Kook's Weekly - November 23

[00:00:06] Speaker A: This is the AST SpaceMobile Podcast.
[00:00:09] Speaker B: 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.
[00:00:25] Speaker C: Good evening, everyone. Surprised anyone's still awake. I guess there's some West Coasters and probably some people in Asia. Um, so we'll keep this fast and short. You know, the real summary is that I think this company, AST SpaceMobile, has great prospects and I own a lot of it. So thanks for joining tonight. It's our in-depth chart chat, and I'm glad everyone was here for that important message. But in all seriousness, as this guy that was futting around on ASTS said to someone else that had ASTS in their profile, I think he said, quote, this belongs in the domain of pathology. And I'm thinking, dude, you, have you checked out my profile yet? And so kind of on that note, I'm thinking I have to do the Spaces. I'm also someone who's extremely superstitious.
[00:01:19] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:01:19] Speaker C: So I do the pushups every night. I'd rather die than not do the pushups. I do the weekly every week. I do the Spaces. I legit today went around shopping for Jets gear because I asked the internet what would break the curse. And then the internet said, not, you know, don't fast, don't delete your account or whatever, just become a Jets fan. So a laugh was had by all when I tried to explain to the guy in the shop why I was looking for Jets gear. And he's like, Dude, why? And I'm like, well, I lost a bet. And he understood, he understood that no one would actually want to go buy a Jets hat. And so they had a good laugh. But this week I was, you know, every week I start off and think, will there be enough for a weekly? And what will I do if there isn't? You know, I'll have to ad-lib, maybe talk about gardening or something. But this week was like all the other weeks, which I think we've been doing this now for like 16 months or something. It started in August of 2024 when I thought the cadence of news was just so incredible that it made sense to just compile what happened in the week. And then it became the next week and the next week and the next week. And so this week we had some interesting stuff. First and foremost, BB6, also known as FM1, also known as WTF, where is it? Got a launch date of December 15th. It will be launching with ISRO, ISRO for short. That launch vehicle has a near-perfect record. Hopefully this will be a continuation of it. And importantly, what I'm hopeful of is that this is the start of the next ascent of the stock price. And now, Some of you might be panicking and waiting for the pre-market to open so you can dump all of your shares, 'cause you might have thought, oh my God, he's kook optimistic. And this is where it's very important to clarify that there are 2 wolves inside of me right now. One is a very depressed wolf that's super sad and full of melancholy. And that should make all of you feel better. The other wolf is— seeing the world for what it is and seeing a world that has blown the stock to pieces, which really isn't a whole lot to do with the stock itself inasmuch as it is the, what smart folk would call factor risk. And so the factors, as the pod shops would say, would focus on nonprofitable tech, nonprofitable innovation. We'll get to this in a second, but stocks with these characteristics were just brutalized. in October into November when the pricing of Fed rate cuts, which then joined the AI slam of Michael Burry deciding he wanted to be a movie star again. All these things collided to kill stocks with these characteristics, but now it's all flipping. And so I'm sure a lot of you saw that Powell is leaning toward a rate cut in December. Bitcoin is going up. I think a lot of this was actually due to Japan imploding. They— Japan didn't implode. Japan's attempt to unimplode, which in turn causes implosion. And so what Japan did is introduce a bunch of stimulus that creates a bunch of borrowing demand, weakened the yen, blew out JGBs, Japanese government bonds. And as it turns out, the world is just one big carry trade. Now, I got actually reprimanded at my firm for making a joke. Saying, you know, hey, it's all just one big yen trade. And they're like, no, it's not. This is all innovation. Don't simplify it. I'm like, guys, come on. I think you got to have a little bit of street smart in life. And the reality is crypto was one, just one big carry trade on the yen for now. And that had a multiple sigma event, which then has ramifications. And so people got massively liquidated in their crypto portfolio and that, you know, has knock-on effects.
[00:05:24] Speaker B: Right.
[00:05:24] Speaker C: for other things. But the confirmation of a launch date for FM-1 is important to me. Was it expected? Yeah, of course. We, you know, we're all tracking the ANSAMA flight to India, so we knew it would happen. But there's something special about just announcing these things. It really is the kickoff of the constellation. And what we now know, or what we always knew, is that we'll have FM-1 launch, and now we're on the hunt For FM2 to ship. What we don't know actually is if FM2 will actually be batched with other satellites. We really don't know. And so there's some optimism that creeps in here, but what we think, or what the company's told us, is FM1 goes, FM2 goes, and then we're going to start to have these batches. And the first launches will be with Falcons, and these are up on next spaceflight. They got to be confirmed. And we'll get some more resolution in terms of when those rockets are really going to take off. But we know it's all kind of happening. And what I know, having had a lot of experiences in industries that are hard, space is hard, but there's a lot of other hard industries, is that once you get past like a critical shakedown phase, it's easy to confuse the shaking as the end of the world. And people tend to have pretty short time horizons. I know I do, and it's hard to I'm a long-term thinker, but it's very easy to just look out your window and see the weather and confuse yourself as someone who lives in Seattle, but you don't live in Seattle unless you do. A lot of people don't. And so when it rains, it's a passing thing. And the stock market to me has weather patterns much more akin to Iceland than it does Seattle, but people confuse each state each time. And so for a person walking around Reykjavik, They will, you know, in the stock market's parlance, will think they live in Seattle and then flip and think they live in San Diego. And they extend periods too long without an ability to see future state. And so the current state the market has seen for, you know, to its credit is some delays and uncertainty on launch. And that was sort of resolved, we thought, in early October. That's why the stock really gunned. And then it started to come undone again in line with all this Fed crap. And as we get this visibility and really show this company is going to deliver on the execution, that's the big unlock that I believe is going to drive it to whatever price it wants to go. I have a lot of respect for, people know this, for Reformed Trader. He's the TA guy that actually took the red pill and started to really think about the fundamentals, but still has that lens. And sort of as I kind of view him as, I forget who it was, the Dog Whisperer. There used to be this show about a guy who could, you know, have this special empathy with dogs and almost talk to them. This name was like Caesar or something. Reformed Trader to me is like the Dog Whisperer where he has this innate understanding of stocks, but then can zoom out and really see what the market is kind of signaling. And what he sees is a path, and God, I hope he's right, a path in early 2026 to the $150 range. And, you know, we can all be skeptical of the chartists, I get it, but Reformed has been incredibly accurate. And again, he's developed this understanding of the company beyond just simply saying, you know, XYZ chart pattern. And I think the path to that can also be tracked to the fundamentals. And so I personally am really excited. Again, this is the second wolf talking. The first wolf is still very depressed and upset and of melancholy. Again, I don't want to scare people, but the second wolf is saying that FM1, boom, then we're going to get FM2, and then we might get surprised with some of these batch shipments coming out fast. And I think that's what's going to catch the market off guard is like they actually got it. And if they confirm what we'd look for in sequencing is if in December, you know, call it week after next is the starting point, If we actually get updated PR that talks about reaching that 6 satellite per month production cadence, then I think it's game on. And I think a lot of this could also coincide with Golden Dome. Think about it. An extra DA, it would be nice, but I don't know that that causes a crazy rerating of the stock. Verizon was the big one, but I don't know if the market is going to be as hung up on the incremental Bell Canada deal. STC, case in point, despite how massive that was, it really told me ASTS can book as much guaranteed revenue as they want, but people just want to make sure the satellites are up to realize it. And that's fair. And so that's where all eyes for me are on that. So what does the company think? There was an interesting 13D that came out on Friday about something that again, Reform Trader actually detected in the market flows. of a massive options trade that looked like it was a rolling of the collar that Abel had put on last year. So for those who forget, Abel did what was called a prepaid forward contract, which is really just a wealth management tool for someone to defer the sale of stock, defer the sale of a stock at a current price and get some cash. And so Abel pays himself $0 by the company. So his only source of income is through the sale of stock, which he does not want to do as evidenced by his behavior. So he did this prepaid forward deal, which had, I forget what the bands were, but I think it was a $17 floor and a $46 cap. And I believe the stock price was around $25 at the time. And so now he could have, you know, frankly, most people have said he should have just let this structure roll off. And what would've happened is he would've had to deliver believe it was 2.5 million shares to the dealers that sold him this deal, and he would've constructively sold stock at $46, walked away with a lot of money, and frankly, as a percent of his real ownership, really not sold anything and got enough, you know, walking around money to be happy to buy a boat, whatever. He didn't do that. He actually went back to the casino and said, nope, doubling down. And so he rolled his position again, Now the ceiling price is $80 effectively, and the floor is $56. He did it for a credit, which means he was able to extract some cash just because the way the option prices work. But he effectively deferred the sale of stock for another year, which has some tax benefits. But importantly, he's not going to sell stock now below $80. So he's bullish. He's doing backflips from what I can tell to minimize his own dilution, which is telling. It's like, you know, I'm a bullish guy on this stock, but you know, a lot of us over time have trimmed for one reason or another. For me, I trimmed to take care of some margin debt, and that was at like $20. Now, were those good sales? No, they weren't, but I had to do what I had to do. And Abel just you can't sell. And so he had the opportunity to sell when the stock was 100, things like that.
[00:12:52] Speaker B: He didn't.
[00:12:53] Speaker C: And so that also goes back to, and I don't want to diss Kevin Chan— Kevin Mack, Kevin Chan, God forbid. I'm going to pay hell for even saying that. What a Freudian slip. Kevin Mack, the professor at Stanford. He's a good dude and I don't want to have anyone have a view that I'm anything but friends with this guy, but he was just saying, hey, this stock price at $100 was an aberration. It was just because all these crappy companies were rallying. And there's some truth to that, but that was the price. And there's a lot of people that know the stock really well, including myself, who were not rushing to room our position at that price, and neither was management. And why is that? Because there's reasons why that stock can be at that price. And so yeah, the market was hot. We got a taste of it. You know, as Corey said, you know, instead of securing his financial freedom by selling some shares at $100, he instead decided to take a screenshot. And I think a lot of us did too. But I really view that as a preview of what's to come. And that's an interesting way. I think the market kind of told us like, here's a crumb, here's what's in store for you. And I again view it as very, confirmatory that management seems to view it that way too. So let's talk a little bit about what happened with the market position. So I have this next tweet that says, you know, why they gotta hate, and it just shows this Goldman index. And then there's a little snippet from Bloomberg about a Deutsche Bank note. And, you know, really just people were puking equities and the short squeeze basket had ripped, and then people just went and attacked it with a vengeance, which is typical when you have a sudden change in Fed rate expectations. And so people went from really thinking there were going to be December rate cuts to then that being off the table for a little bit. And, you know, just 25 basis points, that might not seem like a lot, but it's like the tripwire that can cause a cascading function. And then you had the Japanese government bond market go to hell, which is a big rate shock across the world. And these things just cascade. And then that drives fear because as it's going down, people aren't going, oh, I wonder what the correlation is to Japanese interest rates?
[00:15:09] Speaker B: No.
[00:15:09] Speaker C: People are going, someone must know something, you know? And I remember even saw that when the Antonov was flying back to the US, people were right around going, oh my God, there must be something wrong with FM1. And they took a flight and flew it back to Midland. And I thought, that is the bottom. And it actually seems like it was. And so now what's interesting is these factors are going back in our favor. Just as I've been checking the news today, obviously stuff's up overnight. Bitcoin's rallying, The Fed is saying that they are going to cut. And now all these programmatic investors, pension funds, things like that, they are underweight equities for the first time in months. And we've had this happen before. And so when I was trading the COVID debacle in February, you had the blow-off bottom. And then what happened is you had this reversal in flows in March when all of a sudden The CTAs and all the pension funds just had to pile in equities because they got underweight. And that type of buying basically gave other people this sort of put where they went, okay, finally I can be rational again and get back to business because all these flows are at my back. And you know, then you have Fed rate cuts, which is a liquidity boost. You have the government reopening, so money will be flowing again. There's a lot of positive things that are set to happen to the market in the next month for sure. And I hope that's, hope that's right for my sake. And then when looking at the patterns of ASTS, we've posted, you know, we, a couple guys and I have posted these patterns where we'll have these runups into launch and then these brutal declines of 40 to 50%. But what I found so interesting, just going back to study what I already kind of knew, is just how violent these increases are. And so Some of the TA guys, you know, again, Reformed Trader had pointed out to me in the past that ASTS would have this weird sort of serial correlation where it would have like 11 green candles in a row and just crazy. And we've experienced this like in June of 2025, which we'd called the endless rally. And it would just, obviously these are amazing periods of time for us because every day you make some money. But that's what happens here is this thing just shifts into gear and it goes. And my personal plan was, and I don't know if I'll ever have the discipline to do it, but once you have news like we just had on Friday, which fits the pattern of certainty of execution, that's what we're really looking for with this company. Once we have a certainty of execution press release, even if the stock gaps up, which it didn't on Friday, but it tried, what I had been thinking is, These are really the rallies you want to buy up 10% because then the serial correlation is pretty crazy. And I know in October I didn't really have that mental model defined well for myself. And so when the stock was ripping in the 50s, I had no appreciation that the typical pattern would suggest follow-through up into the 70s, if not to 100, which is what happened. And I want to be sensitive that that could happen now. And what does that mean for people? You know, I don't give financial advice, but what it means for me is, for one, be super careful selling covered calls because the way in which this stock can run up usually surprises to the upside. And so that's the first thing to be super careful of. Shorting it, obviously danger. And, you know, potentially I bought a little bit of some call exposure, Additional on Thursday. Once the stock kind of was up for the second day in a row, I thought, okay, been here, done that. And so anyway, just telling people what I've been doing and it's this pattern of serial correlation, which is pretty interesting to go back and study. It's easy to lose it in the emotional whipsaw we go through, going back to Icelandic weather. When the stock is crappy, I think I live in Seattle. And I'm just like, can't even look at it. I always delete Anpanman's number and start throwing darts at pictures of King Tut. And what I should be doing is just waiting for that chart to bottom, have a couple updates and realize that then we're going to have like 20 updates in a row because the weather will change. And then before you know it, you think you live in Honolulu or something. So then back to fundamentals, there was some good research out on the TAM, so I have that. linked out, and it just shows that the DTC demand model suggests, you know, these guys think $37 billion market by 2030. Who knows? That's finger-in-the-air stuff. But the key point is it's a really big market, and that ultimately will drive the multiple. So when you have a winner-take-most market and that market is big and growing, that's where stocks get to be worth hundreds and hundreds of billions of dollars. And you can see that, you know, this is a point we've talked about quite a lot. On the next tweet is really what the TAM is. And so, you know, the elevator pitch, the 5 seconds of DD is that ASTS is for dead spots and there are a lot of those. But over the past years we've come to realize, you know, never mind government, military, IoT, things like that. We call it the Scotiabank thesis back when we used to like Scotiabank, but now we can call it the We stole Scotiabank's thesis and they're temporarily dead to me until they upgrade the stock thesis. And that relates to the displacement of terrestrial towers. So where do we see yet more proof of this on a weekly basis? We have the ASTS FCC docket. And so in one of the filings against them, the RWA, which is the Rural Wireless Association, quote, Finds the manner in which the applicants seek to provide SES service will disproportionately harm rural wireless carriers and their customers by causing harmful interference. Okay, that's, that's BS, but then the truth comes out. RWA is concerned that if these waiver requests are granted, national wireless carriers will cease allowing their respective customers to roam on rural carrier networks once SES is established. And will default to SES service rather than terrestrial-based services that are readily available through roaming arrangements. Wow. They could not have given us our own bull case served in a more credible bacteria-free silver platter than what they wrote in the SEC docket. And that's what's always amazing to me. You know, you're parsing through all the FUD and things like that. And then you see something written by your adversary, where they wave a white flag and say, you cannot approve ASTS, because they will put us out of business. Huh? That doesn't sound like the service doesn't work. Sounds like it works a little bit better than anticipated. And so then zooming out, of course, AT&T and Verizon don't want to pay roaming fees to all these jokers.
[00:22:24] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:22:26] Speaker C: You know, it's kind of like small town cop being able to issue a ticket to the city slicker with New York plates. Now we all got fed plates with diplomatic immunity. That's kind of what's happening here. And so do I know the net impact of how, how significant these roaming arrangements are? I do not, but I think they're probably a lot bigger than I anticipated. And it really speaks to how ASTS is Is going to take market share from terrestrial service. And that fact alone likely multiplies the TAM. Let's say that our dead spot TAM is really the starting point for what we believe the market to be. This ingress on the terrestrial market, my belief, multiplies our TAM manyfold, if not base 10. And that's the type of dramatic change in perception that can cause a stock to go to infinity, kind of like Nvidia. Oh, the market's just gaming. Oh, the market's just Bitcoin ASICs, or, you know, not even Bitcoin ASICs. It's crypto. And then it's like, oh, actually our chips power replacement of mankind.
[00:23:38] Speaker B: Boom.
[00:23:39] Speaker C: $5 trillion market cap. And so I think that as the technology evolves, Software-defined allows it to evolve more quickly. We're going to see that ASTS takes a lot of share from terrestrial, and that's bad news for the tower guys. That's going to change their growth curves, but it's really good news for us. And so other things that came out, you know, again, these dockets are great. You have AT&T complaining about how they can't provide 911 service with their Starlink thing because it's a crappy system that wasn't built for purpose. And AST SpaceMobile, by contrast, has successfully demonstrated VO, voice over LTE calls with various partners. So that's what happens when you design something from a first principles basis versus adapt something. and try to jerry-rig it. And that's the difference between ASTS and Starlink, which is going to continue to matter more and more as people understand it. And so let's talk a little bit more about the TAM and different ways to think about it. Kasey was reading, of course, Kasey doesn't sit down and go, you know, read Ulysses or anything like that. He sits down and reads FCC documents about C-band Spectrum auctions. God bless his heart. And so in a thread he wrote, I was trying to figure out, you know, okay, well, so now why do I have to care about this document? You know, there must be some nuggets in there. And what is interesting is one Cathie takeaway is, you know, as the spectrum is brought to market, which is great for the overall market, it adds capacity. It's really important for America. But one thing that has never been lost on me like Legato, for example, is if you get the spectrum approval, if you're a normal guy, then how do you fund the buildout? And where we saw this very in a very pronounced way was with Dish and EchoStar, where Charlie Ergen just, he bought the spectrum, but he couldn't build it out. It was just too expensive. Nevermind, then you gotta go get customers for it. And so a full buildout of this new spectrum that's going to be released by the FCC Would require, on CATSI's numbers, 20,000 to 40,000 tower sites, which would cost between $25 and $40 billion of CapEx with OpEx alone of $1 to $2 billion. By contrast, you can light that spectrum up with an AST block of satellites, which would cost about $1 billion and immediately cover the entire US and have, for the most part, avoided OpEx and things like that. And get it in service faster. And so when I sort of think about the stepwise jump in innovation, to me, the world that other people are living in is a guy with a spade and a donkey trying to plow the Great Plains. And we invented the combine. We are the International Harvester of spectrum with an automated way to make grass and wheat and everything else grow. And other people are in this very manual process that's unbelievably capital intensive. And that's what I really think is when you zoom out, sort of incredible changes in technology, like the automated loom, for example, which Buffett wrote about, the advent of the car or the airplane, Guggenheim's press, just things that took a stepwise change in terms of how you approach a problem. That's what I think we might come to be viewed as, because what most people don't realize when you pull your cell phone out, it's just a radio talking to a tower. And I just don't think most people really understand the backend infrastructure that's required. Maybe subconsciously they do because they're aware of these towers that are ugly and they don't want them in their neighborhood. But I really don't think people truly understand the cost in the backend. And that's where my thesis the whole time had really relied on the MNOs viewing ASTS as their AWS. And so in a world that was effectively on-prem, just to jump to another analog, all of a sudden the cloud exists and you go, well, yeah, why do I need to manage my own capacity, have all my own facilities, deal with disks, blah, blah, blah. why don't I put it in the cloud and someone else is having this massive economy of scale to manage all this capacity? So I only use what I need. I don't have to deal with all the OpEx, things like that. And that's what I think it is. And so that's, you know, my bull thesis on these MNOs, for example, was in the extreme, AT&T, Verizon, the Vodafones of the world can shift so much of their CapEx to this much more capital-efficient model and focus on what is truly valuable and scarce for them, which is spectrum. and the ownership of the customer. Those are the 2 things in my view that really matter. The other stuff is commoditized balance sheet risk, which we want to get rid of. So anyway, Cathie's tweet gives some really good numbers, contextualizing again the enormity of what we used to call the Scotiabank thesis around CapEx avoidance. And I think you're going to hear more about this later. So the other thing that's super duper, duper cool about ASTS is, again, to quote the great Patsy, spectrum will find its way to the most efficient system or something like that. This quote is going to go down with some of the great Marcus Aurelius quotes, I think, when history reflects on this, because spectrum is the most valuable Finite resource that I'm aware of. It powers our current society and finding ways to use it more efficiently is very important. And as we're finding, it's crucial to national security for one, but also powers the economy. Just imagine your life without RF signals, no Wi-Fi, no cell phone, no radio, no GPS. I'm sure I'm missing 500 other things that relate to RF signals. It's a very important thing. And so to get these rights is also valuable, as evidenced by Starlink paying $23 billion for 50 megahertz of US capacity. AT&T recently printing a massive number for spectrum, Verizon, same thing. Then meanwhile, we have ASTS getting somewhat the same amount of spectrum, For peanuts. And why is that? Spectrum that previously was unusable by other people for lack of technology can only have one buyer, the person who has the technology, and ASTS has it. And so what's really interesting is the extension of this thesis where our pursuit of low-cost spectrum does not end with Legato. So Dr. Mike has been following the case pretty carefully, and there's a tweet that I retweeted about EchoStar and some of these European Union 2 GHz of MSS reallocation proceedings. And so all these incumbents are going to lose their spectrum from what I understand. It's getting relicensed, and this is terrible for them because it's really like a litmus test of like, So what did you do last summer? You know, have you been praying? Actually, really, it's Elon Musk saying, you know, tell me what you did last week. And all these companies are going to be like, uh, about that. And, you know, you saw the video that STS put out today showing some of these CEOs literally praying with tented hands and like all these behavioral cues of distress and looking to calm themselves because they're horrified about their future. But EchoStar said that they only need 5 megahertz to maintain their current service offering, but they've had 15 by 15 megahertz channels for 15 years and they've only used a third of it. So what does this mean? This means, in my understanding, and I'll have the experts in the space mob correct me, but as these reallocations occur, if someone is coming there saying we will use it, They are going to get it. And I am not aware that these necessarily go up for auction in the same way the US does it. And so there's a very good chance that Satco, which is the joint venture between ASTS and Vodafone, is actually going to be the recipient of spectrum potentially, not for free, but with a service commitment to use it. And this aggregation of spectrum on a global scale is again what I, and I don't mean to say this sensationally at all, but this vertically integration, not of satellite production itself, which is important, but this shift in what we understand their strategy to be, to actually grab all the spectrum itself. This is a complete boomerang of value, or boomerang is the wrong word, what I really thought is like, as something goes around the Earth in the slingshot pattern to get to the moon, where you just get more and more velocity to then really escape Earth, that's what I see happening here of, you know, a company where I originally thought we had a $100 to $200 billion company opportunity. As I've come to understand how this company could aggregate a massive holding of spectrum around the world, hence my joke that wasn't a joke of ASTS is the first spectrum treasury holding company. That's when I started to realize they might have a path to a trillion dollars of value. And whether they hit that or not, there could be a believable upside case to that, which is really what matters. And so we're getting more and more details of that. It's something I'm following very closely, really keen to see other people post on this topic and educate us all. Obviously, if I see it and it's interesting, I will put it in the weekly. So keep, keep doing that. And to this point, again, in the FCC filings, we have SpaceX complaining, complaining, complaining. And so now it's always useful. I don't think I quoted this, but I think it's down later, but you have the now famous Katzi annotations. So she takes the filing and then just writes on top of it what they're really saying between the text. And here what you have is SpaceX crying because they were seemingly totally outmaneuvered in Europe. And so now that SpaceX is vocally clamoring, ASTS is a EU sovereign network, you can't possibly approve them now, these foreigners, never mind that SpaceX's only customer is a German-owned telecom in the US, but They start to attack ASTS over this new SATCO structure where Vodafone has made it fully EU compliant and offering European digital sovereignty. Now, do I think the FCC is going to have, you know, an adversarial position to this? Absolutely not. If anything, they're going to respect it. They're going to understand it's crucial to give data sovereignty in the areas where you're operating. And the, I would think that ASTS is going to have a very clear ability to operate in Europe and comply with the wishes of Europe. And I don't know how the FCC is going to get in the way of that, but what it really shows is the ASTS seemingly just totally outflanked SpaceX in the EU. And I think it started with technology. SpaceX system spams. Cassie's done incredible work showing what the beamforming differences are. And I picked up when I was meeting with a, I forgot where it was, he was an engineer at, might've been Iridium, and he was just telling me this issue of this 100 kilometers within the borders. And he just said, yeah, like SpaceX, you know, can basically operate in the US because 100 kilometers from the Mexican-Canadian border, you know, sucks for people in Buffalo, but that's kind of it. In Europe, when you have these 100-kilometer buffer zones, you actually Delete service in a massive part of Europe. You you render your service functionally inoperable, and so SpaceX was never really well equipped to serve Europe. Never mind then innovate contractually to create what we all believe to be what will come to be known as the Iris Squared constellation, which was the state. initiative to take on Starlink in Europe was effectively doomed at inception by the way they were going to do it, leaving Europe holding the bag with no substitute. Enter Vodafone with a perfect solution to offer. And now we're starting to see other competitors realize the masterstroke that AST has seemingly pulled off and try to, you know, bicker about it. With great technology and success should come money. We have Ted Cruz talking more about the BEAD program. So BEAD is the Broadband Equity and Access Directive. I can't remember exactly what it stands for. Massive. I think it was like a $42 billion program. And here we still have all this money and there's been a real focus on getting it actually spent efficiently. And Ted Cruz is out talking about it. Put that link out there. Ted Cruz has visited the AST SpaceMobile facility. I certainly get pointers from people who seem to know what they're doing to keep focused on BEAD, which I take as a hint this might be applicable to us. So we're seeing a little bit of news in that front. Next, we have expectations of a Bell DA coming. And so we have some FCC extensions that Kasey very politely pointed out to us, and we know they've had successful testing. We have Bell Canada talking about in their earnings releases, and so it seems like it's time to ring the bell. I think we'll have a nice DA. I don't know if it's gonna have the same type of prepayments that STC has because they're already an investor, and I also don't know how much the market will care about it. It's a nice to have, but again, I think that Showing this, the cadence of really FM2 through FM10 is what's going to really drive the stock price. But having more DAs pile up certainly is not bad. Then we have UK testing. We have an STA for Mexican testing. We have Ireland. You can see this company is busy and they are pumping with the FCC, which brings us to an obvious side note. We could have SCS approval for the front haul, which is sort of the final FCC approval that I think would solidify the regulatory permissiveness of the company. That could happen, I think, at any time and hopefully before year end. And that would be a pretty big deal, certainly discounted in the price because ASTS is being valued as a company that will exist. And a failure to get FCC approval would certainly not be good. And so I think the market has come to realize this company has manifest destiny at this point, but it will still be nice to get these FCC approvals. Could, you know, be, you know, yet another thing that gets long-onlys to realize that this is where the boat is going. And then we also had to, it was a really kind of a surprising Update and updates on Blue Origin. So Blue Origin announced a product roadmap, to my surprise. They're doing these massive upgrades and going to have this, what they call the 9x4, which is a meaningfully bigger New Glenn rocket than we knew of. And the fact that they were already able to land the booster on the second try is Just astonishing. And the size of this next rocket starts to look a lot like Starship. The difference is that Starship does not work and New Glenn does. And so good thing we have a diverse set of launch and have Falcons and things like that. But what's interesting as we dig a little bit deeper, we have @AlexFromBabylon Kind of doing a little bit more analysis on this new configuration for New Glenn. And this is interesting, and he just really highlights that really very, very few launch customers actually require this type of capacity. And so then why build it? And so first point is that Jeff Bezos wants to have the biggest rocket too. So yeah, it could just be a rocket measuring contest between Elon and Jeff. Makes sense. But you gotta actually have something to do. And so for interplanetary missions, it's useful. But then interestingly enough, New Glenn points out that this rocket is designed for 3 customers: for Amazon, for their LEO initiative, Kuiper; for NASA, where there's your interplanetary stuff; And then for this little company called AST SpaceMobile. And so what's cool about this is it basically means that AST SpaceMobile got what we're going to call a semi-private configuration, purpose-built for its own needs. And then we start to realize that this is able to potentially help us launch a lot more satellites than we had previously thought. And Katzi pointed out that the fairing in the new, new Glenn, I guess we call it newer Glenn, is basically exactly the dimensions required to fit Block 2 satellites side by side. Probably not a coincidence. The other thing which is neat is something, um, We'll get to in a second, 'cause I did not space my tweets in logical order, but I did list all the other clients that New Glenn has for this vehicle just so we could start to see who, um, who's gonna be using it and therefore who really it, you know, was meant to benefit. New Glenn 2, by the way, was returned to the refurbishment center. Rocket looks in good shape. I can't even imagine how hard it is to refurbish a booster. And then in a study of contrast, and actually, you know what, maybe I missed a tweet. Oh no, I didn't. Sorry. So after talking about this New Glenn update, the key takeaway is Blue Origin in the press release, let me go to it, has this really cool thing of both our 9x4 and our current variant, the 7x2, which again refers to the number of engines on the booster and then the second stage will serve the market concurrently, giving customers more launch options for their missions. And this is where it gets important, including mega constellations, lunar and deep space exploration, and national security imperatives such as Golden Dome. And so a lot of us go, huh?
[00:43:45] Speaker A: What?
[00:43:47] Speaker C: You know, then we, we just start to think, well, This is, this rocket is designed for Golden Dome support. And then the 3 customers they list for this rocket include AST SpaceMobile. And we start to just wonder, congratulations on what? And that would be exciting. And I know I am the worst offender in terms of people who are prematurely excited about the possibility of Golden Dome. I really hope we win it. This is something that if we don't, life goes on. If we get it, I think that's the type of propellant for the stock price because of the validation that it would provide that coupled with some operational updates that are favorable, could really do unbelievable things to where the stock is going, but more importantly, to where the stock will not be going, which will be down for meaningful periods of time because it will at that point be a Too big to fail company. And speaking of things that are too big and fail, we had some updates on Starship. And so again, if I'm being totally honest, Starship is something we want to work, but like St. Augustine has said, not yet. And so this rocket is very big. This rocket facilitates Starlink doing lots of things faster. Now, they would still have all sorts of problems, in my view, on really competing with AST SpaceMobile because of the MNO relationships and things like that. But, you know, would you put your head in the mouth of a tiger even if you were really sure that the tiger had lockjaw? I would not. Why risk it? And so I don't really want to see what happens When SpaceX can launch a trillion satellites at the same time. So therefore having Starship delayed a little bit, well, I'm never really rooting against someone when you're calling balls and strikes. Having Starship delayed is good for AST SpaceMobile. And we're looking at these pictures over the weekend of Booster 18 blowing out like someone tried to shotgun it. And so that's not good. They can't land it. It's all over the place. I don't think they've made true orbit yet. And now you have these things blowing out like crazy. Um, something is wrong. And I, I'm not a rocket engineer, but you can see some of the videos too. They got, they got this on the— someone got it on their Ring camera, I think. And this is not good. So we have to ask ourselves, Does Starship have a bigger problem? If so, what does that mean for SpaceX, especially as all these SpaceX investors, you know, who are a determined bunch, I'll say this, they keep paying higher and higher prices, but there's gotta be a point where someone wakes up and goes, wait, hold on. So New Glenn just launched a Starship effectively competitor. We have all this other launch capacity coming, and then Starlink is going to be attacked on all ends from Kuiper for the fixed terrestrial. And then we're going to have ASTS walking away with the D2C opportunity. Someone at some point has to acknowledge the reality that there is competitive pressures building on SpaceX. This company cannot be perceived to truly already live on a different planet. Maybe I'm wrong, but the ramifications of that are important because these companies, you know, someone that does private markets for a living, this stuff just doesn't go well when you start doing down rounds. That's just, it's a total mess with how liquidation preferences work and things like that. And I don't know SpaceX's capital structure, but I just do know these are not good things. And there has to be a point where someone decides like, hey, maybe I'm not going to mark up SpaceX to $1 trillion when I can synthetically kind of recreate it for $50 to $60 billion by buying a batch of other securities. So just something to think about as reality seems to be setting in there. And then meanwhile, we have SpaceX attacking us in our docket. That's the next thing on the weekly. And Katsy ripped them to shreds as usual through this thing called Truthful Analysis, which is a crazy thing that expert consultants never thought to do. But it's pretty fun to watch Katsy rip these filings apart. And to me it just begs desperation. And then you had T-Mobile do the same thing and Katsy ripped them to shreds too. But they just kind of try to stall us through lawfare. It won't work. We'll get our approvals, I'm very certain of. And if anything, it shows us that our approvals might actually be forthcoming quickly. So a lot of interesting stuff this week. Maybe, maybe there'll be no news during the week of Thanksgiving, but I'm thinking that we're going to have some exciting developments, if not formally announced by the company, but through some research from the Space Mob, because we're all on the hunt for any signs of what the satellite production is or any early signs that any of these things are being Shipped. So I know I'm gonna be monitoring the situation very carefully. And thanks everyone for joining me. Sorry it was so late. I'm on vacation and the time zone certainly is pretty brutal for people on the East Coast. So thanks for those who were able to join in. Appreciate it. It's nice to connect with people. And I also wanna make sure we keep every superstition possible alive so that the stock will be strong and go up. I'll talk to everyone soon. Have a great night.
[00:49:44] Speaker B: Bye.
[00:49:44] Speaker A: 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 AST SpaceMobile, make sure to subscribe. Thanks again, and I'll see you next time.
[00:50:05] Speaker B: We're doing something very, And I think with this technology we can really affect a billion lives. AST SpaceMobile is the only company that has proven technology to deliver cellular mobile connectivity directly from space to the everyday smartphone. People will just basically turn on their phone and be seamless regardless of where you are. We don't want the user even to know that it's connected by satellite. Our role is to bring this into reality, always in partnership with the animals. Listen.
[00:50:50] Speaker C: Mmm, waffles.