaling.
• 13:07
  And so company's getting ready for a pretty exciting back half
• 13:13
  and you can see the M and OS are really excited.
• 13:16
  And so Bell was out talking about the continued momentum and
• 13:19
  the partnership and, and Italy. If the satellite doesn't end up
• 13:23
  working, then you know, not all, basically not one step forward
• 13:27
  or really not you were one step back, but the satellite.
• 13:34
  What we did also learn because of the flight patch was the
• 13:38
  importance of the military. And so as Catsy found out, they
• 13:41
  literally put on Morris code Millnet.
• 13:45
  So military net, which is important and something we knew.
• 13:50
  But when people kind of scoff at the idea that ESTs has all this
• 13:55
  military importance, the fact that they literally are writing
• 13:59
  Millnet on their flight patch is certainly a giveaway and just
• 14:04
  goes to show you the importance of this company and the future
• 14:08
  outlook. What I found interesting this
• 14:11
  week, I'm sorry if I'm a little short of breath, I'm trying to
• 14:14
  double task. I'm on the treadmill right now.
• 14:19
  So just is where it is doing two things at once like cardio while
• 14:26
  broadcasting our complex satellite developments, which
• 14:30
  I'm not qualified to do. But we had a interesting article
• 14:33
  written by a, of all people, a paid consultant who has Azon X.
• 14:38
  But what's interesting is just, again, a pretty clear
• 14:42
  delineation of the different tech differences.
• 14:45
  And so points out that among the field, which at first glance
• 14:50
  might look crowded, you have names like Iridium, Skylo,
• 14:54
  Satelliot, which honestly, as I look at it looks like satellite
• 14:58
  idiot, I would say probably are and Q tech, Starlink, Now
• 15:02
  Amazon, all of a sudden it looks like a crowded field.
• 15:05
  But when you start to dig down, you have many of these people
• 15:09
  are just narrow band IoT satellite operators.
• 15:12
  They're using general roaming, which is a separate network not
• 15:16
  integrated to the MNL, which is not offering consistent network
• 15:20
  slicing, very, very different. Then you have Starlink, which is
• 15:24
  basically Trojan forcing itself to be a parallel network using
• 15:31
  the MN OS to get access to their end users, very, very dangerous
• 15:35
  for the MN OS. And then you have Amazon, which
• 15:38
  hasn't yet really defined its strategy.
• 15:39
  But what I'm learning is that they're really probably not
• 15:44
  going to really compete in this market.
• 15:45
  And we'll get to that in a second.
• 15:48
  But as Kathy points out in the next post, the first principles
• 15:54
  basis of ASTS is ultimately why it's going to win is because it
• 15:58
  is directly integrated into the MN OS, which allows them to work
• 16:05
  seamlessly, which then allowed the Ms. servers sure had assets.
• 16:09
  MNOSMS OS would be a different call when you we're starting to
• 16:13
  talk about cannabis, which maybe is appropriate today, but at a
• 16:18
  jolly that's good on that route. But with the MN OS we have
• 16:23
  capitals bomb. They don't want all this
• 16:25
  terrestrial towers. And so if they can displace
• 16:27
  loads to the sky, we're going to want to do that.
• 16:30
  And we have Catsy very astutely picking up the fact that ASTS
• 16:37
  announced that B or BB Southern FM 2 will greatly exceed 120
• 16:45
  megabits of peak data speeds. Well, what we all learned today
• 16:48
  at 4:00 in the morning from a bell is that the speeds will be
• 16:52
  above 150 megabits per second. So that's pretty telling in
• 16:57
  terms of what they're achieving in terms of spectral efficiency.
• 17:02
  And that again causes this convergence, which I've always
• 17:04
  believed as to why satellites are going to start to replace
• 17:08
  the towers on the margin. And that is a huge Cam expander.
• 17:15
  And as Kathy points out, the enabling part of this is the
• 17:19
  partnership of Nokia where integrating with the air scale
• 17:25
  system by Nokia and the MNO 5G core ASCs is not an outside
• 17:30
  provider. So going back to the tech
• 17:32
  differences, they're not comparable if you're a separate
• 17:35
  roaming narrowband network versus something that integrates
• 17:38
  directly with the core. We are just another cell site to
• 17:42
  the MNO, which allows for it to be part of a hybrid network
• 17:47
  infrastructure. They're very exciting, which
• 17:50
  goes to the next part around Amazon.
• 17:53
  So this will certainly be a volatile week.
• 17:59
  We had a volatile week last week.
• 18:00
  So Amazon entered the frame by buying global start.
• 18:05
  This was a competitive process very well seller draft and
• 18:09
  Amazon bought it for two $11 billion of being debt.
• 18:13
  And of course, the ACS is hammered as people raid the
• 18:17
  prospects of a new competitor as as I like at this deal, it's
• 18:22
  just an absolute no brainer for Amazon.
• 18:24
  He chose, if you just work backwards, the N 53 spectrum
• 18:28
  that they had as part of this, it's going to be useful for
• 18:31
  Amazon for its data centers and warehouses.
• 18:33
  It's a private 5G frequency that allows them to really do Wi-Fi
• 18:39
  without any public spectrums. And then they'll be able to do
• 18:43
  this for other people. And I don't know what that's
• 18:45
  worth, but it's probably worth a lot for them, all their robots
• 18:49
  and things like this. And then you have the Apple
• 18:52
  contract, probably not terribly important in terms of its
• 18:57
  immediate financial application, but it probably ties in more
• 19:01
  with Amazon being a lot more AWS work and sets some optionality
• 19:05
  for the future and keeps it away from space sets.
• 19:08
  And you also get 26 megahertz of spectrum, which is going to be
• 19:12
  immediately very valuable to Amazon for its drones and IoT.
• 19:16
  And then they could say we have ADC offering whether the
• 19:19
  ultimate would do or not TBD. But again, it keeps it away from
• 19:24
  SpaceX, keeps the Amazon in the game with a placeholder option.
• 19:28
  The market is not very optimistic about Amazon.
• 19:31
  And so as I was reading some cell said reports, the market is
• 19:36
  currently putting a negative value on Amazon Leo with people
• 19:41
  just really focused on cash burn and the very uncertain prospects
• 19:44
  of success. Whether that's correct or not,
• 19:48
  we will certainly find out. But it just goes to show you
• 19:52
  that the stock market is very negative on the prospects of the
• 19:57
  Amazon Leo less so after this deal couldn't show maybe a a
• 20:00
  path to go forward, but I really don't think this had to be a
• 20:04
  deal that was well thought out. But Amazon is for 11 billion
• 20:07
  bucks, it's 5% of their CapEx budget.
• 20:10
  Immediately you have some spectrum you can use.
• 20:13
  You're also really going back to a spectrum holding company.
• 20:17
  Buying spectrum is kind of like buying Bitcoin.
• 20:20
  It's just kind of a cash equivalent in a very loose way.
• 20:23
  And so by buying something that once gone, you can never get
• 20:26
  again. But if you get it and change
• 20:28
  your mind, you can easily sell it.
• 20:30
  And it fits into the strategic optionality for what you think
• 20:34
  is potentially going to be a very big part of your business.
• 20:38
  Is Emily smart thing to do? But a lot of people pointed out,
• 20:43
  like quite a few links here in this one tweet, as a lot of
• 20:46
  people pointed out, Amazon's not in the business to white label
• 20:50
  the service to Apple is at least the the hot tape.
• 20:55
  That would be pretty small thinking as opposed to some far
• 20:59
  greater integrated idea. And that's personally what I
• 21:03
  think is going on and whether it extends to the potential
• 21:08
  absurdity of a Fire Phone, which we'll get to next.
• 21:11
  The use cases for Amazon to have integrated connectivity to
• 21:15
  consumer hardware is very obvious.
• 21:18
  That makes sense. And so that starts to even put
• 21:21
  pressure on M and OS in different ways, but it's not
• 21:23
  directly comparable to what ASCs is going to do.
• 21:26
  Most importantly, I didn't see a play on where Amazon was
• 21:30
  actually going to build this in a smart way.
• 21:32
  And so they're maintaining their contracts with MDAMDA is a third
• 21:37
  party contractor. To my knowledge, there's never
• 21:40
  been a successful constellation done with third party
• 21:43
  contractors for very simple reasons.
• 21:45
  You're going to get hosed on the costs, and you don't have the
• 21:48
  short cycles for iterations and innovation.
• 21:50
  You know someone that has materially different incentives
• 21:53
  and goals than you. They're not aligned and the path
• 21:57
  to rapid innovation is not there.
• 21:59
  And so for them to replicate what ASTS has seems simply
• 22:03
  inconceivable. And so far, what we know is that
• 22:07
  their satellites are going to be a much smaller scale anyway.
• 22:10
  I was actually talking to some ASD people about this today and
• 22:14
  they just were kind of scratching their head at how MDA
• 22:17
  would have a competitive offering and I think the simple
• 22:19
  conclusion is that they will not and that that is actually not
• 22:22
  part of the pilot. So I think the Amazon news from
• 22:25
  this week was probably ultimately a non event for
• 22:31
  reasonable expectations of the stock.
• 22:33
  Although sequel I really wouldn't give a thought
• 22:35
  experiment of would I rather just traded to SpaceX and sort
• 22:39
  of strengthen the monster I already know, or I have a new
• 22:44
  little monster that took some strength away from the big
• 22:47
  monster. But now I have two monsters.
• 22:50
  And so net, net, I'd rather probably have one strong
• 22:52
  monster, which I already feel pretty comfortable about how
• 22:55
  we're fighting against versus adding, you know, the other
• 23:00
  single greatest entrepreneur in the history of humanity who has
• 23:04
  been largely successful in almost everything he's tried.
• 23:07
  Yeah. I don't like want to draft that
• 23:09
  guy into the ring in my Waffle House cage fight, but but here
• 23:12
  we are. And then use go well, at least
• 23:15
  ASTS has been company. Forged in Fire has already had
• 23:19
  to be achieving success in light of facing by far the most
• 23:24
  formidable competitor ever in SpaceX.
• 23:28
  And now there's just a new entrant which just simply global
• 23:30
  star recapitalized without an immediate plan and no evident
• 23:35
  change in the technology certainly better capitalized.
• 23:38
  Not really clear to me how this change is the long term picture.
• 23:42
  Would have been better if global surge just decided to wave the
• 23:46
  white flag and liquidate on economically.
• 23:48
  But you know such has not to be the case.
• 23:50
  But Amazon immediately fires back, no pun intended, and
• 23:53
  decides to alienate itself from all M and OS by announcing a
• 23:57
  Fire phone. And so people just can't quit
• 23:59
  the idea of owning their own platform for good reason.
• 24:03
  Because that's where his reply. And so Meta would do anything to
• 24:07
  have its own platform and try to an Oculus burned a lot of money
• 24:10
  but was worth it because if you can find the next platform
• 24:14
  shift, you control the world. And these guys know that.
• 24:17
  So they'd have to try. And so for Bezos to have a
• 24:20
  successful GC business that's not particularly interested
• 24:23
  given to current enterprise value, he asked to defend and
• 24:27
  increase, taking a shot at a new winning consumer device that
• 24:32
  then pulls in all sorts of value from the content, compute and so
• 24:35
  forth. That is interesting.
• 24:37
  Take a bet on that and if it fails you can flip the spectrum
• 24:40
  anyway. But in the meantime, how does
• 24:44
  AT&T feel about that? Probably not great.
• 24:47
  How does Apple feel about that? Probably not great.
• 24:50
  So my view is all these other guys are going to be again
• 24:55
  looking at who is really the carrier neutral option, who's
• 25:00
  not going to be a competitor to them and you probably want to do
• 25:05
  business. And so once we have found to be
• 25:07
  particularly useful is this one from Alex from Babylon this
• 25:10
  week. And he went at the risk of
• 25:12
  stating the obvious, the richest men in the world are not buying
• 25:15
  on s s spectrum for 10 to $20 billion just to white label it
• 25:19
  to legacy M and OS. That is short to medium term
• 25:22
  fairy tale story and I'm quite sure nobody serious fell in for
• 25:26
  that anymore. They bought this to supercharge
• 25:29
  their Leo connectivity bundles via prime and Sterling
• 25:32
  equivalent directly competing with the same M and OS long
• 25:35
  term. So this is really the fiber
• 25:37
  optician and to power it around AI at the edge ambitions without
• 25:41
  metal men. ASTS is literally the white mite
• 25:45
  shining armor here for the MO's. Without it they are at long term
• 25:50
  risk of being cut out of the royal customer.
• 25:53
  And so my own comment is how can you start to lose a second of
• 25:56
  the market? You start to be at risk of
• 25:58
  losing all of the market because you start to get weaker, less
• 26:02
  financial power, things like that.
• 26:03
  Slippery slope. And meanwhile, ASTS continues to
• 26:08
  strengthen its own global spectrum campaign.
• 26:11
  And so Mega Constellations and Justin Barrett were out really
• 26:15
  showing that ASTS might actually be the acquirer of the the
• 26:21
  remaining sort of legacy fairs that need to do something like
• 26:24
  Iridium and VSAT. But also ASTS is trying to get
• 26:27
  it for free. So there's still this very
• 26:29
  active docket discussion where ASTS is going after these S band
• 26:35
  rights in Chile, Brazil, EU, et cetera.
• 26:39
  And these can just be awarded by the government and something to
• 26:43
  follow pretty closely. I don't want to dismiss the
• 26:49
  power of Amazon. It's also worth noting that in
• 26:52
  the next week that Amazon has been successful at winning over
• 26:55
  some of these airlines from Starlink.
• 26:57
  So again, for a little competitor not to be dismissed,
• 27:00
  but we have to start thinking about what is the real strategic
• 27:03
  goal of Amazon And once identifying that strategic goal
• 27:08
  with the reaction of other companies in the ecosystem to
• 27:11
  respond against that threat. And whether the friend I already
• 27:15
  have in ASTS also enables me to fight back against my enemy,
• 27:22
  increasing them. But also do I want to strengthen
• 27:24
  my enemy? Who is the wolf in the hen
• 27:26
  house? And the answer to that is a
• 27:28
  resounding no, which is why I'm an OS, don't want to work with
• 27:31
  SpaceX. And I see a very strong argument
• 27:35
  it's not too keen to hand over everything to Amazon either.
• 27:41
  There is some speculation that Amazon as a spectrum holder
• 27:45
  could in fact economically be another MNO for AST.
• 27:49
  Yes, because now that they have the spectrum, the question is
• 27:52
  how to light it up. Does it make sense for them to
• 27:55
  put birds in the air for different use spaces they have?
• 27:57
  Or do they actually hire ACS and utilize the spectrum through
• 28:01
  that, give them a little relationship with the companies,
• 28:03
  which is friendly? What's entirely conceivable that
• 28:07
  that's true, but we could certainly put that also in the
• 28:11
  in the opium bucket just because a bad week likes more bad news.
• 28:17
  We had the Rakuten. We had Rakuten was a large
• 28:21
  shiller start to sell their shares.
• 28:23
  That I think is, you know, unrelated to everything,
• 28:26
  although now everyone's probably like Mickey knew Mickey knew
• 28:29
  that the second stage wouldn't burn, right.
• 28:31
  Any sold in advance. Well, no, we didn't, but
• 28:36
  Racketson is over levered. Being a holding company or third
• 28:43
  party investments is not their business model.
• 28:45
  They are not SoftBank. They have a over levered
• 28:48
  electronic company in Japan that's struggling and has
• 28:51
  interest rate shock and they have a massive winner with it.
• 28:54
  So they're blowing out of it. So that just does provide a, a
• 28:59
  technical it chose. It's like any syndicate trade.
• 29:03
  Once that's signalled to Wall Street, it's just easy.
• 29:06
  You just lean into that because you kind of have a free option
• 29:09
  to the short side when you know there's a big seller holding a
• 29:11
  bunch of stock. So even if you're a buyer of the
• 29:14
  stock, naturally you're just going to pull your bid and now
• 29:17
  you can get it get it back a little cheaper because you have
• 29:20
  this publicized seller in Wall Street will certainly lower the
• 29:24
  price to help clear that stock. So that's going to be a bad
• 29:27
  technical question is whether it was already realized or not.
• 29:32
  And then really going back to the production queues, seeing
• 29:36
  the Antonoff in Midland is important because it's giving us
• 29:39
  more visibility into some of the critical path items, namely
• 29:42
  being the composite wings. So those are being dropped off
• 29:45
  or it might have been the flight computers is what looks more
• 29:49
  likely. And so we have the arrays.
• 29:52
  We know arrays don't do much good unless there's a control
• 29:56
  set to process the signal. When those are coming, it just
• 30:00
  gives us more visibility just by the pessimism.
• 30:03
  But the ramp up of brush capacity is coming and will
• 30:07
  accelerate. Some of you may not be there for
• 30:09
  it or get it. A lot of people will give up.
• 30:11
  They get consumed with the negativity, leaves the bitterly
• 30:15
  to help the perspective and then wake up in three months and then
• 30:20
  everything's firing and they go where did they go wrong?
• 30:23
  And the where they went wrong is they didn't spend 5 to 6 hours
• 30:26
  every week compiling a weekly update, then live streaming it
• 30:31
  through a stream of consciousness to really
• 30:32
  internalize what the future looks like in six months versus
• 30:36
  what the most recent past look like.
• 30:38
  That's the difference between people who keep their head on
• 30:42
  and people who don't. So just remind people of that
• 30:45
  based on a limited experience trading public securities.
• 30:51
  And then we also have FCC meetings happening.
• 30:55
  They don't need that approval yet, but it continues to go
• 30:58
  through or past the comment period.
• 31:01
  Those for SES approval and the Gaia and said those could come
• 31:04
  when they need to come. We don't yet need them, but I
• 31:07
  would expect they can have come. And Brendan Carr has been out
• 31:11
  publicly saying that we're, you know, evidently approved because
• 31:16
  we're deemed to be one of the three competitors.
• 31:20
  And then there was a sell side doubt, but different could do
• 31:22
  that in their own time. So thank, he's great meeting a
• 31:26
  lot of people this week weekend launch.
• 31:28
  I know we all left really excited.
• 31:30
  It was really incredible to watch a successful booster land
• 31:33
  clearly shortly there after punctuated by the uncertainty of
• 31:40
  what a off nominal inclination or off nominal orbit beams that
• 31:45
  we'll find out. And so never, never fear that I
• 31:49
  will be shit toasting in a humorous way, whatever the
• 31:53
  answer is, good or bad, doing my own mental rationalization,
• 31:58
  which is my process and mine alone.
• 31:59
  But I'll invite people on, right?
• 32:02
  So if everyone has a good trip back, see their respective homes
• 32:06
  if they're a launch. Otherwise they hope people, you
• 32:09
  know, keep doing good work and reflect on what's material,
• 32:14
  what's not, what's emotional disappointment versus what a
• 32:17
  killer would think. If you want to be the business
• 32:20
  killer. And maybe the answer is panic.
• 32:24
  That's not my reaction, but it it might be the right one.
• 32:27
  So I'm not going to advertise in our future, but remember to stay
• 32:31
  calm and carry on. And meanwhile, I've done 36
• 32:36
  minutes doing the hacker workout with my inclination is 7 1/2% in
• 32:43
  my orbital. The last thing is 2.5 miles an
• 32:45
  hour on the treadmill and burned 261 calories.
• 32:49
  We'll talk to you guys. So try to be productive.
• 32:53
  Bye. Thanks listening to the AST
• 32:56
  Space Mobile podcast. If you enjoyed this episode and
• 32:59
  you'd like to help support the podcast, please share it with
• 33:02
  others, post about it on social media, or leave a rating and.
• 33:06
  Review to catch. All the latest news about AST
• 33:09
  Space Mobile, make sure to subscribe.
• 33:11
  Thanks again and I'll see you next time.
• 33:17
  We're doing something very, very big and I think with this
• 33:20
  technology we can really affect billion lives.
• 33:23
  AFT Space globally is the only company that has good technology
• 33:27
  to deliver cellular broadband connectivity directly from faith
• 33:31
  to the everyday smartphone. People will just basically turn
• 33:35
  their phone and be seamless regardless.
• 33:37
  Of where you are. We don't want the user even to
• 33:40
  know that it's connected. By satellite our.
• 33:43
  Role is to bring this into reality, always in partnership
• 33:46
  with the MMO. Listen, Waffles.