Kook's Weekly - May 31 - The Launch Labyrinth

[00:00:07] Speaker A: This is the AST SpaceMobile Podcast. It will just basically come to your phone and be seamless regardless of where you are. We don't want the user even to know that it's connected by satellite. Listen, the opportunity that we have is very, very, very large. Okay, good evening everyone. Hope everyone had a fun weekend. I definitely spent some late nights really just refreshing X, hoping people would post cool things, but turns out a lot of people go do other things with their life on Saturday night. So I was sort of like, when's Katzy gonna wake up? And then, then he did. But, um, a lot of Rocket stuff for me. I did what's Um, usually pretty impractical of doing back day before then taking my daughter to the beach, which that meant leaving her unattended while I go screw around on my shortboard for 2 hours. So I can barely move right now. Doing back day before surfing is inadvisable, but you know, sometimes you make bad decisions like not figuring out how to vacate extra fuel from your nuclear weapon-sized Rocket. So someone had a pretty bad Thursday evening. Not quite sure how you deal with vaporizing a civilization, but that's what Blue Origin did. So let's start with the bad news. New Glenn 4, the hot test was not successful. And so they had what is truly the worst nightmare for a launch company, which is to blow up your rocket on the pad. Blowing up a rocket in the air is bad enough, you lose your rocket, um, but blowing up the pad is definitely not good. Here they were building another pad for their 9x4 bigger rocket, and from what I can tell— I'm not an expert on this by any means— but from what I can tell The damage was less severe than feared, certainly probably pretty bad. But, you know, there's a lot of stuff going around. I was just looking at some posts where someone went through all the other pad explosions and said, you know, Blue Origin's toast. We'll see. You know, this is a company that's really motivated. The space race is on. It's not normal times we're in right now. Blue Origin has access to More money really than anyone. Time will tell if they're as motivated as anyone. I think that they're going to be. And then I think that the US government has a very big incentive to get these guys back into the air as well for some diversity of the launch capacity. So we'll see. I know a lot of us were really trying to think through how this was going to play out. My playbook for Friday, which I advertised far and wide, was wait for people to really blow themselves to pieces despite warning you know everyone you know what I thought was going to happen. Human emotions are pretty simple. People see a stock down, the fireball, holy shit! You know you got to just also remember how New York works where when COVID was coming, I remember just sitting there waiting and going hold hold hold. wait until COVID hits Manhattan because hedge fund guys aren't going to really dial it in until they're stuck in their apartment. And then the second it sort of sweeps through New York, that's going to be the bottom. That's kind of how I traded COVID and that was right. And so here it was really waiting for that video, those videos to circulate, people watching the fireball freaking out. I did what I had to do. Then I went surfing, I came back and the stock was up $10. I think it was like $5 or $10. And so I think it's this sort of event, you know, first of all, I'll say I have no idea what the stock price is going to do, but I know there's a lot of people probably pretty interested in just at least hearing someone talk about it. I'm not sure if Anpanman did like 6 Spaces this weekend already, in which case then you can just drop off this one. But I divide exogenous shocks in a couple buckets. The first one is a dilutive exogenous shock. And so take like a convertible bond flush, an equity offering, or the Rakuten sales. That's a dilutive shock. And so all of a sudden the supply of shares increases. It takes some price discovery to sort it out. You have a bunch of people engaged in what's called destabilizing arbitrage. So even though the stock is down on the dilution and they go, oh, well, maybe it will recover. They go, well, you know, let's just pile on because people are going to be scared and we have kind of a free look. That's what happened with Rakuten. Shares, when placed, don't just go to iPilot, who's going to hold his shares forever. Shares sort of ricochet through the market for a while, sort of like money supply. And it takes a little bit of time for shares to settle. And that's why when you have dilutive shocks, it can sort of take a while where If you have a convertible bond issuance, maybe it's going to be 5 to 10 trading days before something settles down. This is just a shock, a shock shock. Shares don't really need to ricochet around. It's sort of big boom, big boom it was, and people then need to readjust and they can do so very quickly. So this happened not very long ago on April 20th, Happy 420. You had New Glenn 3, you know, not twist a bolt correctly and screw up their second stage. A way less severe anomaly than blowing up the launch pad, but in any respect, you, you knew what happened. I remember I was, you know, sitting there with my hands in my face at the Orlando airport, you know, wishing that, you know, Tanner would hold me tightly, but, you know, we had just met. It was a little awkward, you know, if this guy was gonna Provide the comfort I needed, but you know I was sort of mopey dopey and so was the rest of the world. And so the stock imploded for all of like ten minutes and then ripped. And so that was my game plan on Friday. The risk with it is: Is there more of a long-term consequence to this that the market needs to factor? That is a very big question. Immediately, we'll get to that in the immediate aftermath. We have the U.S. government just flat out saying we are behind you, and Jared saying. Hey, we're not a procurement organization. Like, let's make shit happen. New Glenn going down is is really bad for NASA. It's their keys to the moon. New Glenn going down is really bad for Jeff Bezos. It's really bad for Amazon. It's really bad for the United States of America because you don't have Starship. And you know, if you have Cat Ask Cassie, Cassie, Starship might be a long ways away. And here you had New Glenn. Actually having a pretty good track record, making orbit 3 for 3. Yes, you had the off-nominal orbit on New Glenn 3, recovering the booster 2 out of 3. We were starting to look like we had a pretty good vehicle based on my perspective of it. Certainly looked to be more successful than Starship. So this is a very important asset. And the boosters, the other boosters apparently survived. And so we're really down a launch pad. I've been reading like everyone else. And so some things seem like they're long pole items, like the, I think it's called the erector, basically that crazy looking centipede-like truck that actually makes the vehicle go up. But when I look at this, and I really don't know, it looks to me like a combination of a lot of industrial equipment. Doesn't look like a lot of bespoke stuff. Seems like concrete and iron. And I'm pretty optimistic, maybe more than I should be, in terms of how quickly they're going to be back in action. But I'm pretty sure that New Glenn is gonna really step on the throttle to get back. Hopefully there's some real process improvements. They're going to have a little bit of time to really make sure They've ironed out some things. Some of these mistakes seem like, you know, famous last words. I can't launch a rocket, but seem like sloppy errors, and maybe that's a consequence of the pace they're maintaining. We'll see. Hope they iron those things out. But we really don't know when they'll be back on the pad. So the very obvious question for ASTS. shareholders is how much do we care? We don't own Blue Origin. It was not our rocket that blew up. It is a rocket that blew up and a program that shifted to the right. It is a program that might not have shifted very much to the right For us, because we don't know exactly when we were supposed to fly. I have some data that is now very dated that showed that there were quite a few other launches of other people before ASTS was going to launch. And that brings us back to New Glenn 3. Why did they do it that way? That was sort of our sacrificial bird. We had a twin, FM1, FM2, experimental SDA birds that, you know, it's better than launching concrete on a, on a test rocket. And then we also had ISRO, which was successful. So they put one bird on New Glenn 3, risky, but a risk they could take, insured. And, you know, it didn't work out. We didn't put batch 1 on there. And so We don't know what the risk profile this TS was taking. Now I'll be honest, in April, and this is where I really hope that Scott is not like me. And there's a reason why Scott has a, has a job like he has and why I run a podcast. Uh, Scott is really good at what he does. And so what I'm hoping is that these guys hadn't been overly excited, but kept pretty sober. The risk in that is in April we were all really excited about how New Glenn was looking. So that's the thing I have in the back of my mind is it was looking really good. Like they had had a walk-off home run of being early to wrap up a ton of capacity on New Glenn. We didn't know exactly what they wrapped up and how backend weighted it was, but that certainly the risk. What we don't know, but what we're coming to realize, is that the company likely had managed that risk quite considerably. And hopefully we'll learn some more about this in the coming days, if not tomorrow. I know a lot of people have some inquiry into the company. I'm not optimistic that the company's going to press release anything. I've always taken the view that they probably should not because there's credible commercial information that while we would like to know, we don't need to know. And sometimes even though it would be nice to know, hey, exactly what are you launching? That information, if broadcast publicly, could actually hurt the value of our shares because it tells other launchers exactly what they can and cannot do to us. So I would always defer to the company on what's commercially sensitive. As much as they want to treat us like partners, sometimes you're not on the inner circle, but what we believe is true is that the company has multiple Falcon 9 launches coming up. I had done some math a month or two ago, which I published, which is just really going through the 10-K. And then I'd been working with one of the fellow Space Mob people, you know who you are, on what the down payment schedules are and things like that. And I had arrived at 6 to 8 Falcon 9s that had been contracted as of 12/31. We had Paratum Plant just ripping over the weekend. So thanks, because it showed that you are also working on the weekend, and that's great because Space Mob is killer. And he was doing the same analysis, better than mine for sure, because he then published kind of all of the changes and really tying out every quarterly change to what payments would've gone out. Really great analysis, and it also yields the same conclusion that we likely have booked a lot of Falcon 9s, which probably get us to 25 to 30 satellites already hard committed on the SpaceX launcher. As I was again staring into my screen late on Friday and Saturday night, it dawned on me something else of why did the company? both talk about ULA on the May call and be much more explicit about radar and government use and about how they're already providing government services and that will continue to scale and they've been active in theaters of war. Why? You know, it wasn't like Katzi was arm wrestling them and they had to finally be like, well, we've been defeated on the internet, so we will now tell you that Katzi was right. Something else was going on. And so that's what got me really thinking. Did these guys just qualify for NSSL, which I did a thread on? National Space— National Security Space Launch Program. Because you know that no matter what they were thinking, April, May notwithstanding, they would have always been trying to optimize launch. That's a never ending optimization problem for these guys. No matter how comfortable they are, they're always going to be trading that. I would hope they should be in the launch trading business, uh, just like Exxon and Shell have very active trading divisions, which are brokering tankers and things like that, and storage all over the world optimized. That's how I would imagine ASTS to be dealing with launch. And so all else equal, if you can start to get in lane 2 of NSSL and start to get these government priority launches, that's better. That's starting to soak up some capacity that was already reserved for the government and potentially is net new capacity to you. No actual capacity created in the market, but you're getting access to some things that you didn't have access to, and you also are doing Priority, which is interesting. And you also can then use that to get on some NSSL-approved launchers, which would include ULA. So that's what got me spinning all of a sudden, you know, just sitting there going, "Oh shit, this seems like it's not a coincidence." And then the so we'll find out. They they did mention ULA pretty clearly. They had also mentioned MHI in some other calls. That's Mitsubishi, and that can do— forget, I have the chart somewhere. Uh, I think that's— I can't remember if that's 5 or if that's 3, but these are pretty big rockets. And so all of a sudden, when you start to play around with it, the path to quite a lot of satellites in the air is right there. And so the ASTS launch labyrinth is really what everyone started to focus on on Friday. And again, this tweet Uh, from Piranha Plant is a, is a really good one. And I, I retweeted it with the title ASTS Launch Labyrinth. So I'd suggest people take a look at that. But when you start to play around with sort of almost kind of like electoral vote math, where you're like, what's the path to win? I built a model just to figure that out. And the path, you know, really what we're figuring out is if these guys are executing at 6 satellites per month of production, How many, if any, satellites are going to be stacked in storage because they're built but not shippable? That's really kind of the question that we're trying to answer, presupposing that these guys can build 6 a month. And so is it realistic that they're going to be having 2 SpaceX launches a month? I don't know. I know a lot of people think that that's baloney, but clearly SpaceX is capable of doing that. They launch, forget what it is, like 10 or 15 times a month. So the question is how much extra capacity do they have? And then all of a sudden, let's just say it's one per month. So then we're starting to solve this matrix with other vehicles, MHI, ULA, ISRO, Ariane, you know, maybe Trump will like, you know, smooth things over with Putin and we can all go to Kazakhstan. So I'm not holding my breath on a Soyuz launch, just saying. But there's a lot of paths. And a really interesting idea is let's assume the worst case. Let's assume that all of a sudden satellites are piling up. How does the market view that? You have this inevitability. So maybe you have 25 or 30 satellites in the air and just the pace of activating satellites is slow, but then you start to have all these warehouse satellites, and people are looking at it going, well, shit, they're definitely going to get the satellite built or the constellation built because all these satellites are there. And so really, to me, what I was thinking is, you know, whether— I actually don't know what the stock price is doing, if people are panicking or unpanicking. Let's just check real quick. Panicking, down 4%. Okay, losers. But Well, you got to think about it is assume worst case. Let's just all be negative. So we're all going to freak out about Blue Origin. Okay. So what I think we could reasonably assume is that the uncertainty that was thrust upon us on Friday is not a tomorrow uncertainty, but really like a 6 to 9 month out uncertainty. So people are really worrying about what happens to a plan that otherwise might've been set for Q1, Q2 onward in 2027. That's a really long pole thing to worry about. As an ASTS shareholder, it's usually been the inverse experience where people are worried about what's happening tomorrow and totally blinded to the upside possibilities of what could happen in the more distant future. My big mistake with this investment, you know, 4 or 5 years ago was seeing out far too far and not overlooking, but certainly underestimating the challenges of getting to where we are today. But I always saw what the opportunity was. I could see out super far and certainly see out a lot further than the market and most other people. And so here it's actually this weird inverse, where if the stock price is, is going to be heavy, which I don't think it will be, that implies that people all of a sudden are thinking out with a forward horizon far more distant than they're used to thinking out. In the meantime, having all of this positive news hitting them over the next 6 to 9 months, and then the assumption is that they will ignore good news that's hitting in the front months and focus on the distant out months. Find it really hard to believe because what's going to happen is we're going to have a launch in a couple weeks, we're going to then have another launch in July or August just depending on how these schedules work out, then we're going to have another launch if not more in September, October, November because we have this big SpaceX campaign. All of a sudden the company now has quite a lot of room to navigate for any uncertainties that might've been sprung up on them. Certainly an uncertainty was sprung on them. And so that's a lot of time, again, far out to start working on things like ULA, MHI, Ariane, et cetera, where a lot of the know-it-alls are like, well, you can't just go get heavy lift tomorrow. Yeah, no shit. And so the company doesn't need that tomorrow. The company was very well covered In the immediate to mid, you know, midterm outlook, and it's really this outer period that if there's anything for people to worry about, that's where it is. There's a lot of time there, and what I've always really taken a lot of comfort in is we are the most beautiful girl at the dance. There's no other company with this much cargo. to launch. And the world's a pretty simple place. You want to get the big customers that are going to be repeat, that are going to be scaled. You don't want the onesies and twosies. If you're a launcher, you want to have a franchise customer. ASTS is the game. People can't— well, obviously SpaceX is not available. And then right now there's a lot of people buttering their bread with Amazon cargoes. Well, Amazon has shown their hand. They're obviously going to go to New Glenn the second they can. So those cargoes go away. And so people that are looking to underwrite programs to get this cadence of scale, which is crucial. Again, the reason why SpaceX is such a beast is they were able to underwrite a launch cadence that no one else could match. That's allowed them to drive their costs to lower than anyone else. which has given them a very durable competitive advantage. And so Blue Origin has that both with the relationship it has with ASTS and then obviously Kuiper and things to come, and then government revenue. But other people that want to scale— ULA, you're going to have Rocket Lab, MHI, Ariane— then you have things like Terran. You have other launch vehicles we really haven't thought much about. But I was thinking more about Terran. Eric Schmidt is also one of these infinite money chip type of guys. He's got all of the money in the world and he's bored and he wants to do this. And he thinks this is the key to AI data centers in space. So I believe Eric Schmidt is a little bit, well, not a little bit. He is Jeff Bezos doing Blue Origin for Amazon. Elon doing Starlink for SpaceX, as is Eric Schmidt fixing Google's problem in terms of launch capacity to get big ideas done in space. So I would not— wouldn't thought I would've ever said this, but I would not count Relativity out. I would've— 2 years ago, I would've said count Relativity out. I'd actually looked at that company in a funding round and Now you can say, well, don't count them out. They actually might be first to orbit versus some other sort of high-profile names. So there's lots of things that can go on to solve this matrix, which right now the whole market is very myopic on this. Will they hit 45 by year end? I think it's a stupid benchmark. And I've said it a million times. What happens if they hit 30 satellites by year end? Well, the referees who don't have money at stake and who don't have very good careers are going to be like, well, they missed their 45. All right. Yeah, maybe. And the stock might be at $250 because the market sees the inevitability of everything. And the market goes, well, yeah, we said 45, but we actually didn't even believe they could uncork their manufacturing capacity. And they did. And so just like this company has been pretty delayed versus any, literally every single other goalpost it set, Stock is at all-time highs or very close to, because what they've accomplished even with delays and even with challenges is still unbelievable. And so what a lot of people miss, and I was actually talking to a director of one of Elon's companies about this, asking him just to— I kind of knew the answer, but just to ask so that I could repeat it really for everyone's benefit. I said, what's the consequence of Elon making these sort of insane public statements and guidance goals that he is 99% sure he's— not sure, but 99% chance he's going to miss? What is your view as a director of that? Does it create any challenges? How do you manage both Wall Street then being like, well, you missed your guidance, How do you deal with the internal stuff? And his response was actually, you know, pretty common sense, and which is just parodying Elon's view. Elon's view is, well, if I set really crazy goals and I achieve 60% of it, I still beat the living shit out of every single other company. And so it's like one of these things where yeah, Tim Ferrar might say like, well, Elon missed his goal. Well, Elon Musk is going to be worth a trillion dollars, and. Tim Ferriss is not. And so one guy missed some goals. Who do you want to be? The aggressive visionary. So what I like is ASTS has certainly set ambitious goals, but I really think, as I thought about this more today, we're going to have so much good news over 6 months, which is really the window by which the company has time to figure out if and when they need to backfill any New Glenn assumptions, which the answer is probably yes. There's so much that happens between here and there. Anyone that thinks in the short term might find themselves 6 to 9 months from now going, but y'all, weren't you worried about New Glenn? And then we're like, no, no, dude, like, didn't you get the memo? Like, first of all, New Glenn pad is almost rebuilt. You know, I'm thinking like, you know, 6 to 9 months from now, we're gonna see stuff. The market's gonna be forward-looking. And then other things will have happened. And that's the important thing is you really always have to look at where is the puck going to be at December 2026. The market is not going to care of what is happening in December of 2026 relative to whatever expectation people had May 31st. People are going to be guessing and divining the future of June 2027. That's what you really need to figure out. to be a successful investor. Meanwhile, the FUD on Friday was crazy, which is again why I bought back a ton. Um, when I say bought back, it's really trading deltas around. And so I have my core ASTS position, which is really no one's business except mine, but you know, that's my core position and I'm pretty resolved to not touch it. Again, personal decision, but it's just kind of what I want to own. I really want to see if I can make a billion dollars just because I'll be then like folklore on the internet. But I do trade pretty aggressively on around that position with options. And so I had a way to increase my exposure pretty materially on Friday versus where my exposure was on Wednesday. And so I shot my shot, rightly or wrongly, I'm a bullish guy. And so bullish people look for opportunities to be bullish when the stock blows up and they think people are overreacting. So that's what I did. And maybe I'm right, maybe I'm wrong. We'll find out. But in any respect, when we were looking at what, you know, all the armchair quarterbacks were saying, there was FUD going around that this explosion knocked out the entirety of Cape Canaveral. You know, 7:55 AM Friday morning, SpaceX launches. I think SpaceX launched again on Saturday and then ULA launched too. So The U.S. is open for business, and it's really pretty incredible actually when you when you think about that. The U.S., in the span of 12 hours, was able to detonate one of the top five non-nuclear explosions ever. Clap clap clap! Good job, guys. We still have the bomb-making capacity, even if inadvertent. And then shortly thereafter, launch a bunch of rockets. while the smoke was still rising from our inadvertent MOAB. Hell yeah, we have a pretty diverse industry. Pretty cool. And it just shows you how dynamic it is. And so zooming further out, the crux of the ASTS strategy has always been to be really 2 things: carrier neutral, And launch agnostic. I believe that vertically integrating with launch is not a great return on capital and also just implausible given the constraints most companies have. Certainly ASTS is not able to do it. It's not their core competency. There should not, in my view, be an ASTS rocket. What they should, should do is design satellites that are compatible with all the other rockets on the view that there's going to be a lot of launch. People can't resist, uh, building rockets, and there will be many. I liken this a lot— again, my background is in oil— it's always really interesting when you look at the long-term returns on VLCCs, which are the biggest boats. They're, uh, worse than Aframaxes and Panamaxes, which are small, smaller boats. And what's funny about it, I was doing the math and I was talking to people, and it's like, literally, it's pretty simple. If you're a Greek owner and you're a Norwegian owner, it's, it's a dick measuring contest. And so you just want to go buy a goddamn VLCC because it's fucking big and they're awesome. I want to own a VLCC. I don't care if I give up 200 basis points of spread. It's big. And so what happens? Too many people order them, and you actually like literally pay for ego in return versus the smaller boats. And so then what do we have in the space industry? Everyone wants to build a rocket. Rockets are awesome. Flying phallic symbols, you know, boom, here you go. And so there are a lot of rockets and there's a lot of programs that are scaling. Some of them are not yet scaled, but everyone's excited about space. And so New Glenn, Vulcan, Uh, Arianespace, we have SpaceX, obviously, MHI, ISRO, Rocket Lab, Relativity, Stoke. I'm probably missing some. And then obviously, you know, the Starship program, you know, is a big one. There's a lot of launch. And so ASTS understood that it's probably not going to be a high ROI business in launch, at least was my view. And so we, and there's a lot of people doing it, so they don't need to do it. Just make sure you're compatible with all these other guys, as opposed to building satellites that only work on your bespoke launching system. That's what Elon is doing. The reason why he can't compete with ASTS is he can't build an array as big as ours. He has to build a bigger rocket to fit his bigger array. We don't need to do that. And so we've got lots of horses in this race and Katzy really just nailed the graphic, uh, perfectly. It's kind of incredible the AI was able to so perfectly manifest his vision. But that's really the key to the ASTS strategy. And again, you're going to have a lot of good news before you have any realization of the current uncertainty. And that's where the shorts could get blown up once again, is trading on what we already know today versus the good news that's going to shortly follow thereafter. ASTS and the entire industry is dynamic. You better believe ASTS is making phone calls, if they hadn't already, on other launch capacity. We already know that they had been really gearing up to do that because they have been working on integration with ULA. They've talked about MHI. And so they had already been extremely proactive Because they should be. They should be launching on every single vehicle. In particular, they should be launching on vehicles from other countries to ingratiate themselves with regulators and local content issues in other MNOs. It's a good look to launch stuff in Japan if you want to go get some other Japanese MNOs. It's a good look to launch on ISRO and have Modi singing your praises in India which probably is going to help regulators get their head around your service versus the person that doesn't butter anyone's bread, SpaceX. You know, turns out people start to close a lot of doors. Satco wanting to get 2 GHz spectrum and show local content, I can guarantee you someone has had the bright idea that they should write a couple checks to Arianespace to help the European in space infrastructure also benefit from scale and cadence for a system that we hope that we can get to service that area. Smart business. And so there's many reasons why ASTS's strategy should look like the way we're envisioning and why before Thursday night we had already known that they were doing that. So the bear argument is just simply delays, delays, delays. And what they're missing again is the near term— when I say near term, but like the next 6 months of good news, which is gonna just slap them in the face. And then all of the degrees of freedom the company has, including just paying more to increase certainty, while the uncertain thing, which is New Glenn return gets worked out. So you've already had sort of Captain Obvious delivered, really just summarized by the Deutsche Bank report. Again, not saying that Deutsche Bank wrote anything that is controversial, but they just say increased uncertainty. We, we don't know. These are the 45ers. These are the people that think that 45 by 12/31/2026 is a line in the sand that ultimately matters. I am one of those people who do not believe it matters. I don't believe that they will hit 45. I could be pleasantly surprised. I'm not willing to die on that hill. Maybe they do, maybe they don't. I just don't care. The way my brain works, it's very mysterious, um, I'll say that. And I'm not saying my brain is good, but my brain tunes things like that out. My brain tunes a lot of things out. There's a reason why I can take such extreme financial risks, whether I should or not. Very open debate, but I do. So my brain is wired the way it is, and I know some things I glom onto and some things I just don't resonate with me and I don't absorb and I don't factor in as relevant risks to me. 45 satellites by year end is something I file in the— I do not care because the directionality of change at that point is what will drive the stock price. And I care about the stock price. I do not care about $45 for $45 in itself. I care about the stock going to $700 so that I can write Tim a letter and say, I hope you can grow as a person, and I'm willing to accept you as someone who can write honest work. So this is your chance. Love, Cook. That is my goal, and I'm sure he'll decline. But when we think about what's actually happening at this company, we're shipping stuff. We need bigger freeways in America, so we gotta call Jared over at NASA and get him to expand these freeways. I mean, look at this beast. I mean, so we had Bluebird 9 arrive at the Cape on the 27th. From what we could likely guess is that they're probably in the early phases of stacking these satellites now, which is the encapsulation process. I don't know that to be true, but that's also some PR that could happen this week, is we could be getting pictures of the satellites in the fairing. That's going to be pretty exciting, not the least of which is because Tim Ferrar bet his career once again on the idea that all of the Falcon 9 launches were canceled, which is pretty funny, um, because they wouldn't fit. And here we have 3 satellites, quote, officially arrived at Cape Canaveral ahead of the next Falcon 9 launch campaign. Again, very interesting words here. And of the ASTS Space Mob also noted that there were 10 rocket emojis. I went back and actually did a pretty comprehensive correlation of The emoji count, which I know people think is ridiculous, but it's really not. So Abel knows we're not jobs. If there's one thing Abel knows, it's radio frequency engineering and that his investors are insane. Those are the two things he holds true. And you know, go to a launch event if you want to see how much we hit him in the face with how crazy we are. So he knows that launch emojis count, and so ten means awesome stuff is happening. Campaign is an interesting word. Not next Falcon 9 mission, that's singular. Campaign. 2 doesn't seem like a campaign. 6 to 10 sounds like a campaign. So that's where a lot of us go, well, we already knew, we thought we knew how many Falcon 9 launches they were going to have. And certainly the company isn't doing anything to disavow us of that notion. So we've got a lot of exciting stuff happening in the next week or two, right when Wall Street is being reoriented around the SpaceX IPO. It's pretty exciting. So there's going to be all eyes on us. People are learning about space this week and next. They're learning about Starlink. They're learning about the opportunity. They're going to be seeing our monstrous tuna cans in a SpaceX rocket, they're going to be doing analysis of Falcon 9 launch demand, and they're going to be seeing ASTS as one of the key cargo providers likely to give more forward order book visibility. In my dream of dreams, which is admittedly unlikely, We'll have a splashy multi-launch contract assigned next week. Again, people gave me crap for that, but like, yeah, I know it's a low probability, but I like to post whatever's on my mind and I believe what I write. So there's, there's some possibility that that happens, which again pulls us into the orbit, no pun intended, of SpaceX. It is good for this industry to be vibrant. It is good for people to be thinking about SpaceX. juxtaposed against other companies, not in isolation. We want people to be thinking about the industry and who the winners are going to be. We do not want space to be viewed as a single stock opportunity without anything else. So luckily ASTS is launched into the middle of this discussion. This is very exciting for us, and I think that there's going to be some knock-on effects where a Extremely liquid security, and so there's a lot to do with that. Before we get further down into that thought, there's another tweet that caught my attention. Jean Le Bon worked for Ariane Group, and I thought there was this really cool tweet where he says, "I worked at Ariane," and as a European. Let me tell you a little bit about my perspective of your industry. You guys, I'm paraphrasing, you guys are dope. You did some stuff we can't do. And the fact you blow stuff up and iterate very quickly is why you have what you have and we don't have that. And then this person who comes from Arianne goes on to say that a $50 billion market cap for ASTS is a point of great convexity. Because it could be the number one subscription business worldwide. Again, I remind you, this is a person that worked at Ariane. Where are these Europeans coming from? What has Peter Lindmark been doing at the coffee shop? My God, the guy's probably like handing out mission patches, being like, I am Peter, here's a mission patch, let me tell you. They're like, yeah dude, it's like a Jehovah's Witness just knocking on doors. And hopefully making people a lot of money. It's pretty exciting. And so we have people that know what they're doing. This person continues and says, ASTS is no science project. It is an inevitable giant in the making because the manufacturing— oh, what manufacturing capabilities? What does that mean? Industrial-scale footprint, investment in PP&E. The asset, my friends, is not necessarily the satellite themselves, but the machine that makes the satellites. This person, Jean Le Bon, understands about this point and says that the manufacturing capabilities of ASTS are now delivering at full speed the biggest satellites ever launched in LEO, with capabilities so critical to the US that their launch is not up for debate. No, Jean Le Bon is not my burner account. If I had a burner account, I don't have the culture to pretend I'm French. People know that I am crass, simple, uncultured, and live off lentil and pesto. So this is in fact an individual expressing their thoughts, and it is not me. I am not a burner guy. So it's pretty interesting. I like to see these people share their opinions. It's, it's very constructive for all of us. I'm really curious to hear it. And so everyone should read that tweet. It's titled under my retweet, which is industry people who aren't reliant on consulting contracts like AST SpaceMobile. And so, you know, we, we have all the proof points you really need to know something special is happening. Probably one of my favorite tweets of all time is this Anpanman tweet, uh, from, I believe it was Friday, where it just shows at 7:00 AM, all of the major US MNOs put out a JV press release. At 7:01 AM, ASTS says, we're working with the JV. Congratulations. I don't think that that was them just having like an auto-triggered ChatGPT response tweet. Something tells me that they were embargoed, knew about it because they're included in it, and immediately put out that because they wanted to tell people that they too were in this thing. And then you have 8 hours later, Starlink tweets What the hell? This is illegal. Okay, so they showed their hand immediately, like they are not included. And it was that was like pretty much the funniest tweet you could have had. And then two weeks later, you have Viasat saying congratulations, we support this JV. It's like wait two weeks later. Hey guys, what's up? And so comical, but it really just looking at the sequence of those tweets, which. Panman did a hero's job outline, really, I think, tell you everything you need to know. And it comes down again to the tech. I believe that what we're dealing with is the transition from Facebook on a desktop to Facebook mobile. Starlink with their broadband is desktop. We're Facebook mobile, and that's the killer. We're doing between 100 megabits to Now 200 megabits per cell, whereas the narrowband Starlink solution is doing 7. So there's a reason why everyone's coming to us. There's a reason we're very special. And so that's why I think you could extend Cassie's general logic of spectrum will find its most efficient uses. So we'll launch. I am really not worried about our satellites getting to orbit. I don't know how they will find a way. I can construct various scenarios of how this will happen, but I'm, I'm very certain that this will not end up being the boogeyman that people fear it might be. And so going back to this SpaceX IPO, one thing that is pretty interesting to me with SpaceX coming out is all the pair traders are going to come. We have a hyper-liquid security. ASTS trades like water, $50 billion market cap. This passes the test. A lot of the other industries, like, not that liquid, pretty small cap, kind of gnarly. And so once we have SpaceX trading, it's going to be pretty interesting just to see what happens with the Millennium, the Point72, the Citadel crowd. What happens? On one side of the equation, are they going to use ASTS to hedge SpaceX? Well, that would be quite funny. I love short interest. So if that were to happen, that's great. Maybe it slows down the share price progression a little bit, but that basically is just setting a spring for something that's truly astounding. But on the other side of the equation, so many people are looking at SpaceX and sort of rubbing their eyes and going, $2 trillion. Doesn't the more obvious pair trade become long ASTS and short SpaceX? I'm not doing this. This is not my business, but is that not the more obvious trade? And for anyone that previously would've wanted to own ASTS, the question is always, how am I going to hedge it? It's certainly a question I've gotten from quite a lot of my friends. Now, do I short Globalstar, do I short already? You know, blah blah blah. But you're shorting these like shitcos that have leverage, that have real strategic value spectrum, which if it re-rates could be worth a lot. That was what was demonstrated over the past year. But businesses that are kind of melting, they're really kind of terrible shorts to offlay risk because they themselves are so idiosyncratic and eventy. Not great. ASTS, in my view, isn't the same sort of crapco type thing. It's the secular winner on its business. It's got the NAV revaluation story that works. It's a huge market cap, so you're not getting taken out by some high-leverage equity. I think it's a really interesting long-short trade. And so you're about to have that enter the equation. And so does it cause the valuation gap if in fact there is one, You know, being sensitive that we're a $50 billion company. Starlink is worth, you know, $1.5 trillion. Different businesses, admittedly, but there's enough sameness for someone to go, should there be a gap that is closed? Is ASTS going to eat into Starlink's opportunity? Is Kuiper going to eat into the opportunity, which then makes Starlink likely to go down anyway? So it should. underperforming ASTS, which has a more clear secular runway. These are some of the things that I'd be thinking about if I were a TMT pod guy, and we're about to find that out. I think previously what had been happening is people would just pair up ASTS with Rocket Lab, which is why you have these crazy correlations between our 2 companies, but we're really not the same. They're both de-SPACs, both have you know, knucklehead shareholder groups, us included, that people love to hate because everyone's so excited about their baby. And so they tend to trade together, but they have very different drivers. And so they're not naturally, I think, a great pair. And so hopefully what happens is people decouple Rocket Lab and ASTS so that they trade a little bit more independently and perhaps couple SpaceX and ASTS because there's a little bit more of a zero-sum game in the value transfer. Admittedly, I'm not going to actually double down on the zero-sum game comment because I believe it's a massive opportunity between broadband satellite and mobile satellite, and I don't think I would want to be short either, but it's another story. So we also have the EU waking up. We've had them last week come out with their 2 GHz MSS spectrum rules, it sure looks like they're about to squeeze out EchoStar and ViaSat. I know that those are fighting words for some of our friends like Stuart Taylor, who I hope is well, and he hasn't, you know, a real axe on, on ViaSat. I think he consults for them or works for them. But the rules start to look pretty, pretty geared toward hurting those companies and reallocating that spectrum to European companies or companies that play by Europe's rules. So there's a lot of uncertainty here. I'm not going to purport to be an expert in it, but a group of us have been working on this. Some of the lawyers in Space Mob have taken some leadership of trying to understand this. My sort of quick read is it sure looks like ASTS has done backflips to be compliant with some of these rules. It really depends on how the voting is tracked to manage the fact that you can have a non-EU member as part of the JV, and then other technical issues around data access and security measures must comply. And so there's all sorts of things which are very complex, all of which looks like they were explicitly wired into the SATCO or European ConnectNow JV. All very encouraging. And it doesn't look like we're going to walk away and take all of the spectrum by any means. That certainly doesn't look to be, uh, the case, but it sure looks like there's a chance we could get a a good slug of that. And so there's some work from Katzi as well that I have linked out. And then Alex from Babylon, who's also really good at this stuff, did, did some work. And I think a lot of us are coming to the conclusion that we could find ourselves getting a grant of some EU MSS. These are again some of the things that are very value accretive. And so if anyone is sort of hyperventilating over New Glenn, the things that can happen under the hood that represent jumpside risk are aggregation of spectrum. That's found value. Charlie Ergen traded for many billions of dollars on his dark spectrum because it has asset value. So even if, let's say, our launch campaign, some of it, not all of it, is shifted to the right so that we have, you know, maybe not 6 satellites a month going up but 4, who cares? Um, all of a sudden you get a slug of 10 MHz of MSS, which is worth, you know, whatever huge number That's the type of stuff that shorts are missing. The company has so many irons in the fire that you really need to think about the sequencing of the immediate positives, which are all coiling, versus the now, you know, distant— in my view, more distant uncertainty of any change in the launch cadence. Other things that are happening are drones. And so Trump really made a big initiative for drones last week. We're a drone company. How do you control drones? So sometimes you do not need, um, radio frequency. So Anduril, I believe, has really figured out how to make these things, uh, jam-proof. But certainly a lot of drones depend on connectivity and positive control. That's really a really strong point for something like AST SpaceMobile. So I think that, you know, again, these are secular changes that are happening, which Should you go out and buy ASTS because of some drone announcement? No, but it's just one more thing on the platform that is ASTS that is working in your favor. You want to have as much positive drift, as many positive secular trends at your back as possible when when investing, especially when investing like a lunatic like myself, trying to really rip. cover off the ball. You want to have all of these trends. Turns out usually secular winners and platforms start to aggregate and be exposed to more than just one. When you're an international infrastructure layer for technology, you tend to intersect with many things at the same time— connectivity, AI, future weapon systems, radar, drone. All sorts of things. This is what gets me really excited. Speaking of weapon systems, Golden Dome. So we keep hiring pretty interesting people. So Jonathan Cooper put out that we had a 28-year veteran of Raytheon, missile defense chief, is now the director of system integration, test and ops for federal programs at AST SpaceMobile. These are not people you hire randomly. So this person had been the radar program chief engineer at Raytheon. Before that, lower-tier air and missile defense system radar integration director. This guy's not working with AT&T on your trip to Yosemite. That's what this person is not doing. And so when you hire a guy like this, It's for a thing. This is a big thing, and the awards are going out. Of course, I would really like to do you know control F five and replace the word SpaceX for ASTS on this award that came out for four point one six billion dollars. You know, kind of like congratulations guys. I'm so happy for you. Crying myself to sleep. Um, but these awards are going out, and importantly, in this SpaceX award— again, congratulations guys— they say, the government says, we will not leverage any one single provider. Instead, we are partnering with a highly diversified pool of traditional and non-traditional vendors, each bringing various capabilities to support the AMTI architecture, assuring that we have access to a strong competitive industrial base. So in that press release, they're saying this is not all going to SpaceX. Hopefully we get something soon. It would be really awesome if they could just kind of hurry up and do this, guys. Like, no time like the present. But, um, all signs still really point to an incredible government and military opportunity for ASTS, and I am in particular very excited about it. So now back to kind of where we started. So on— I don't know if it was Friday, uh, ULA had an awesome launch. And so hope people saw that launch, but ULA launched, ironies of ironies, an Amazon cargo. And, you know, also congrats to Amazon. We're so excited for you, but it just shows there's, you know, cargo's going up. Now Amazon is a little bit of a problem because they also went out and swept the market. And so we are competing with them for launch and, you know, we have, you know, a couple of big programs that are, biting at each other for this capacity, ASTS being one of them, Amazon LEO definitely being another. But again, I go back to, if you're a launch vehicle program, you need velocity to close the gap with SpaceX. You need to have lots of launches to have a feedback loop of cadence You need demand for your launchers to get to that manufacturing scale that SpaceX has a 24-year head start on. You need that demand anchor, and ASTS represents that. It's a very big program that's well-funded. They're sitting there with nearly $4 billion of cash. I have a strong belief that when ASTS calls the launchers, which presumably they did on Friday, people are picking up their phone call and making things happen. And I also believe— well, I hope, I hope that we also were able to create some paths that might have otherwise not been available to us. We're probably working on them nonetheless with NSSL and other relevant similar programs to get access to capacity for a program that is not necessarily commercial. Again, our program is in the immediate term military. So that's what I have for people. I hope every— again, everyone had a great weekend. I really was just up my computer just, you know, until midnight each night, just trying to think, because the last thing I want to do is, is be wrong. And I'm admittedly a very positive person. I'm very positive on ASTS. I certainly have a lot invested financially in this, invested emotionally in this. But when or if the day ever comes where I exit, I will tell people That I did that, you know, generally, and why I did that. And the answer more likely than not for that is going to be just simply: I've made enough, and I'm just moving on my life. I definitely don't sit here tonight saying that my view of my investment is changing because New Glenn blew up their pad. I certainly went through all the trials and tribulations over the weekend testing that theory. Went through all permutations of cuck. craziness on like, oh my God, 'cause I, you know, I read stuff on the internet, people are so negative. It's so easy to fall into that trap. But then I started just, you know, go, go through it all. This is actually where AI is really, really helpful is with, with Claude Code. I just built a launch model and it's pretty dynamic. And we were going through the sensitivities on what type of capacity we could access and really around clearing the backlog. So again, Assuming you get to 6 satellites per month, are we going to have 100 satellites sitting in a warehouse? That's not good. Or are we going to have like 10? Are we going to have zero? And this is ultimately what drives the stock price. We're certainly not going to have access to no launch. And so I know with an extreme degree of certainty that we have a lot of SpaceX launches. So I sort of went through all the self-induced worrying, just as I should do. I have a really big position. I don't want to be wrong. And I really landed at this idea that as severe as New Glenn's anomaly was, you know, not to take away from that at all, and just by the miracle of God, no one got hurt. So this is really the most important thing is everyone got to, you know, see their family this weekend. I, I think that you're going to see very quickly Velocity around that pad being rebuilt, visibility and renewed attention around the other pad that New Glenn was building. You're gonna see other launchers getting an opportunity to get a relationship with ASTS SpaceMobile, which I do believe is very important to launchers. I stand behind this in the most fierce terms, is that when you have a program which could be up, you know, up to or more than 500 satellites, Again, we've read the ITU filings. 500 satellites. That type of tonnage is wild. The launchers want that business. We are the most beautiful girl at the dance. Everyone is going to take our phone call. And in my view, they're going to lift heaven and hell to get our business. Not because they like us, not because they want to be our friends. Never rely on the kindness of strangers. ever, but because out of their own selfish interest, getting an allocation of our enormous program underwrites launch vehicles themselves. And so we have extreme market power, which is a crazy statement if you think about Tim Ferriss pulling his hair out as I say this correctly, and he implicitly has to admit that this is right for a company that so many people bet against as a zero. Has now become one of the top three, four, five cargo providers in the world. Everyone wants Scott's business card because he can put launchers into a full cadence, and that's where I think the things really matter. Maybe our costs go up. I'm sure sure that they will. Long-term guidance probably does not change, but we have the money. Our economics are insane. The key is just show the operating cadence of getting these things up. Damn the torpedoes, get it done, and I believe they will. So I will end it here. I hope everyone has a wonderful weekend. I hope people found this useful. Trying to be as objective as I can. I've spent an unbelievable amount of mental energy this weekend trying to think through this. I know there's a lot of people that you know might disagree with me in terms of where I'm shaking out on this, but. That's what makes a market. I'm not saying you have to listen to me. I'm just offering up my opinion. So have a great night, and I look forward to a lot of great research that people put out that I can include for next week's weekly. Thanks for listening. Listening to the AST Space Mobile 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 AST Space Mobile, make sure to subscribe. Thanks again, and I'll see you next time. Listen. Mmm, waffles. Mmm, waffles.