Is AST SpaceMobile Becoming Space's Next Hyperscaler?

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[00:00:59] Speaker C: Okay, looks like we have a quorum. Hope everyone had a wonderful Labor Day. I am not excited to go back to work tomorrow, but, um, it is what it is. So I know a lot of us were checking TLE data all weekend. So the FUDsters— I woke up, I forget if it was Saturday or Sunday, and the FUDsters were running rampant, kind of like what Tim had said when BW3 was initially launched, he was quick to tweet, well, you know, probably broke up in orbit, which is my conservative forecast. And, you know, this thing is always quick to really seed a lot of uncertainty, which seems to be in the intent because a very simple query using AI, which is a really great Equalizers, some of these can give you a different story. So I just refresh my own data and I see BW11 just happily in orbit, path telemetry that you'd expect it to. It has not deployed, that I'm pretty confident in. And so then the question would be, hasn't it deployed? And that answer can be for a couple of reasons. One is that they're waiting for it to be in the appropriate spacing. I'm getting a lot of thumbs down. So is that people thumbs downing the fact you can't hear me, or is it thumbs downing— hold on, breaking up, kook. Oh God, one sec. I don't really know how to fix it. Microphone, because this is an X issue, not a kook issue. Apparently it's better. Maybe I just need to be closer. So anyway, what we were talking about is BW11, and if this keeps on being a problem, then I'll figure out how to switch to something, but I'm hardwired on a really good connection, so I think it's just X. But so anyway, I've been checking the BW11 data like a hawk, and I see it in the right type of orbits that it should be in. And so it has not deployed though. And so there's a couple of reasons why that would be the case. One is there was heightened solar activity, as I found out when I was talking to Kevin Shen. And so that's a good reason not to deploy a satellite because there's a lot of things that could get complicated if you deploy a satellite in a solar storm, one of which is a lot of electromagnetic buildup on it. So you unfurl it and, you know, you have discharge, electric discharge. Another is that there's just more drag in atmosphere, so you deploy it when it would have more stress on the structure. Another reason is that you're waiting it— waiting for it to be spaced, uh, optimally relative to the other Bluebirds. That last one I haven't checked. I haven't pulled a map just to see what what the configuration looks like. But those are, those are 2 real, real good reasons why BW11 would, would be delayed in its unfurling. Another reason would be maybe they had a problem with it. And so what we know is in the past sometimes there's been software issues and they have to upload software. You have to wait for passes over. You know, that, that's happened before, unbeknownst to maybe a lot of people on this call. And then lastly, and seemingly unlikely, but a possibility is that there was a mechanical failure and they tried to unfurl it and it didn't go. That would be really surprising because of the stored energy concept of this satellite, and there'd be a point where the company would have to disclose that as well. So I'm of the belief it is the solar activity which they're waiting for, and then obviously it's also Labor Day and these poor people at some level need to have some some weekends off, so you might just have a lower staffing level, and it's not ideal to be doing a complex surgery when you don't have the best doctors on staff. So the company did put out a letter to the FCC confirming that everything was nominal. Of course, we do know that Blue BW-11 is not deployed, but it is otherwise in the correct orbit, and they're talking to it, and all that is good. So earlier this week, what was really actually reassuring is we had Adriana buy stock. And so she doesn't do it very often. She's, to our best knowledge, a billionaire. Her father created a huge empire. So the thing about billionaires is sometimes they don't actually have a ton of liquidity because her assets are a lot of operating companies. And God only knows what her checking account is. It's probably a lot higher than mine, but it's not like she's sitting there with $1 billion in cash and could just willy-nilly go buy $1 billion of AST stock if she were so compelled. She has a huge position because she was a Series B investor and has been with Abel the whole way. Presumably, the Cisneros Group has been a very important partner. In the past, she has bought stock and it happened to mark a bottom. So my personal belief that as a director, she's a little bit of the confidence reinstiller of the company. A lot of people have met her at launch. Again, if you've done your research of the company, you know how important she is to the board and as a consigliere to Abel. So when she steps in and buys stock at a period when the stock had otherwise really been in a freefall in August, kind of stuck in this vortex with other space stocks and frankly, most other MOMO stocks, and then of course, the stock price always writes the news, never mind that you could see that it was a high-beta MOMO sell-off, people then start to freak out and then the FUDsters come out, For example, saying you know there must be problems with the satellites, and then BW fourteen and fifteen are delayed. Oh my God! You know, so for her to step in there, I do believe that that was meant to be a line in the sand and a signal to you know quote unquote the faithful of guys just it's coming. So stock responded to it, and you know I think it's not just me saying it; it was the market saying that. That was a line in the sand. It was a signal to us, and you had volume explode on the stock, and the stock was up 12%. So people got the message, and I'm glad she sent the signal because I don't want a false signal, and I don't believe that she would send us a false signal. I think she sent us a valid signal because she validly thinks that things are really about to be going in an exciting direction. Meanwhile, Tut put out a pretty interesting tweet that just showed the talent exodus from Viasat. And so not to dunk on Viasat, we have Tanner to do that, but it is useful just at a cursory observation to go, when you have talent exodus, you must ask why. Exciting companies that are attracting A-type people growing into exciting opportunities where there's not only a chance for career development, personal development, but most importantly, from my vantage point, is wealth development. People get into companies, they don't leave. And here you had 12 VPC-level execs gone since June.
[00:08:30] Speaker A: This episode is brought to you by Palmolive. Family time isn't just the big moments. It's weeknight dinners, sitting around the table, everyone talking all at once. So when the plates are empty and the sink is full, use Palmolive Ultra. Palmolive's most powerful formula removes up to 99.9% of grease, leaving your dishes sparkling clean. And the new convenient pump makes cleaning even easier so you can spend less time tackling dishes and more time together. Shop now at palmolive.com.
[00:08:59] Speaker B: When you need to build up your team to handle the growing chaos at work, use Indeed Sponsored Jobs. It gives your job posts the boost it needs to be seen and helps reach people with the right skills, certifications and more. Spend less time searching and more time actually interviewing candidates who check all your boxes. Listeners of this show will get a $75 sponsored job credit at indeed.com/podcast. That's indeed.com/podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Need a hiring hero? This is a job for Indeed sponsored jobs.
[00:09:29] Speaker C: So there's many reasons people leave, but to have sort of large departures of the C-suite is a striking contrast to the talent inflow that we have at AST SpaceMobile. I certainly didn't appreciate this as much, but talent tracking, I think, is one of the best clues you can have when evaluating an investment. If you're looking for some hardcore event-driven investment, maybe less important because Because you might be, you know, hoping for something that's going to revalue because it's just simply oversold or something else. But if you're a secular growth investor, which is the vast majority of how my money is allocated, the number one thing is the team. The team is what adapts. The team is what is dynamic. The team is what not only brought you what you're excited about today, but are planting the seeds on the product roadmap of what will benefit you tomorrow. And you might not even know about that thing. And so take— it's easy to always use Elon as an example. Take Tesla. You could have gotten excited by the Roadster, and the Roadster is pretty cool, but behind that was a product roadmap including but not limited to a sedan, an SUV, batteries, and then robots, and God knows what else. And that's because you had a team always pushing the envelope, figuring out how they can grow their TAM, and increase their advantage and draw on their strengths. And so you want to see good talent flow because good people want to work at exciting places and they want stock in those places and they want to get rich. Although a lot of engineers are maybe less preoccupied on that last part, but a consequence of working at a really exciting place is that you can usually make a lot of money. And so the The thing that I have obviously come to believe is that the reason why the talent inflow at ASTS is so high and that the legacy companies are seeing sort of their managed decline is that ASTS is the hyperscaler. It is the Google, it is the Microsoft, it is the Meta, it is the revolution. And so Hyperscalers, everyone knows what that is in the context which the name was really invented, but hyperscaler as applied to space, I think, is something that people haven't thought about. So SpaceX is clearly a hyperscaler. Blue Origin, more likely than not, is going to be a hyperscaler. ASTS is a hyperscaler, but measured in actually a pretty interesting way. In one single launch, ASTS launched 3 satellites that are double the square footage of the entire constellation of Iridium. And back then, 25 years ago, Iridium spent $3 billion to do that. So in the past couple of months, as @TechInvestor, appropriately named for this discussion around hyperscalers, in the past couple of months, ASTS has launched the equivalent of 4 Iridium constellations. And so sure, it's very easy to get upset about the company with delays. And, you know, more than anyone, I want this company to hit timelines and just in general to execute. But when you take a step back, they launched 4 Iridiums. And that is with them debottlenecking and having all sorts of teething issues, redoing floor plans, changing designs, scaling, finding labor, training them up, all of the painful stuff, the production hell that these companies go through. They just did 4 Iridiums and that's their warmup. So the hyperscaler concept is very interesting. Obviously, all of us would go back in time and put all of our money if we had identified the concept of a hyperscaler back 15 years ago. Easy trade. Just buy Amazon, Google, Facebook, Microsoft and just go. I think that the same thing is being recreated in space, and Starlink is kind of a red herring for people. As N-Pan Man points out, old news for a lot of people, Starlink's 650-strong satellite of D2C satellites, which are providing services for T-Mobile, those were a minimally viable product, and they just did it kind of as vaporware to drain ASTS of capital, scare the crap out of investors, and see if they could get ASTS to be really a stillborn, and they could claim to be first to commercialization. But it really wasn't fit to purpose. It was repurposed technology for IoT applications brought to you by one of the world's greatest scam artists, Chamath. little bit of a red herring and the market therefore has held this fog of war around who the actual hyperscaler is. And so meanwhile, going back to talent flow, ASTS continues to recruit for growth. And so we saw the company recruiting for a head of radar recently. Interestingly, Ivan Hristrov pointed out that Anderil was hiring for the exact same role. So we've all been looking for an Anderill partnership. I happen to have a little bit of insight into Anderill in terms of their strained relationship with SpaceX, also their dependency on satellite technology to make a lot of their products go. So it would stand to reason that they're talking to ASTS. We know Palmer Luckey is an investor in ASTS, so that's pretty interesting coincidence. But also we have ASTS's— one of their employees, Satish Sharma, posting that they are looking for partner technical leads for Africa, Europe, and Japan. So this is a company that is scaling globally. And that's what's also so unique about ASTS is it benefits from what we can call the iTunes phenomenon. Where previously when you built a business, you'd have to go country by country with a go-to-market, build local infrastructure, build a product for each market. The iTunes phenomenon allowed an app developer to build an app and then press a button and then have global distribution instantly. ASTS with a constellation more or less has the same thing. And as it's wired itself into all of the other MNOs, unfortunately there's not one global MNO, which would make this somewhat of a worse situation actually for ASTS. But because the world has this large fragmented group of MNOs that they've put together, the vast majority of them, ASTS is going to be able to turn on global reach, which is very difficult to replicate, very quickly. This is actually an issue that I talked to Battery Commodity about. A lot of you might know him. He lives in Switzerland and used to be an executive at, I think it was Nokia, and knew, or no, where was he? Yeah, I think he was at one of the MNOs and made this point to me just on how hard it was to actually bundle all the MNOs so that you could push through unified global service. And so companies that are looking to have a connectivity element to their product, they get really hung up and stonewalled because they themselves don't have the capabilities to go around the world and get a deal with every MNO. Well, ASTS is actually going to be that layer, that global layer that sits on top of all the MNOs that can be a point of distribution for other bespoke applications. For example, your coffee machine. And so Nestlé wants to have a connected coffee machine with global reach. Some people might laugh at that, but coffee is pretty important. You're coffee machine wants to talk to a network to do certain things, be connected for one, and that allows that device to do that instantly on a global basis. Now, use your imagination of how many other much more vital solutions can also apply. So it comes to the point of just how quickly sentiment can shift. And so we were all down in the dumps week before last, Adriana bought some stock, sort of woke us up from our stupor. And then there's been a lot of stuff this weekend about Jay Liao, the European JV. These things just all of a sudden sort of pop out of nowhere, yet we've been talking about them for now 3 months. And it's just important to know how quickly things can change. And so Wave 3 Trades pointed out that on May 7th, which I also remember starting to figure out if I had enough toasters next to my bathtub, so to speak, It was really bleak in April. And at $65, it was the end of the world. And then bang, SpaceX just changed the sentiment overnight and the stock doubled. And we have had this impact quite a lot. And so if we look at this really cool analysis by @PluggingAway, he asked Grok to recreate a chart that just simply showed number of days between hitting an all-time high. So this chart, which is very interesting, paints really kind of a picture of my life over the past half decade of the very long wait from 2021 until 2024, where basically the stock only went down and a lot of us only kept digging our graves deeper and deeper until finally we could see the whites of their eyes in terms of execution. The stock ripped. And now all of a sudden we've had this like jagged saw of pretty quickly hitting all-time highs, although each time we go back down, it seems like a lifetime. Like June, whatever the last one, June 2nd feels like a lifetime ago. And all I know now is pain. It's like all I know is war as I've been in the trenches, yet I come from the land of peace and prosperity. And so it's useful to visualize this and make sure you're in the right mental frame Well, no one knows if ASTS is ever going to go back to $130 or if it's going to go to $250 or $2,500. We can all believe that, but no one can know that for sure. I certainly believe it, otherwise I wouldn't spend my time like this. And if history is a guide, the psychology and sort of the positioning that causes the stock to rip and then do more than dip is this cleansing phenomenon, which I've always been consistent in how I've said it is, If it were easy, everyone would do it. And stocks take work to own. If you just bought it and forgot about it, then that statement doesn't apply to you. But if you're an active investor, like pretty much everyone on this call by the fact you're spending Monday night with me, looking at a stock distorts time and space and reality. And it makes you lose perspective because of a recency bias and you lose your mind. And so a visualization like this can just help you rewind. You know, last October when this thing first hit 100, I remember walking out of a hotel just thinking like, just disbelief looking at my account, total disbelief. And then it crashed into Christmas. I remember watching BW6 and then the stock tanked and I just thought, you know, like, goddammit, this is stupid. And then we got to January 2nd. I remember I was in Australia and stock just ripped and didn't look back. And it just sort of happens when you least expect it. As I think about the lived experience of this, it's just always so abrupt. And so it's good to have perspective of this. Right now, the way I see it is we finally cleared Labor Day and vol's been crushed. People are now back. Market's a little bit shaky, but everyone is super-duper negative about midterms and all that. It's so gloom and doom out there. that where's the bullish people out there? I think they all got wiped out. And so now it's really getting back to business for Wall Street. And I think that the company is going to have quite a lot of very exciting updates in the near future. And that can be enough to really just put this thing back in motion. It's always unclear what the market's really going to care about, The obvious ones are, as the word obvious represents, obvious. J.Leo could make a lot of sense, European JV that shows that this is really the global winner. T-Mobile could just simply be as simple as getting another launch date on the books, and then people go, well, we're so worried about launch, yet they keep on launching. Maybe we should just trust these guys that they're going to figure it out. It could be as simple as that. We'll see. But at the end of the day, you can just kind of see where the sentiment is. And so David Einhorn, who I particularly don't like, I've had personal interactions with his firm. I've found them to be horribly condescending, which is a lesson for anyone on this call that runs a firm or one day does, is how you treat people matters because unbeknownst to you, 10 years later, that person might Have a podcast through complete serendipity, and remember you treated people, and then decide to use their podcast to remind the people of what an asshole you are, so that how you carried yourself turns out not to be a private endeavor, but in fact a public endeavor. And so the people at Greenlight at least were some of the most conceited, arrogant, condescending people I've ever encountered, and they can go fuck themselves because their firm has basically gone out of business, and I think they suck, and they're a bunch of fucking idiots. And so David Einhorn, who did a couple of things back in the early 2000s, but has since just been a totally stubborn jerk trapped in the mindset of 2 decades ago, which I also grew up in that era with him, but have adapted. This guy, of course, now decides to chime in about SpaceX being a bubble. Well, David, why don't you do some damn work, you idiot? And so what does he do? So he talks about how it's a bubble and, quote, we have spoken to investors who own SpaceX. And then he cherry-picks some comments while being extremely condescending as usual. And then he picks one person, quote, one high-profile holder of many billions of dollars in SpaceX told us that the company will generate $1 trillion of high-margin revenue. Well, he might've been talking to Ron Baron, for example. useful context if that's in fact who he was talking to. So just blindly quoting someone who on one end of the bookend could have been some junior analyst interviewing or whatever, who doesn't know anything, or it could be Ron Baron, on the other hand, who probably would have said something like that with context. And so when he says, we observed that $1 trillion— we observed that it would be greater than the annual revenue of Amazon or Walmart, and asked to support this claim, he offered no explanation and then pivoted to a rant about short sellers. Okay. Well, so what? First of all, it's Ron Baron. He probably would have pivoted to a rant about short sellers because that's what he lived through when he made a couple billion dollars on Tesla. Is SpaceX revenue opportunity the same as Amazon or Walmart, which are retailers and have massive pass-through effectively? Merchandise? I don't know. But to out of hand dismiss everything without quoting the most obvious reason why SpaceX is valued where it is, which is Starlink, is really ridiculous. And so then he goes, well, we don't have a view as to whether data centers in space will replace all the data centers on Earth. And then he really diminishes that next statement by saying whether asteroids can be mined for minerals. So he's just trying to diminish anything by moving very quickly into absurdist ideas, or whether people will someday travel to Mars, or whether the moon will be an important manufacturing hub, we doubt that the discounted value of those possibilities would approach SpaceX's market capitalization. They're the largest ISP in the world. Whether that's worth whatever the market cap is, I don't know. I don't own SpaceX, but This is the type of stuff you see at a bottom. You have David Einhorn, who's a weapons-grade douchebag, start to cherry-pick random comments without any research of his own. What does this guy do? Just go talk to other people? Why didn't he read an S-1 where he learned about Starlink? He doesn't mention Starlink. And so he doesn't mention the near monopoly this company has on launch. He doesn't mention or do any analysis on data centers in space. We don't have a view. Well, hey, douchebag, before you start rubbishing a stock, maybe you should have a view on the stock. I mean, this is really the Patagonia vest meme of all time, where I haven't done any research, but I know you're wrong. That's David Einhorn for you. But who cares about David Einhorn? He's a man trapped in his own wretched personality. But it does highlight where we are in the market, where people are kicking jewels while they're on the ground. And so I read this and I just think, wow, this is a sentiment indicator. And so I don't have a dog in the fight with SpaceX, but now it's just become easy to be like, well, look at those dopes that invested in space. This is exactly what happened around Google IPO, SaaS stocks, all this stuff each time. And so read his comments, you know, as you, as you see fit, but I certainly view it as one of those things that makes me go, sentiment is about to shift super fast. And what I find pretty interesting too is This comment that Fireside Alpha put out, and it's this interview with Gavin Baker. And he says, you know, this is kind of how I look at it too. He goes, it's impossible for you know all these people on all these people on X are saying that space-based data centers are going to fail and are stupid. And he goes, it's very hard for me to engage. There are all these people on X, and they're like, I'm a physics PhD, and this is impossible. You know, for the space mob, does this remind you of anything? You know, Tim Ferrar. He's sitting back in his La-Z-Boy chair from 1997 being like, well, thermal dynamics is really hard and this is going to blow up in space, but I've done no work. That's the Tim Ferriss mentality, the lazy expert, the expert from afar. But then what I find his comment is that it's so true is he goes, so let's say you're an astrophysics PhD, you're brilliant. And you have 100 more IQ points than I do. Have you thought about this for an hour? Have you thought about this for 10 hours? Because if you have 10,000 of the world's smartest engineers at SpaceX who've thought about this, and each of the— and each have thought about this for hundreds, if not thousands of hours, and the sum of that, working with very sophisticated engineering tools, is that it's a solved problem. That's how I look at it, is you're just not going to randomly have confirmation by Blue Origin, SpaceX, Nvidia, Google, et cetera, on the exact same thing and have it be a nothing burger. This really reminds me of one of the sort of like all-time greatest regrets for me, which is when a really plugged-in Silicon Valley guy presented at a value investor conference back probably like 14 years ago, where I was pitching some bond I was short, which ended up going to zero, so pretty good short. This guy got up and gave a slide around Bitcoin, and everyone laughed and used it as an opportunity. I think I've already told this story, but used it as an opportunity to whip out your BlackBerry and catch up on emails because you're just going to check out for this presentation because this guy's a dope. He laughed and said, look, I have no idea. I get it. It's weird, fake internet money, But the chart he showed was the number of Silicon Valley engineers working on it. And he went, when there's this level of talent flow toward a problem, it's going to become something. That was his view. And that's my view on all of these things. And so sometimes you're going to have a near miss, like Web3 maybe was kind of like a duster, but AI came so fast. So I guess sometimes people can be wrong, but it's a really good proxy. If you see all of the smartest people focused on one particular problem, maybe don't trust the random anonymous account on Twitter that it's not going to work. Meanwhile, Einhorn casually asked his friends, and they said that it won't work, yet you have the world's greatest engineers all focused on the problem saying it will work. Who's your fighter? This goes to the type of TAM that I expect to very quickly be relevant for AST SpaceMobile, because now we know we're now so deep in the stack for our production that we are now adding edge compute capabilities to our Bluebirds. So we might, in the near future, 3, 6, 9 months, start to be seeing actual commercial telltales of what this will mean for us. So our very exciting story might be about to inflect upward to an even higher angle than we had previously thought. And it really just goes down to a lot of times sort of the arrogant hedge fund guys, which I used to be one of them, sort of thought I was super smart. And so it was easily dismissive of others is really the archetype and takes one to know one, kind of how I look at it. But I've changed. And so the hedge fund douchebag will often just not understand how a new market can be created. They look at what is, they measure it, they analyze it, they put it in a box, and they'll dismiss something because they'll go, well, the TAM is only XYZ. What they fail to recognize is the TAM can be just as volatile as the company itself, which is to say the TAM can be a 10 to 100xer. It's not static. And so there's an interview that came out that Only Six Inches graciously shared with all of us, and it's from Vodafone. And it says, what's becoming more interesting is the involvement of satellite. We're probably ahead of the game here. Vodafone has got a deal with AST to bring connectivity, and it's not just consumer coverage. It offers a whole new swath of enterprise applications. New verticals are opened up like ports, oil industry, agriculture. There are whole new packages and propositions being developed for these new verticals that historically have always been neglected because we couldn't get the connectivity to reach those types of segments, nor could we get the connectivity, but it was too expensive, or where we could get the connectivity, it was too expensive to make it generate ROI. Really interesting stuff. It's evolving. And the world is ready to watch. So it brings me great joy when I see Barron's picking up on us. Having pitched Barron's on this, not Ron Baron, but actually Barron's, the financial journal, this is a great periodical that a lot of investors read, a lot of older money managers are going to read. And so having them get inculcated with us just builds awareness and familiarity, which is great. And the big events are on the deck. And so it really is Tick-tock. We're waiting. It always feels like we're waiting. My experience as an ASTS investor is what it must feel like to be a drug addict. It's like I get my hit and then it's like, oh my God, I need a bigger hit. When is it? It can't come soon enough. And so what can you do? I don't know the cure for ASTS addiction other than embracing it. But what we have with SPAC Bobby is just pointing out the Berenberg initiation report that toggles between no T-Mobile and T-Mobile. So they show what happens if we get T-Mobile on the 2030 numbers, it adds an extra billion dollars of EBITDA. So it takes their target price from $92 to $121 using a 15 times EBITDA multiple. Now, this is a stock that will be highly unlikely to trade at 15 times EBITDA. More likely than not, we'll trade at 30 or 40 times EBITDA given the growth and the durability, but that's a question for another day, a problem for another day. Let's get back to the hundreds before we start worrying about these things. But it just shows you that we have a lot of exciting things happen and the sell side is ready to pounce. All of this was clouded over by the massive momentum unwind that we had, and I thought it was really useful that Anpanman just put out this comparative returns that showed, look, it was really everyone. And so, well, except for SpaceX actually, but all the space basket, BlackSky, Redwire, Planet Labs, Rocket Lab, were all down roughly 40% from June 11th to the T. So very, very little dispersion in these, which then just reminds you, you're not dumb, the sector is dumb. So it doesn't really give you a whole lot of respite because you still lost that money, but it is really useful to understand if your negative return was driven by a factor, which was the general high beta momentum factor, or was it a result of bad security selection? And so bad security selection then gives rise to a whole lot of other questions like, did the company's competitive position erode? Did the technology not work? Did they not finance the company? All we have really in the recent price data is just the market sucked. And the market can unsuck really quickly. Meanwhile, positive developments of the company set the stage for a spring to shoot yet further higher. So Pretty exciting time to be alive. I'm very happy on one hand that summer is over because I just want the stock to get back to business. It had typically been a pretty good summer stock. At least we're off the bottom, but this summer was very disappointing, but it also had one of the worst momentum drawdowns in history. So we had truly an astonishing event across the market driven not totally by Situational awareness, but they're clearly the poster boy of its excesses, and we might have worked through that by now, which is great. But then we look back to again the events that we have coming toward us, and while this weekend was really preoccupied by very exciting things to look forward to in Japan and in Europe, let's not forget this little country called the United States of America. And so. We have again this joint job hiring where Anduril is having a radar guy being hired, but then ASTS is having a radar guy being hired. And the job description says, quote, the program is built around a dedicated, minimally modified derivative of ASTS commercial satellite constellation and encompasses the full life cycle. As Tanner said, this seems kind of neat. So it really does Point again to a dedicated Blackbird shell, which goes to just how many satellites we might be making, each of which are gonna have economics. And so modeling a 90-satellite constellation is one thing. Modeling a 500-satellite constellation is quite another. How all of this monetizes are things we will learn in the future. But what's clear is that the scope of the market opportunity is dramatically larger than what even the kookiest of kooks like myself would have thought of 2 to 3 years ago. And the consumer reality is about to be here. And so last week we also had interviews with @2degreemobile, which is in New Zealand, and they're talking about the beta services that are coming and talked about how indoor D2D is going to be happening because of ASTS's unique technology. So again, a big difference between Starlink, which is really why Starlink is not the killer app— doesn't work indoors, line of sight, text only. ASTS is going to be the game changer. It's the hyperscaler. And then you had the same thing coming out with Rakuten talking about services being launched. And so this is happening now. We also had US Mobile talking about it. first of all, talking about the fact that they had a partnership with AST SpaceMobile and SpaceX, and then they said it's going to be coming in Q4. Pretty exciting things. And so what I had been emphasizing to people is, as frustrating as it is on these near-term delays and sort of the microscope by which we analyze this company, as we throw 3 satellites up at a time very quickly, we're building a constellation. So When you blink, and I kind of define blink as 3 to 6 months, when you blink, we're going to already have the ball so far down the football field, it could be very easy to lose sight of this and be too cute by half. And by the same token, we're already, you know, by the end of this week, we'll be midway through September. We're starting to get within a blink of Blue Origin being back in the pad. Now, am I looking forward to the drama of New Glenn launching again? No, I'm not. But it will be really nice when and if they're successful and get that program back on track and quit effectively detonating launch pads because of a faulty valve. But—
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[00:41:10] Speaker C: Just impress upon yourself the passage of time, both how slowly time goes when you're suffering losses and you're looking backwards. But then just how quickly you travel through time toward positive events. That's sort of the thing I've come to realize and appreciate so much in my investing career, which helps me really keep my head on straight despite all my crash-outs, but probably keep my head on more straight than others. So with that, my wife is texting me saying, where are you? It's like, you know where I am, but This is another IoT application. His wife's putting more trackers on their husbands when they're doing podcasts. So anyway, with that, I'm going to go. I hope we have a very prolific week next week. I will be checking the TLE data, and we might have a shipment this week. And otherwise, it's just back to business for Wall Street. And I think a lot of people are going to be trying to understand European JV with all of the testing partners that ASTS has, which Strike me as a simple problem to solve. And then JLeo clearly making advances. And then we might be getting some launch dates pretty soon, which will be really exciting for everyone to get back together when the weather is also a little bit more, uh, tolerable in Florida. So thank you for joining, really appreciate it, and I hope everyone has a very good Monday evening. Thanks for listening to the AST SpaceMobile Podcast. If you enjoyed this episode and you'd like to help support the podcast, please share it with others, post about it on social media, or leave a rating and review. To catch all the latest news about about AST SpaceMobile, make sure to subscribe. Thanks again, and I'll see you next time.
[00:43:12] Speaker A: Listen.
[00:43:14] Speaker C: Mmm, waffles.