Kook's Weekly - April 12 - The New Glenn Era and Meta's Space Validation

[00:00:06] 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.
[00:00:27] Speaker B: Good evening, everyone. Hope everyone had a good weekend. I am exhausted, but spent my Sunday catching up doing the weekly just so I could make sure Stewie had something to read at the airport lounge, which he did admit to reading it, but he denies listening to the Spaces, which is good because this is our place, not for experts. But as I reflect on the week, just kind of going through everything, Today. Um, there's, there's so many exciting things happening. So let's get right into it. First, I think a lot of us right now are watching, or I was, maybe this was on delay, but the, uh, the erecting, I don't know what the right word is, but the, uh, to say the erection of New Glenn 3 sounds, sounds odd, but I think it is, uh, what they call it. And so they have the rocket out on the pad and they're lifting it up.
[00:01:19] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:01:19] Speaker B: And it is super duper cool. And so we have a tentative launch date set, but I believe that these things aren't totally set in stone just yet because we have to hot fire it. So make sure you have a cancellation policy on your, your flights to Orlando. But it's happening soon. And a really important thing to remember with this launch is it is Blue Origin's 3rd certification flight. And so I guess they call it upending. And so I hope New Glenn upends some of the false short thesis that's out there. I saw some people tweeting that ASTS has a Blue Origin problem. We've always thought that ASTS has a really exciting Blue Origin opportunity. And so the general understanding is that ASTS has SpaceX flights booked this year. Uh, as fallback and that they're effectively fungible. I'm not totally sure how the contract structure works, but this is what I've certainly heard and what we've seen actually the company say. So it really is an opportunity for upside for ASTS. If New Glenn continues to be the successful program that we believe it is and will be, then we've become the anchor customer of really the most capable launch vehicle out there. While also getting the benefit of using SpaceX, which is obviously a very capable launch vehicle, and then diversifying into another heavy launch vehicle that we have not yet had named. But it but it sounds like it's Ariane, although it could easily be Japanese rockets. So all eyes are going to be on New Glenn this week. First, the hot fire. Hopefully that goes well, and then once we have the hot fire, then they should be good. for launch, and that will be a very exciting event simply because the rocket is drop-dead gorgeous. As many of you know, I have many superstitions, one of which is not to order my model rocket from Kazakhstan until a successful launch. And so I'm eagerly awaiting reaching out to my, my boys in Kazakhstan to place an order for an ASTS-liveried New Glenn 3 rocket to complement my collection of, uh, existing successful launch vehicles. So right behind me, I have my PSLV rocket, which is beautiful. And my LVM-3 is on its way as well as my SpaceX, because I'm going to have a nicer rocket collection than this pumper and pan man who bought a bunch of 3D printed crap. Oh no, not with Kook. With me, it is Aerospace-grade rocket models made in a former Soviet bloc country with export controls on said rockets, which is why they take so long to get to me. So we have a lot riding on this, not the least of which is my model rocket collection. So what is also interesting is that we see more, I don't know that this would even be a surprise, but just more evidence of the obvious, which is Blue Origin is building for scale. And so they've filed the initial documents to build a new launchpad, and this is all just the buildout of that company. And so the way the market is probably going to look at this for a while is that ASTS is in a way a loose derivative of the success of Blue Origin. I don't think that that's the right correlation, but I suspect that it might be viewed as such. And so in a way, People looking to get exposure to SpaceX can buy ASTS for derivative exposure on the D2C opportunity. Those lucky bastards, because they will accidentally pick the right horse in the meantime. The unlucky people are using ASTS as, again, a proxy for SpaceX and shorting it to hedge their risk. But then the same way as excitement builds around Blue Origin, which I think it will, that's a private company. And so the market being the market might do some silly things and view ASTS as the derivative of that. I think that's going to be a loose correlation because they're certainly separate companies, but ASTS is a big customer of Blue Origin to the extent that the rocket flies. So last week we also had a little bit of drama with New Glenn. You know, I know a lot of us are really excited and then, you you know, we're like, hey, raise the roof, guys, raise the roof. And they like blew the roof off. And so guys, come on, like you can't let the space mob enthusiasm actually infect your company. And so Blue Origin did have a tank blow up when they were doing some pressure testing. And so it blew off the siding door. And so I guess something like this has happened before to them. I, this shouldn't impact, will not impact New Glenn 3. Apparently New Glenn 4, 5, 6, 7, or 8. This might've been for New Glenn 9, although I'm not totally sure. I gotta research this a little bit more. And so, but just highlighting it here because some people noticed it. And again, the definitive answer is that that is a testing thing as they seek to find the limits of their equipment, which is good. And they found it in the tried and true SpaceX way of You don't know until you create an entertainment spectacle for people by blowing something up, but it certainly does not impact New Glenn 3. And again, ASTS has a bunch of SpaceX launches planned as well. So 2026 should be really well covered with, with, uh, plenty of launch vehicles. But then people go, well, yeah, but where, where are the launches? And so my understanding is that it truly had been an ASTS Delay, not a launch vehicle issue. And that's where some of this flexibility that they've dialed into their launch contracts. I don't have the contracts again. Those weren't 8K to my knowledge, but I do believe you pay some fees as you have to reschedule. And I believe that that's what's been happening with SpaceX. But once the satellites are ready, SpaceX is like catching a, you know, a well-oiled machine. You know, they'll put you on the schedule. So it was interesting to see That Space Mom, the reconnaissance force known as Space Mom, was able to photograph a shipping container on its way to Midland. And so that looks like good news. Having these containers move around is something that is certainly something we follow. It can be indicative of shipments of satellites. So we're almost to the middle of April. We know from the company that the difficulties with the composite ring has been solved. And then the engineering challenge and the testing related to stacking the satellites is solved. It is our belief that that is the final critical path milestone for shipping the batch 1 of satellites. And we saw some truly ridiculous stuff from experts, quote unquote, that are currently having quote unquote libations. I mean, this is so painful to listen to this guy, um, who speculated that the company doesn't know how to stack its satellites. And I talked to some actual experts on this, people who do this for a living and stacking satellites, getting them ready for launch integration is just literally what happens every day. And so you ship one satellite at a time or 2 or 3, whatever the truck can bear, you get it to the payload processing facility. And that, you know, so that's going to be at Cape Canaveral and that's where you made it to the rocket. And so for Block 1, that's what happened is they shipped 5 satellites. They're smaller, obviously, than FM-1 and 2, but then they mated it to the launch vehicle, shot into space and it worked. This is literally what happens every time. You don't ship the full fairing of satellites from Midland. And so this expert really revealed Potentially just a lot, a lack of payload engineering experience, which I don't have, but I could very quickly figure out what the answer was. And so maybe a satellite engineer wouldn't know this, but then to go out and spread FUD about it really belies any sort of credibility someone might have. But the other thing that was really exciting, and I think we covered this last week, to, but we're going to get back to it, is this visit by Meta, Facebook, that visited the facility. And so we can see the satellites and it's really consistent with what Katzi had been thinking. So it's good to see these pictures and then check it against what Space Mob is thinking. And so we're looking at the satellite and, you know, the support structure that helps bear the load. So that's a little bit more information that we got. So another interesting analog we want to study is just going back to what I've so lovingly termed Constellation constipation, which again, I believe that our fiber is about to kick in and we're going to get real regular, real fast, uh, from the back half of April onward. But you can see, and as Kevin did this really cool analysis on the pacing of Amazon's own Constellation. We can look at the timeline there just to see what scaling a constellation looks like. So they launched their prototypes in 2023, and then about a year and a half later, they had their first batch of production satellites. So they had their 2 test satellites, then they popped out 27. Mind you, their little LEO satellites are teeny little things. They're not nearly the same engineering scale as what ASTS is doing. But then they've been popping out these like wildfire. And so they had a launch April 4th and they have a launch April 27th and April 28th. And so they're banging these out now 25 at a time. So it went from April 2025, they had 27, then we had 3 months later another 27, then a month later 24, a month later 24, a month later 24. So then they went to a monthly cadence effectively. Now they're banging out multiple launches per month. And so, as Kevin points out correctly, this is an excellent demonstration of production and launch cadence ramp going from barely any launches to a regular monthly cadence, including some months of multiple launches. So when you're looking at this, it is useful to do these sort of comparable curves. And it just shows you just the industrial realities related to an industry. And so if you assume you know, a good-in-class, best-in-class operator, you can start to appreciate the realm of the possible as companies encounter whatever challenges they're going to encounter and then resolve them to ultimately get to the cadence that they want. And it's our belief that ASTS is really at this tipping point and about to get there. So looking at the Amazon LEO, Pace and pacing should be really dispositive of what ASTS is about to hit. Again, we have maybe the burden of knowledge among the space mob. I could see how a generalist is thinking like, oh, delays, delays, delays. And we're sitting here going, oh yeah, okay. So they had to deal with some composite issues and engineering for stacking. And of course it's nice to hit guidance and I really wish they would, but You learn new things when you're doing new things, and you'd rather get it right than get it wrong. And so Abel, more than anyone, wants to go fast and hard, but Abel, more than anyone, also wants to get it right. And so does every owner-operator of any company, whether it's Elon or Jeff Bezos. So it's a good comparable. Just like the launch cadence is sort of on the way up, I thought it was pretty interesting to see Katsy's chart just on the subscriber count for the ASTS Space Mobile Reddit account. It is pretty astonishing to just see how interest correlates with price. And, you know, as it should, the company gets bigger, gets de-risked, more people hear about it, more people get interested in it. You know, I certainly see this in my own community. I was just last night, I was out camping and a guy comes up to me and he is like, hey, thanks for Thanks for that tip on AST SpaceMobile. And I was actually pretty shocked when he then started like rattling off a bunch of fundamental information about the company. He's smart. He's a smart guy. He's in the cosmetics business, so not, certainly not an expert. And he was, you know, he had already dug into the launch cadence and some of the technical specs. And so that's just pretty indicative of how many smart people sort of hear about it from other people that they deem to be smart, you know, asterisk, I'm not saying that I'm smart, but he might think I am. He might think I am smart. And then they dig in, they do a little bit more, they join the community, which means that they bought it and the stock went down 20%. And that's of course how you join a community. And then people, you know, when they join this community, they stick around. I still think that this space secular theme is the big one. And so I still think that we're very early in the discovery of this community, and I wouldn't be shocked if space mob, if you will, the Reddit user community is ultimately 200,000, 300,000, 400,000 people, and it's a lot of people, and that's a lot of people buying shares. And when you tie that against the fundamentals, you have to ask yourself, what's the development of a company's fundamentals? So is there actually value being created? So I'm not interested in trades. I'm not interested in meme stocks. I'm not good at it. I wish I were, but Every time I try to buy a stock because I think there's going to be momentum, as sure as the sun will rise, I lose money.
[00:15:11] Speaker A: It—
[00:15:11] Speaker B: I mean, if you don't believe me, ask King Tut. It's comical at this point that I touch a stock and it turns to shit like instantly. And so that is just not who I am. And so I'm a fundamentalist at heart, very, very strong first principles on what generates value. And so first and foremost for me, there has to be a company that generates a lot of value. But to have a stock go up, you have to have other people identify that value and be interested. And that's where I think that the surefire way to do that is find a winner in a big secular theme, because then everyone wants to get a piece of it. You don't have this generalist dilemma where it's some niche thing that no one really knows, or some illiquid special situation where the only liquidity coming into it is some, you know, jerky hedge fund or you're praying to God someone pumps your bags. That's a tough putt versus finding something that's going to be sort of like a NASDAQ 100 winner. Then the money is going to hit, and stock prices are at all times a function of liquidity. And again, in my view, must be supported by very strong fundamentals so that, you know, things aren't just pump and dump. But I believe that there's going to be a wave of people discovering this and a wave of money And that's going to allow the price discovery, if not a premium to what price discovery should allow on where the stock will go, which is why I feel very, very comfortable owning it. And I always sort of, when I look in a mirror, first of all, I'm like, hmm, maybe I should use more moisturizer. But then I look deeper in the mirror and I go, wow, I'm a sociopath. Like, how do I sleep with this stock position? It is a funny thing. You know, I had a little fight the other day with that valuations guy or something, and he's like, Kook, I really want you to diversify. And I actually think he genuinely really does want me to, and I probably should. But when you know what you own and you really think like an owner, it is pretty funny where like I lose more sleep on 0.1% positions that I'm down on than AST SpaceMobile, where I believe I'm the single largest non-institutional, non-management holder. I don't even like think about it. I mean, I think about like, oh wow, I didn't do my weekly yet and people are going to be giving me crap on the internet. And they did. Some guy's like, hey, Cook, are you okay? I'm like, dude, I know, I know, I know it's coming. And so I think when you find something that, you know, if you really believe it's going to be globally relevant and everyone's going to be talking about it, that's the place to be. And that's the real goal I have is having seen this enough times in my career, I want to nail one and this is it. It's good to have other smart investors like Google apparently lined up. Now, is Google thinking of this sort of as like a PA trade? Probably not. Probably a strategic investor. But it is really interesting to see Google's track record. It is astonishing when you think about it for a hot second of how good they are at some of their investments. But then it's not astonishing at all when you realize that Google has the best information, really the best perspective of really anyone in the world of where the trends are, not the least of which is due that they make the trend. And so when you create your own weather, it is pretty good to invest behind that. So it was pretty cool when we saw Cathie's analysis of just showing when Google invested in SpaceX and some, some of the similarities what is also really cool is that you have to look at SpaceX on a base 10 log chart because the value went so high. And same with AST SpaceMobile now, but there's a lot of really neat things that are happening. And I've always thought that Google made sense as a potential strategic acquirer of the business, but certainly a strategic party who's very interested in Having a front row seat to the business. So what's the commonality of Google and Meta? Both missed the boat when it comes to space. So Google did have a good investment in SpaceX, but from my understanding, doesn't really have their own thing. Meta is in the same camp. And as we talked about last week, Meta is unique to Google in that it is still run by an owner-operator. And so Mark effed it up. Mark bet on VR, which was a reasonable thing, I guess, in hindsight. You know, there were already the flaws and concerns around adoption of VR. Looked at this market a lot, but, you know, he had to take a shot and now he's probably regretting not doing space, but he's making up for lost time. And so again, this guy Vinod, Samara Wickramah runs what's called the Vamos and Acaso programs, which are Meta's global initiatives to optimize voice and video call quality. So we all saw this last week. Stock was ripping on it. Pretty exciting. You know, Meta visits ASTS, but you want to make sure you double-click and understand why. What is going on here? It is curious that we have seen quite a few things with Meta at this point. We've seen them working with the Vodafone JV in Spain. And so we get some more information from this visit. And so Vinod was kind enough to share with us on LinkedIn some of his notes. And so, quote, he came away genuinely inspired by the boldness of their approach in space-based connectivity. And then also how fundamentally different the model is. So here he directly compares it to SpaceX, not thousands of small satellites, but a few massive high-powered phased arrays designed to connect directly. And it's exciting because Facebook needs to find new growth. And WhatsApp is one of those powerful levers of growth. And as a European would say, levers. of growth. So I might start acting a little bit more sophisticated on the spaces as more people join. So when we want to think about the levers of growth, WhatsApp is really a big deal in emerging economies. And so I use it just to complain to Anpanman about the stock price and to tell Tut whatever meme stock I'm about to buy so he knows to short it. And this is why Tut has some of the best returns in the market. is he just waits for me to get interested in something and then he shorts it. And so that's my use case of WhatsApp, but I've seen it used by certainly in other countries. It was really sort of the foundational platform and where a lot of commerce happens. There's some interesting things about WhatsApp I learned. And so in some countries with crappy cell phone service, you can have more of an asynchronous approach. And so like an app can just like break if it doesn't have a good connection. WhatsApp does a little better job. I'm forgetting all the details, but I was investigating this maybe a year ago. WhatsApp does a little bit of a better job queuing things. So if you're waiting for an order or something, you have more confidence that it just didn't, the cycle didn't break, which helps consumers. But WhatsApp has a very big interest in having the quality and the integration with MNOs into WhatsApp as, as good as possible. So what I was digging into a little bit, you know, just a little AI digging is really what is, what is Meta want or need that they don't already have? And so I have a cell phone in my pocket with AT&T and all these apps magically work. I have no idea what Meta has or has not done with AT&T in order to make their apps run the way they run on my phone. Or whether that's really how they would run natively if Venode didn't exist. And then you'd ask, well, why would they have this executive if they didn't do something? And so the first obvious thing is that WhatsApp might want access to customers where MNOs aren't. And so in emerging markets and things like that. So that's the obvious thing is that Meta might want to do something directly with ASTS, especially as ASTS begins to have spectrum that can open up net new opportunities for both parties. That's neat. But even though most people get their services through an MNO effectively, so me, for example, through AT&T, and Meta rides on top as an app, Meta has a history of wanting to be closer to the infrastructure layer and not just be an application. And so they've made massive investments in things like subsea cables, and they've done a large partnership in India with Jio, which I don't know anything about, and some other initiatives, some of which haven't gone anywhere. But there's a pattern where Meta invests directly in connectivity infrastructure when it expands the addressable market of their own products. That makes sense. It makes sense for Meta. It also makes sense for Google. Makes sense for all of the Mag Seven to have things be connected more often, and so we don't know if there's going to be a specific deal that prints or not. We just have to wait. But something seems to be cooking, and so Meta has done large equity stake investments, but we just really don't know. But what we do know is that Vinod is not just. typical corp dev person looking at financial investments. So he's an operational leader. And so he's doing the real work to make sure ASTS as a technology works, not a financial bet. And so all else equal, that's probably better for us as space marvers to know that the people who want to make sure things work are at the ASTS shop and impressed with what they're seeing. That's the type of actual expert, not the PowerPoint expert who consults for a couple hundred bucks an hour. This is the person making sure that Meta is working at the infrastructure layer and he's kicking the tires and apparently really likes what he sees so much so that he's actively basically throwing some shade at SpaceX. It's good information. Helps me sleep at night. So, you know, of all the things that can go wrong, which I'm humble that there are many, it is good information to know that people like this are taking their teams to our factory, looking at batch one satellites, and coming away impressed. That is all else equal good news. Yet the bears will say the tech doesn't work. Da da da da. I just don't get it how these. People always hide behind the, well, Nikola had an investment from GM. I mean, GM's a bunch of dipshits. Like you had that lady who's freaking out, trying to be cool, getting into the moment, not doing any work and got totally duped. But then you have these MNOs, which are like the most conservative companies in the world, dragging everything out for 5 years, torturing ASTS to death to get these DAs across, doing, you know, FCC water torture. on filings and reviewing interference and comments, you know, basically I can't think of anything more painful. And from, from a more diverse and, you know, pool of international interested parties who have all arrived at the same answer, seems to me to be dispositive of we have a really interesting technology. So yet the bears still try to introduce doubt. The other thing that was cooking this week is this article that Interitalia— I can't say his name. God, can you guys pick easier names like Cook? So Interitalia51 found this neat article and it notes Hughes, which is a, you know, big company, had discussions with the Department of Defense revealing significant interest in direct-to-device solutions. Specifically, the Department of Defense is exploring commercially based standards and products to rapidly deploy services, quote, without having to acquire yet another terminal or device. You know, that's pretty cool. And it really speaks to, again, the efficiency of something like AST SpaceMobile. There's no lock-in, it's open architecture, standards-based, and you can use the existing terminals.
[00:27:59] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:28:00] Speaker B: Big deal. And I read some other quote, I think it was in this article, is that soldiers have to choose when they're packing their bags. Do they want bullets, MREs, or comms? I would say if we can shrink the comms, it's probably a better idea for our soldiers to have more bullets and food than carrying around big lunky phones. Seems obvious. And the Department of War seems to agree. They're also increasingly, and this shouldn't be new to anyone, they're increasingly viewing LEO as strategic. And so they want to deploy this next generation of commercial technologies on the battlefield and, and harden them in a way to make them suitable for defense, yet not mess around with them so much that you change the underlying reason why they're commercial systems. And so my view is that with each war, there's always a new learning. And so back in Desert Storm, people were driving around in Hummers. Other people figured out improvised explosive devices. Hummers no longer really viable, blah, blah, blah. MRAPs enter the scene. You know, there's always a new learning from each war. Uh, sadly that we have wars, but there's always a new learning. And so As Mario Nawal points out, that the Iran war is expensive, but it's not the cost of burning the oil that is potentially the thing that is catching people's attention. It's the destruction of some of the assets that the US has, which are the hardest to replace. So the eyes in the sky. And so Iran, apparently not that dumb, figured out that Hitting America's radar systems was in fact the highest and best use of their missiles if they could land them. And so sadly they did land some. And so some of our radars, which were half a billion dollars each, were struck in Jordan and Qatar. And then one of those early warning aircraft was hit. Everyone saw in Saudi Arabia. I don't even believe they're making those anymore, but $700 million. So pretty expensive. And Pretty strategic destruction. When, if you're calling a spade a spade, Iran was targeting the right things. It's sort of the war equivalent of, you know, give a man a fish, you feed him for a day, teach him how to fish, you feed him forever. In war, if you can knock out all the radar systems, you ground all the missiles. So why hit a missile system? Or knock out a missile or hit a tank if you can just whack the actual radar and really degrade the warfighting capability. So the U.S. needs to do everything possible to prevent that from ever happening. Seems logical. If I were in the Department of War, this is what I'd be focused on is how to have the most efficient multilayered radar system possible, especially one that would be impervious from destruction. In the next go-round, and I think the answer is really clear: Leo satellites. And so I think the writing's on the wall that ASTS and others are going to get business like this, and it's going to be a burgeoning secular theme. And I think it could be a big one. No one, or I would say no one. I'm sure someone knows, but I don't know what the size of this opportunity is. But as an investor, I'm banking on it being large and. in tandem with the other very large things I think are also possible in other business lines, commercial, for example, you know, all these large things, only a couple of them have to pan out as really large to have an amazing investment outcome. And you're seeing more writing on the wall here. And so if it weren't a big opportunity, the company wouldn't be hiring against it. Very simple philosophy over here. quick report is meet the team. People are what build companies. I really hadn't appreciated this in my younger days. Now, given what I do for a living, I have appreciated that, not to be too trite and too West Coasty, but people are everything. But not in the sort of like, hey guys, great, great job hitting the quarter. And you know, you buy the team a pizza or something. You know, it's really making sure you have Elite talent in the roles that drive important outcomes for your company, and so following the hiring of these roles is important. And for me, I don't do it as closely anymore because people like ASTS investors and others do a great job. So I just document it. But early on, when I was building conviction in my investment, I had done this tweet thread called Meet the Team, and it was just me going through every single employee I could find and just. Learning about them and seeing what they had accomplished, seeing if they look like a a level hires, looking like they were poached from their employers, like people who had options and yet chose to YOLO their future on this company because employees are not diversified. How you invest your time in your job is a big decision, and for people with options, you can usually only have one job. This is no longer the COVID remote work thing where engineers could have like 10 jobs, although I'm sure some of you guys still figured out how to pull that off. Um, but normal people don't do that. And so ASTS, uh, hired David Lynch as a program manager, and the job description is to oversee a complete— oversee the complete portfolio of defense programs at AST SpaceMobile. Programs, plural.
[00:33:41] Speaker C: Exciting.
[00:33:42] Speaker B: So prior to that, he was at Sierra Nevada Corporation doing the same thing. He had been the chief engineer at Northrop Grumman. Ever heard of that? They make mail trucks, canoes, and B-2 bombers, among other cool things. And then he was a systems engineer at Raytheon for a long time. So here's a very technical person who now Seems to be able to very credibly speak to the world's most demanding counterparty, US military and others around the capabilities of our systems. So I'm very excited to see that our enthusiasm as Space Mob for these opportunities is being matched by the company attracting elite talent to bring that value to fruition, which ultimately someone's got to be on the field to come down with the ball. That, that has to happen. The ball doesn't come down if the player's not there to catch it. And so you want to make sure that we have a lot of receivers on the field to come down with the ball and score a touchdown. And when you look at ASTS and their talent flows, you're seeing a lot of people who are able to come down with the ball, and that is important and necessary. Talent drives outcomes. Simple observation that Can save you a lot of angst in your life. It's also good to check in with MNOs, and so radar systems are all fun games, but MNOs are probably what are going to butter our bread, and certainly a very large market for us. And so we have the guys out in New Zealand, One NZ, truly an astoundingly beautiful country that I hope to visit again, and. What's cool is they come out and they're just, again, doing our research for us. And so Kevin Shen found a really cool, uh, article, and they just talk about how the service works with unmodified phones. That's exciting. And also hits on this data sovereignty point, which we've talked about many, many times. And so ASTS, because it is, uh, bent pipe, our, our architecture, which means it really just reflects the signal from the user handset to the base station on the ground. So the network core, the network operator doesn't ever lose control of the data. It's not processed by some foreign entity, ASTS being the foreign entity. SpaceX is a foreign entity in the eyes of New Zealand. And so if you rely on that, you're giving your data to a foreign company that can do whatever they want with it. And so the U.S. could start to run, you know, who knows what the U.S. is going to do with the data. I mean, we have all watched Homeland. Do we all know? And so as much as I would like the U.S. to have access to everyone's data for our own purposes, each country is equally motivated to not have that happen. And so for a company, and which is the right outcome, is that companies, countries should have sovereignty over their stuff despite other countries desire to infringe upon that sovereignty. And so ASTS is first principled company and preserves data sovereignty for each of its many customers. So the data never leaves New Zealand's jurisdiction. And that's a big time selling point with foreign government customers, MNOs. In fact, governments might require as much. from their M&Os. So I think this is one of these subtle points that ends up mattering in a big-time way. And on the margin, it just helps validate your thesis. I don't know that it like swings you one way or another really hard, but just to understand it is to understand this mosaic of many things that are happening at AST SpaceMobile, which are important. And Let me just see what my next tweet was. Another Kevin Chen. I'm just going to call this the Kevin Chen Show tonight. And so he found another cool article from an industry consultant named Joe Madden, who's more than a typical consultant. This guy is actually really plugged in. He's gone and visited the facility, done detailed firsthand research. He's hired by MNOs and others for Real advice. So I think unfortunately we've degraded the term expert consultant in our you know basically diminishment of all Tim Ferrars accomplishments. But there are actually some of these people that do good work, and Joe Madden is certainly one of those people that I've been following for a while and can attest that that person certainly has good perspective. And so he points out. That there's a lot of buzz on Starlink IPO, blah, blah, blah. And says that a lot of people really just don't know what the TAM is for the DTC opportunity, which is fair. It's a hard question to answer, but he points out that if AST SpaceMobile can really achieve some indoor performance, the size of the revenue pool could double or triple in size. And that just goes to whether or not ASTS has been able to create the killer app. And I believe they have. And it's just important to recognize that the competing systems are not the same. Using low-band spectrum with the characteristics and beamforming ability of ASTS allows you to use the service much more like a typical cell phone versus the line-of-sight outdoor services that some of us currently have access to. And so this weekend, for example, I was out like truly in the middle of nowhere, kind of on the border of California and Nevada and didn't have cell phone service. I was kind of behind a mountain and I didn't realize none of my texts had gone through. And so my wife hadn't heard from me for 10 or 10 plus hours. And she will say those were the 10 best hours of her life, pure peace and quiet. Now, but eventually she was like, uh-oh, what? Well, this guy's usually pretty good at letting me know that he's okay. And so I had never used the Apple system before, and so it's— I think the system recognized that I needed it. And so I went out, I was able to hit a satellite and get connected and send some texts, and it was great. It worked, it worked well. And in that moment, you know, I didn't have cell phone service for, you know, a good 12+ hours plus overnight. I was, I was grateful to be connected, and it just so happened I was sort of in a desert With literally nothing between me and a satellite except for the atmosphere. Pretty good environment for it. And true to form, it worked really well. And you can see that this is going to be the expectation. But then of course I got greedy. You know, what person is like content with just a couple of texts to their wife? I wanted to go on X and doom scroll. I didn't know what sort of things I'm supposed to be mad at. I didn't know that Martin Shkreli was posting videos of Eric Swalwell. These are the things that I did not know and I could not know because I only had Apple's text satellite service. I was out of the loop, couldn't do the weekly things like that. And so people get greedy. Once you get a taste and you get, you know, a little satellite text, you immediately want the full enchilada and you want mobile broadband. Basic human tendency, you know, give me an inch, I want a mile. And that's, that's what ASTS is going to do. And so we're the killer app and that's going to, I believe, explode the market potential beyond what people generally think. And that's where we'll end up looking like smart, smart investors if that pans out. The MNO perspective is somewhat similar. They will get a lot of spectrum, but then one reason or another, they're only given an inch, but they want a mile too. So Katsy does an interesting job analyzing what is this 5G issue, which I remember this back from the day where all of a sudden there was these issues with 5G screwing around with airports. And so I think a lot of people are usually mystified, like, why don't I have good cell phone coverage at an airport? Well, the reason is because you can't have 5G near, you can't have those antennas nearby because it's screwing up airplanes. And so All the MNOs spent a vast fortune to buy all of this C-band spectrum, but haven't been able to deploy it efficiently because of interference issues with airplanes. And so there's, I guess, a grand bargain with the regulators, but it's going to take many, many years to do in terms of switching out the avionics of aircraft. With the right sort of electronic filters. I'm not an expert on this by any means, but what is interesting, and it's very similar to Legato, is Legato created a problem with GPS because Legato, as originally envisioned, was going to use ground stations. That's where the power was, is on the ground, and that's what was going to overpower the faint GPS signal. when you use legato spectrum from a satellite, the power is very far removed from ground, therefore no interference. So what's interesting here is the MNOs might be able to really dramatically shrink the time to value on these massive spectrum investments they've made by lighting up that spectrum via satellite immediately. And then over time, They can swap it as they see fit. But it's just another example where MNOs and people like us might have very different perspectives on why the value of satellite-enabled spectrum is there. And this goes against the simple consumer-minded thinking of, well, I have good cell phone service in the middle of New York City, so this must be a short. That's sort of the Patagonia vest way. And they'll, they'll even say tonight, you know, Coop just defined the bear case because he only used his satellite service when he was literally in the middle of the desert. Oh yeah, I did. But there's so many different angles to where satellite-enabled spectrum becomes useful when lighting up pieces of spectrum that might otherwise have some interference issues or deployment issues. For example, so that's what gets really interesting to just keep absorbing some of these perspectives, so we can really have a better vantage point. AT&T definitely got a vantage point when Kevin Chen singularly pulled off his own Russiagate and like tilted the outcome of an election in terms of this poll on what was the most historic AT&T technology event. I guess it was. ASTS against literally the invention of the phone. And ASTS was able to win the vote with, um, how many votes did we get? 2,900 votes, uh, showing that ASTS was the most impactful innovation in the life of AT&T. So I would just think that that's the ultimate, uh, flex of our political power at this point. But it is also true that people are going to value kind of what did you do for me lately? And having your phone work anywhere with broadband will be that thing and people are going to love it. And Apple gets it. Katsi found some filings that showed that ASTS had been certified with Apple. So if we were SpaceX, we would have a front page Bloomberg story saying Apple working with AST SpaceMobile on innovation that will displace everything. But because we're AST SpaceMobile, we will have no such article. It will be buried in FCC documents for only us to know. But it just points out the handset makers care. And so despite the large investment that Apple has made in, uh, Globalstar and things like that, they're still working with AST SpaceMobile. I don't think they're married to Globalstar, for example. And we know that Samsung is working with them. So everything. happens the way, the way it should. And SpaceX continues to be threatened by the company. So FCC filings are replete with complaints from SpaceX, basically just saying that ASTS is a threat to their business. So AST investors did a great job in this, uh, somewhat long post, and I won't belabor it, but it's the same normal sort of lawfare that SpaceX is waging. I don't take any of this stuff very seriously anymore. I try to read it to learn, but basically these companies are all posturing, especially over this global 2 GHz spectrum that ASTS is making a play for. And it just shows how vulnerable SpaceX feels in this regard. But we'll see. I think I'm going to be more like Scott in this where he doesn't really read these FCC filings anymore because it's just going to happen. But the more important thing for SpaceX is the slowing growth rate. And so there's an account called Lost Fundamentals, Lost Fundamental, which did some analysis just on the pretty cool ratios, actually, days to add a million net new Starlink customers. And so as the company was really ripping, it hit a trough of 47 days per million customers, but that was after some big promotional activity. But now it's been kind of constant and the number of, uh, the number of Starlink customers added per day has started to basically steady off. I wouldn't call it a decline because it was sort of this peak promotional number, but it's kind of been steady and it's still a very high number. So we're not going to be calling SpaceX the next Blockbuster Video anytime soon, but it's going to be very hard to show upward inflecting growth for SpaceX. Really just as a function of the astounding results they've already achieved. Anyone like Tim Ferriss that starts crapping on SpaceX, it's kind of like, yo, hey dude, they like created a $2 trillion company or wherever it's going to trade. I would say they did a couple things right. So if their growth is slowing, look at the level from which it is slowing, a level that is astronomically higher than a level than this little peanut brain could have ever possibly Expected, but yet the dumbwits will come out and be like SpaceX growth is slowing. I was right the entire time. You know, meanwhile, countless billionaires have been created, and so I don't want to be falling into this trap of crapping on on SpaceX for the astounding success that they've been. But they are, but I will. But they they are having the law of large numbers. catch up with them. And that's why Elon has to continue to find new growth areas. And that's where D2C was really a reaction from him. But I believe that he's going to probably go a little bit more toward the AI data center pitch because that's kind of a bigger, easier story. And what people are expecting that he's going to be out pumping the D2C opportunity. I just don't know if that's really what he wants to talk about Because he doesn't have the M&Os to show for it. But we'll find out. And he's got to find a good story to tell. And we do have an article from Ryan Connor found an article in The Information that says Elon Musk is pitching Starlink Mobile as a major driver of SpaceX's valuation despite limited revenue and uncertain demand. I don't have the full story. I actually I have a subscription to the information through my firm, so I'll go find it. But we kind of know the drill. I still just scratch my head because when all the MNOs are basically spoken for, I just don't really know where that growth is going to come from. But I could see the SpaceX phone happening. So I just saw that Grok is going to be coming out with a competitor to WhatsApp. I'm actually pretty anxious for that. I'd be interested to be using a WhatsApp that didn't require a phone number because then I could use it on my iPad. When I want to complain to Anpanman at any hour of the day. And so I could see myself using that. I'm a big user of X and I don't have a Tesla, but a lot of people do. And so I do see a world where Elon comes out with a SpaceX phone and I see how it could be cool. And so that might be what he's really pitching because he does have the pieces in play now that are vertically integrated to make a go for that. And maybe he does, maybe he doesn't, but this just becomes really a movie where, you know, the empire must strike back and the MNOs are the empire. And it's not clear to me that Elon can defeat the world's MNOs. So if he tries to defeat the world's MNOs, you're going to have an intergalactic alliance of all MNOs and all many governments uniting all against him. And ASTS appears to be, you know, the arms dealer to all of those people to fight him. So we'll see how it pans out, but I like our odds. SpaceX is getting a gift from Brendan Carr as well. So it looks like the FCC is going to ease the satellite power rules. And so I've read this and all the briefings on this, and I don't really know what the right answer is. And so the, the power limits are currently in place to prevent interference, which is what the FCC's job is. SpaceX argues that these are outdated rules, which, which might be true, but the data appears to show that SpaceX does interfere with adjacent frequency bands, which is a problem. And so in that respect, then easing the rules should not happen. But so we'll find out. And so if they do, if they do loosen the rules, that is just more power that ASTS can have as well. So a company with superior beamforming technology, they can already work under a much stricter regime if loosened up. Our ability to work indoors and things like that goes up on a log scale. So if they do loosen these rules, I think that the net beneficiary is still AST SpaceMobile, because our service goes from really good to astounding if that happens. So we'll watch that carefully. I could almost bet you my life that Kasey is going to do a really interesting post on this that will put a little bit more perspective on what happens if, for example, The power flux density rules go from negative 120 watts per square meter to 110, negative 110. And again, it's base 10, so it's not, you know, 10% more power. It's a big deal. So we'll wait for Katzy to help break that down a little bit more. And then you also had some total dope named Sasso. Which is close enough. You know, I'll sell him an F, and he's now going to be FAFO doing some fodder article about why the beamforming doesn't work. So I posted his work just in case people hadn't seen it, and all it takes is three seconds. Just run it through AI, and it'll tell you why it's wrong. Never don't even read my work on it, but it just shows where his research is all just tragically wrong, conflating a lot of. Concepts incorrectly, blah blah blah. So you got some fudsters out there. Just wanted to highlight this one as well as the rebuttal to it, just so that if anyone saw it and freaked out, you could unfreak out and go about your life. So there's there's that that's put out there. And then lastly, we are having more out with some spectrum holders that are looking to repurpose or get a. Authority to use D2C on their spectrum. So Grain Management, which we've talked about for a couple weeks now, has this T-Mobile spectrum in the 800 MHz band, and they're, you know, looking to get authorization to use it for D2C. You have Anterix doing the same as well. So it looks, you know, like the CATSI prophecy was right, where spectrum will find its most efficient system. And so you have a lot of spectrum out there, Legato being sort of the first domino to fall, which someone owned but really couldn't figure out how to use it or use it efficiently. And now they're seeing this opportunity to light it up in this way. And that's going to, hopefully, I think it will happen because Brendan Carr is really motivated to free up spectrum for this type of use. And that will give more capacity for these D2C applications, which Should allow MNOs and the owners of this to monetize spectrum however they see fit, but ultimately bringing these services to consumers, which ultimately will have revenue generation to the system that is doing it. And so we're seeing more velocity around that, and there continues to be little clues around T-Mobile. And so will the flipping happen of T-Mobile going to AST SpaceMobile? We should get a Calshi market on this. I'd be actually pretty curious to see what the invisible hand would say. So if anyone knows how to actually get a Calshi market up, that actually would be a really good one, is T-Mobile contracting with AST SpaceMobile. I don't even know if you want to say flip entirely because that— maybe they'll just have both. But this is something that I think we just have to say is low probability because it seems so sensational, but there seems to be enough little hints. in the FCC documents that suggest they're analyzing it. And if it happens, that would be the ultimate gut punch to SpaceX. And I think cause a true shock in the market in favor of AST SpaceMobile. So in that respect, I hope it happens, but I think right now we have to assume it's pretty low probability, but something that I certainly have my eye on. So thank you everyone for joining. We had another busy week and there This next week, it's really going to be all eyes on New Glenn. And remember that Blue Origin is a very conservative company. This is their 3rd certification flight, so they have a monstrous incentive to get this one right. They're 2 for 2 in terms of reaching orbit. They're 1 for 2 in terms of landing the booster. And so hopefully they're going to go 3 for 3, 2 for 3. Um, in each of those perspective counts. Have a great night. Talk soon.
[00:56:39] Speaker C: Numbers, so too good to be true. Will it work? We don't have a clue. Lily awaits, we will be there soon. Swinging for the Hills and seas where no towers stand, connecting voices in forgotten lands. Each day feels like a bluebird's kiss, a journey to the abyss. We love the risk. We love the risk. Follow the rift, bluebird soar. Connect the world, fogs soon rise. As seeds unfurl, tree hearts align. Through the fear and bliss, 'cause we're the Marble Space. We, we love the race. Where, where, we love the risk. Bluebirds soar, connect the world. Foxhounds rise as siege unfurls. We hold the line through the fear and bliss. 'Cause we the mob of space. We're the mob of space.
[01:00:00] Speaker B: Hey!
[01:00:00] Speaker C: We love the race. Ride the spectrum, chase the beam, never bullish enough. Hold, hold, hold it in that time. We love the risk. Where we love the risk.
[01:00:36] Speaker B: Three, two, one.
[01:00:39] Speaker C: We love the risk.
[01:00:48] Speaker A: Thanks for listening to the AST Space Rover 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. We're doing something very, very big, 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 broadband 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 end users.
[01:01:48] Speaker C: Listen. Mmm, waffles.