The Antonov Just Landed - Here's What It Means for ASTS

[00:00:03] Speaker A: Everyone, thanks for joining. Sorry, I started a bit late. I had a number of things that I had to take care of, and man, it's been a long day. In addition to the market sucking and emotionally that being draining, I also had a lot of things to take care of around the house and in real life. So I'm exhausted. Yeah, I'm with you. exhausted, which I'm sure everybody else is as well. But yeah, it's been a rough few weeks. I think some perspective helps. The market has been brutal. The macro has been tough, and there's uncertainty with the Fed. There's obviously a lot going around in the world as well. But today, obviously, Warsh came out pretty hawkish. And I think I've heard several different views, but it seems like he's setting up for a September rate hike. And then hopefully that's going to be enough so he can kind of cruise in October and then there'll be midterms. And of course, midterms are also a point of uncertainty because if the Democrats do get the House or the Senate, or I think it's just the House, then that can inject a bit of uncertainty relative to what we've been used to. This is not a political statement, but when you do have some change in direction from the government, then that can obviously inject uncertainty and programs that you thought were going to be okay might might get put— might have some dose of uncertainty. And so that's always something to look out for. But I think there are some people who say that, whoosh, there's no way he's going to raise in September, but I think he pretty much set it up such that he will, probably. And I think it's important to make a distinction, though, that obviously we're not in— there's some people who were saying, trying to draw some parallels, like we're similar to 2022, and that was a different regime. Inflation was on a runaway course and the Fed had to really jack up rates quickly to get it under control. Here, we're kind of dealing with persistent inflation, and so the Fed is having, at least has a view that the conditions aren't restrictive enough, and so they're going to start potentially moving to make them more restrictive. Although, Interestingly, I've been following Truflation, which has— it's one of these modern data providers. They provide real-time inflation data based off of thousands of data points, and their perspective is that actually, with the exception of a few areas of concern, most of the data points are suggesting that we actually are weakening and are we're not experiencing inflation, we're actually experiencing deflation. So it'll be interesting to see. I think Warsh kind of gave himself a few outs. So on the one hand, he said inflation is very stubborn, and so the target of 2% is fixed and he's very focused on that. But then he threw in a wrench, which I think the market has ignored, but he's talked about creating a new framework where they're going to be looking at more relevant data, broader data, and probably more real-time data. So that probably gives him some level of flexibility where if you can come up with a different formula and show that, oh, inflation's not actually above 2%, it's actually at 2% or it's declining, then that's where you could get a potential surprise, I think, in September where he doesn't raise rates. I'm not saying that he would cut, but yeah. So the market today obviously was focused on that. While the indices were down, I guess the Dow was down basically flat and S&P was only off a quarter point, a quarter percentage, and NASDAQ was down 0.6%, and IWM was down, Russell 1.3%. Obviously, high-beta sectors got completely shellacked, right? In addition to crypto. Sometimes people will ask, well, How can the— and you'll have bears too who will say, man, the market's not down that much. Imagine when it's down a lot how these high-beta sectors are going to perform. Well, today we had a massive move in factors, right? So today obviously momentum was down. I think it was like 3%, but then you had value that was up. I think software outperformed today. And so that's how you— some of these defensive sectors were up. And so that's how you can have an index look kind of calm at a high level, but then when you drill down, high-beta names are going to be off quite a bit. So that's what we experienced today. Names that are going to be much more interest rate sensitive, that's where— yeah, that's what we saw. Today, crypto was down. Obviously, the neo-cloud companies were all down huge. I think IREN was down because of concerns around their CapEx spend, which seems like every week people are concerned about AI CapEx spend and then they get over it and then they're worried about it again. But yeah, space was no different. Quantum was no different. All these sectors got absolutely smashed. So that's the new world we live in. But I think it's important to have some perspective. I don't think we're in 2022 where the Fed's going to have to raise several hundred basis points to get inflation under control. It's stubborn. And so they're focused on tackling that. And so with that uncertainty, with Warsh coming out today, obviously, and there's other interesting news after the close, we appears that the US has almost taken over Venezuela's oil, and so how's that going to impact macro markets? Oil, my guess is it should start coming down, but we'll see. Another interesting thing is that one of the generals of the US was talking about how they've pretty much secured the Strait of Hormuz, and so I actually believe that message versus when Trump speaks or when you hear some of these Iranian news agencies speak. It's always unclear exactly what's going on there, but it does seem like traffic is flowing and oil is going through the Strait of Hormuz. I'm not sure. Obviously, that's something that could change week to week, but yeah, there's a lot to chew on. And so being invested in the space sector, It can take a number of years off your life just given the stress, but I think it's important to have perspective. There's been a lot of bearish sentiment on X, and then of course there's people posting rage bait for whatever reason, but it was interesting. There was this one person who said, well, ASTS is down and will not recover until production cadence is up and running and is consistent. And then I replied back and I was like, well, I guess the entire space sector is waiting for AST because everybody's down. And so once AST's up in terms of their production, I guess everything will rally. And my point there was that it doesn't matter what the company's doing right now. Yeah, on the margin, over the last few weeks, could it have saved 2%, 3%, 4%, 5% of performance? Yeah. I'm sure it would've performed a little better, but everything's down. And I know there's some people who have been upset about, well, they may have bought AST at a higher price, like maybe at $80 or $90 or maybe even $100. They're kicking themselves and they're like, I shouldn't have gotten involved. And this is for newer investors, but I would challenge them and say, well, what would have been your alternative? What would you have— would you have invested in another space company? Because you would be pretty much down the same amount percentage-wise if you had invested in a quantum company or a whole host of companies. If you bought a semiconductor company, yeah, you'd be down almost the same amount. So unfortunately, that's just kind of the market. Interestingly, when you look at price, as we all say, nothing changes sentiment more than price, right? Interestingly, when we do have these periods of drawdown, then people come out with pitchforks and they say, well, the company should be sending out more PR. The production cadence isn't up to snuff. There's a whole host of reasons why people— and this is kind of a coping mechanism, right? Because like— and this is true, this is like human psychology 101, where if something is down, you've got to find a reason for it, right? Just like if something is up, oftentimes people will be like, oh, well, I'm smart, or management must be doing something good. So this is— It's interesting, during periods of time when risk is on, you'll have companies that are marginal investment ideas that are all performing really well. So I'll just point one example out. I remember Virgin Galactic had traded most recently, maybe it traded as high as $8 back in, maybe it was January or May. And yeah, did anything positive happen to that company? No. But that was just beta. It's like the entire sector traded up and so people who traded that were like, oh great, it's up. And if you're trading-oriented, maybe you would swing a position like that around, but in terms of the actual fundamentals of the company, there's nothing positive there. But in periods of drawdown, everybody gets punished with the exception of SpaceX, which has actually hung in there quite well. which I think is a testament to, interestingly, I think they've diversified quite a bit and because of its position, and of course, Musk has done a tremendous job of marketing the TAM and everything they're pursuing. It almost seems like they're pursuing everything under the sun. There was someone, of course, It's an ongoing criticism. You always get a message of, well, how is AST going to compete against SpaceX? And someone had said, I posted this tweet about AST having all these patents, and then someone said, well, Musk said filing patents is a weakness. And then I responded, well, SpaceX has filed a few patents on direct-to-cell, so what does that imply? But in this regard, like to SpaceX, it's interesting because they've been able to kind of levitate, right? Where I did point out last week that they, I think it's now NeoCloud leasing now makes up around 45 to 50% of their revenue. And so if you look at those companies, they trade at very, very low multiples. And I'm talking about the hot ones, right? Like NBIS and IREN. they trade at, I think it's like single digits. Let me just confirm this. I guess the number has moved. But for 2028, IREN trades at 3 times EBITDA. For next year, they trade at 8 times EBITDA. And there's reasons for that because these companies are heavily CapEx intensive. And so people also, in terms of future pricing, it's always uncertain. Are they going to be able to maintain their revenue growth and profitability. And so that's why they trade at pretty low multiples far out. But SpaceX, someone had mentioned, well, SpaceX is pretty cheap relative to other space names, and that's true, it is. But it's also because of the makeup of their revenue. So half of it is coming from NeoClouds, which is short-term leases. I mean, I think they're on month-to-month with Anthropic and Google, And so those are not month to month, but I think it's like 3-month periods. And so those contracts could get pulled at any time. And so for SpaceX, there is, if you kind of blend the valuation multiples, then they trade like a space company and of course launch and with communications, but then also the AI and NeoCloud business. AI, I would assume trades at a high multiple, but I haven't actually dug into that part of SpaceX's business to see what the contribution is there, but then obviously NeoCloud is huge, leasing infrastructure to others. Anyway, it is interesting. I mean, I think Musk, he's a great marketer and promoter, and obviously he now has the the ability to do that because he has credibility, because he's executed. Now, has he executed on timeframes that he's outlined? No, not necessarily. But then has actually pulled off difficult things to do? Absolutely, he has. So that's why people give him benefit of the doubt. So I think yesterday SpaceX talked about how their opportunity wasn't Gosh, what was said? Actually, let me just take a look because I think for 2030, let me just look at the Street estimates. For 2030, yeah. So the Street has their revenue at like $415 billion, but he had talked about potentially getting to $3 trillion in 2030. And it's like people kind of laugh at it, but then there's always this possibility, right? He'll eventually get there, which To give him credit, when xAI and SpaceX merged, people were wondering, they're like, well, xAI is losing money. It doesn't make sense. The combined company is going to trade down. But then he pulled a rabbit out of that. He entered into the NeoCloud computing deal with Google and then also with Anthropic, and those 2 deals are bringing in a tremendous amount of revenue and margin contribution. So that was a big surprise, at least for me. Maybe I was one of the few people who wasn't following it as closely, but yeah. So SpaceX has actually hung in there quite well, but for the rest of the space sector, it's been a complete bloodbath. And so I think, as I was saying before, sentiment dictates price. And so when things are going well, people are obviously optimistic and happy. Management must be doing all the right things. And then when it's negative, there's pitchforks. People are saying on X, just looking at some of the sentiment, it's like, why hasn't the company put out PR? They need to put out more PR. the production, there's some issue that's going on, there's something wrong, like why didn't they launch? These are all fair criticisms. I think it's important to take a step back and understand what you own. So this company is doing something that's very difficult and hasn't been done before in terms of the satellites that they're putting up in space. So you're going to have some delays. You can ask Rocket Lab investors about Neutron. It's been delayed for a really long time. The thing about space is that you set ambitious goals, and employees, suppliers, everybody executes along those timelines, and the expectation is that there's going to be some slippage because we When you have public goals, everybody's running towards that, but then these things are hard and you're going to have setbacks. People kind of forget that earlier this year, we had Bluebird 7, of course, not placed in the right orbit. It wasn't the company's fault, but Blue Origin didn't have a second burn on the second stage, and so that failed. Then, of course, with the routine static fire in May, which was the for Blue Origin New Glenn that blew up the launch pad and the vehicle as well, that set us back, right? 'Cause we were planning on using that vehicle for a launch of 3, a launch of 4, and then eventually getting to 6 and 8, right? And so that launch pad, we've seen updates recently and that looks like it's gonna be back in order sometime. My guess is, you know, the first few weeks of January. And then that vehicle, for it to actually launch ASD satellites, it's going to take probably 2 or 3 commercial missions where, I mean, we're clearly not going to go on the first New Glenn. They're going to have to launch their own cargo and do that successfully at least 2 times is my guess, or 3 times. And then we'll consider putting satellites on it. But I think the company's plan is to utilize SpaceX for the next several launches, and then towards the tail end of the 45 in orbit, my guess is that you'll see 2 New Glenns delivering probably 4 satellites and then maybe 5 or 6 after that. But we'll see. That's just based off of my speculation and how the math works, but I do think for Falcon 9, we've probably just given the delay here. And let me, I guess I'll just talk about the potential delay or the potential reasons for the delay. So based off of our work and our guesses, I think there was probably a view that there was gonna be a September launch, but then, and shipping was very soon. However, there must've been something that came up where they didn't feel comfortable in shipping the satellites. And so they had to, my guess, go back and fix those issues. And so we're probably looking at something along the lines of an early October launch. And what's interesting is based off of Space Mob due diligence now, and there's now a tweet, there's now 4 boxes outside at Midland. Right? And so, or in Odessa. And so my guess is that there's 4 boxes outside, there's probably 1 box inside. So now we've got 5 boxes instead of just 3. And so why would you do that? Well, you probably need more boxes if you're planning to ship 2 batches pretty close to one another. And so if you kind of put those things together, now oftentimes we'll ship 1 and then 2. 2 and then 1. And so 5 actually makes a pretty interesting number because then you would ship 2 and 1 and then maybe 2, and then one of the boxes would come back. And so you would be able to basically ship 2 batches of the 3 in a pretty short period of time with 5 boxes. And so my guess is that there is a possibility that we could see 2 in October or maybe 1 shortly, you know, at the beginning of November and then kind of late November. But yeah, I think for the people who are upset about cadence, clearly the company thought that they were going to get those 3, 14, 15, and 16 out the door, but then something came up, right? And I think it's important to have the perspective of if you do find something in testing, that means that, you know, if it was testing, that means that your testing process is good. and you're going back and fixing it. Because the last thing you want to do is send up a satellite that has issues and it gets bricked in space, because that's no bueno. I mean, each one of— unlike Starlink, where they can lose a few satellites here and there, we aren't sending as many satellites and these are workhorses. And so you don't want to get any of them wrong. And so you want to make sure that that even though you've finished production, and if you go through testing, if there's any ounce of doubt, you'll want to make sure that you fix it before sending something to space. But yeah, that's my speculation. As I mentioned before, based off of due diligence from Space Mob, it does look like we now have probably at a minimum 4 boxes, probably 5 boxes. These are the black oversized boxes that a Bluebird is put into, and then they put 2 generators on it to keep it environmentally sound. But we probably have 5 boxes and there's a possibility that we have 6. And so, as I mentioned before, if you're planning to launch once a month, then 3 boxes are fine for Falcon 9. But if you are getting to the point where you might start launching twice a month, then that's where you need at a minimum 5 boxes and maybe 6. So just keep that in mind. I do want to talk about PR, and then I'll talk about the Antonov. So, well, before I— well, actually, yeah, I'll talk about PR. There will be a public service message at the end of this entire conversation about margin, but let's talk about PR. So I just want to reiterate that this company is different. They are conservative in their approach and they tend to be on the scale of promotional being 10 and 0 being hermits who live in a cave, this company's probably, and they've gotten much better over the years, but they're probably a 4 or a 5. Part of it is their ethos, their engineers. Abel, Early on, I remember when I met with Adriana Cisneros at the BlueWalker 3 launch and we talked about marketing and I was like, hey, it would be great if the company could be more promotional. And she agreed, but she was like, it's not Abel's DNA. He's an engineer at heart and he's all about executing and not being about talk. But delivering the goods. And so I can respect that and it's his company. I mean, at the end of the day, who am I to say? But obviously, I think over the years they've gotten better, but there's also some DNA there, which I don't think is going to change. And that's something that as an investor, you or me, you kind of have to accept that, right? Because ultimately, I remember, and I've talked about this so many times, but I remember post the SPAC destruction over 2023, 2024, those are really rough years. There were people who were invested in some of these other names. I remember like Enovix and EOS and others who people who owned AST and owned these other companies, and they would just— I would get DMs from people and just be like, why can't AST be better at PR? These other companies, they're much better at communicating, being promotional, like when there's milestones or supposed milestones, or things that are happening, they would market it and they'd tell the street and retail investors would feel good, and I guess public institutions as well. But then over the course of the years, I began to realize the difference between the two. This company, when there's nothing to say, then they just won't say it. And when there's something material, they will put it out there. And going back to Q2, actually yesterday before I went to bed, I actually listened to the second quarter call and it was chock-full of information. They didn't put it all in PR form, but it was chock-full of information where as an astute, someone who is an investor, if you listen to it, it's like, holy shit, there's so much going on, and they actually disclosed it, but they're not putting PR out left and right. For example, the 3 military awards that they got, $125 million over 3 years, there was no PR about that. They just released it during Q2. They talked about it, but they didn't— and my guess is the other side, whether it's through them being a subprime or whoever they were facing, if it was SDA or someone else, they probably appreciate that to a degree. It's like, hey, we don't want you guys to necessarily blast this out there that you got XYZ award. But that's part of their DNA, right? There are times when they have PR'd some of that, but other times they've been they'd probably cite it on discretion. And that's just part of the company. Obviously, when the JV got announced with AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile, they did put out a PR because that was a very unique opportunity and it was very material. But when it comes to the day-to-day stuff, these guys are not marketing-driven overpromotional, and that's not fair to say. They're not promotional. So going back to my example of Panovix and EOS, those companies, and there were a few other SPACs that actually went bankrupt, but unfortunately those people who back then, there's a few that I can remember, sold AST because they're like, I've had it with this management. They don't communicate. So they sold and they went all in on some of these other names and Oh man, they just got absolutely brutalized. So I think it's important, some people are saying that stock price is not the company, and yeah, this is a really tough time, but you've got to keep your emotions. You've got to go back and think about why you're in this investment and what you're underwriting and think through what has changed. Yes, the macro environment has changed and it's bad right now, the sentiment's bad, And we might be facing higher interest rates. Now, we're a very different company. We're not a $700 million pre-revenue company with $100 million of cash left on the balance sheet and yet to launch a commercial satellite. That was ahead of Block 1 satellites. We are now $20+ billion. We've got Legato spectrum that we still have to work through, but that alone is once deployed is worth $20 billion, so we're trading at that value, but we also have cash. We've got over $3.5 billion in cash. We've got $1.3 billion of contracted backlog. We're working with all the top M&Os. We've got all these defense awards. And so yeah, we're in a different environment. Yes. The Fed, maybe they'll raise rates. I don't know what's the endgame. Maybe they raise a total of 100 basis points over the next few months, is that really going to destroy this company? No. Could it during that period in 2022, '23, '24, could we have gotten annihilated and ended up in bankruptcy? Absolutely, yes. But obviously the company made it through that period of time and it was due to execution and and the MNOs and strategic partners seeing the real value here, which I think people forget sometimes, where Verizon looked at SpaceX Starlink and looked at us and said, hey, I'm picking these guys. But yeah, so when I talk about the company being conservative, going back to the 3 government awards of $125 million over 3 years, that's a firm award. Right? And so they don't count options or they don't count contract ceiling. Now you'll hear Scott talk about that where it's like, oh, this is like we're getting paid this exact amount of money over these 3 years for these 3 awards and they can grow, but this is what it is. And so when you look at other space companies and you can have AI kind of apart what an announcement is, oftentimes you'll see a big headline number. It could be several hundred million dollars, and that's the difference in DNA. Some of these other companies will put out a big headline number, and then when you peel back the layers of the onion, it's like, oh, they're including all the options, or they're including the potential contract ceiling value. It's not actually the firm value. So if you go to the 10-Q and you look at what actually is the firm value, it's actually quite a bit smaller. So yeah, it's just a difference in approach. Not that one approach is right or wrong, but it's just different. It's like these guys are more conservative in nature and that's how they are. So taking a step back, if you look at Some of the other companies over this past period of time, there's been some criticism about AST. It's like, oh, they can't execute and yada, yada, yada. Well, yeah, it's been tough. They're in production hell, and this stuff is really difficult, but they've launched 2 batches of Block 2 satellites successfully, have deployed all of them, well, almost. Bluebird 11 will probably get a PR probably on Monday, I guess, based off of folks who are tracking that it successfully unfolded. But yeah, we've got a bunch of satellites up and we've got line of sight. I tweeted out a production pipeline where we actually have most of the materials for up through satellite 48 or Bluebird 48. And so we have line of sight to 45, right? That is enough to provide commercial service. And the beta, by the way, of 2025, that's really important. From what I understand, a lot of the MNOs will start moving quickly in terms of closing definitive agreements. And that's basically shit or get off the pot. And so when beta launches, I think that's when you're going to start seeing real momentum. Obviously, we've got the key early players who have definitive commercial agreements, but you're going to see a lot more roll in once Beta is launched. But let's see. Another topic I did want to cover is the Antonov. And so we had another Antonov come in from India, which is Big news. I think the company, if you talk to them, they would tell you that once you get to a level of consistent production where everything's kind of humming and there's no changes or modifications needed, they're going to be shipping these composite rings by ship instead of an Antonov. But clearly we're still at the early stages of production. And so we just had an Antonov land in Midland, which is a big skeptical— or skeptical, a big spectacle, just given how large that aircraft is. But from what I understand, based off of some very detailed due diligence, it looks like there's probably been 7 to 8 composite rings that were dropped off today. And so if we kind of do the math, of how many rings were dropped off before, and I like to call them donut rings. You know, I think we're probably, in terms of actual composite rings, we're probably somewhere in the neighborhood of Bluebird 33 to Bluebird 34, which is good news, right? 'Cause we have microns completed all the way up to probably 45 or 46. And so now that we have those donut rings, We pretty much have everything we need to complete up to 33, 34 satellites, which is great. And so the fact that they're flying in instead of waiting for a boat, but they're flying in additional donut rings, that tells me that they're looking to really ramp up cadence of production and shipping towards, call it, the second half of Q4. So I've speculated on this before where if you look at— well, there's a few pieces of news. So we just learned this past week that SpaceX is not doing any more Falcon 9 Starlink missions out of Cape Canaveral. So any future Starlink missions will be V3s that will go up on Starship out of Cape Canaveral. But for now, Any V2 Starlinks or Mini Starlinks or D2C Starlinks, those are all going to be launching out of Vandenberg, California. And so for all intents and purposes, the manifest has freed up. And so there's quite a bit more flexibility if you're willing to pay for it for launch. And then additionally, if you're looking for, I think this is how it works, but if you're looking for somewhat cheaper launches, there is this ability to go standby. So there's a number of missions that are scheduled for the 4th quarter, which have satellite companies that are supposed to have payloads there on time that may miss their deadline. So that window, if they don't hit it, then SpaceX has the ability to then have someone else step in and take that Falcon 9. So My guess is that the company has additional launch options. So first of all, just to be clear, we do have a Falcon 9 that was scheduled for September, I'm pretty certain. And so that's probably— that's been pushed back and it will be in October. We probably have a few more launches for the rest of this year with Falcon 9, and then we have this ability to go standby. Right. I guess in a kind of perverse way, we should all be cheering for some of these other companies. I got to go back because I forget exactly. I think there's Telesat and OneWeb and a few other companies. We should all be cheering for them to have delays so they don't show up on time because then we can launch more satellites. Now, obviously, you've got to produce enough and have them ready, but I think that's why we're seeing this constant stream of Antonovs coming in because they're trying to iterate very quickly and get these things in production. There was someone today that did reach out to me and said, hey, it'd be great if you can— and by the way, if you have a question or comment, feel free to drop it in and I'm happy to talk about it. But this one particular person had told me, hey, when you— the next space that you do, you should kind of make sure that people understand that composites are a process, meaning Going back to, I think it was January of this year, or maybe, yeah, January, there was some rumors that the first batch of composite rings, they came, when they came from India, they were shit, right? They had some issues and so they had to be sent back, or not sent back, but they basically had to have, they needed to get either redesigned and/or reinforced. But, you know, composites are such something that you improve over time. There's no— it's not as if, like, you design it and it's perfect the first time out. It actually— and I didn't appreciate this because there was another person who works with composites who told me, I think it was in 2025, that, oh, if they're shifting to composites, like, it's going to take longer than you think. And that ended up being true, right? Composites are hard. That's why a lot of people don't do it. But for space, if you can pull it off, the amount of the weight savings versus strength are totally worth it, right? That is if you can pull it off. And so obviously, for the company, they're now at this point where they are confident in in the rings, and obviously we've got 6 satellites that made it to space. They didn't disintegrate in the fairing. They didn't collapse or anything like that. And so they've got the process down pretty well. And so the good news is that Antonov coming in with 7 to 8 rings means that they are very confident with where that design is, right? And so my guess is that And by the way, I think Tanner had made this point before too. It's not as if all these rings are coming by Antonov. There is a possibility that some may have been shipped over the water, but because they— you could see a scenario where they shipped some and it's taking maybe a month or two to come from India. Actually, I don't even know what the travel time is, but by seeing another Antonov with 7 to 8 rings, that's a pretty bullish indication that They are looking to really hockey stick production towards the end of, call it, towards the end of Q4. So October and, sorry, November and December, we could see quite a few launches. So it could be a scenario where you see 2 launches a month, who knows, right? Depending on how the cards fall. But yeah. I think going back to BB-14 and 16, as we saw from the company, 1 is done. It sounds like 2 are close to done, although I think all 3 were probably close to done, and then there might've been some issues. Don't know what that would be, but they had to go back and make sure that they were fixed, because that's what good engineers do, good aerospace guys do. Again, you don't want to send a satellite up to space that's bricked. But yeah, so that's kind of where we are. If I had to guess, we probably will see a shipment tweet or PR in the next week if we're looking to launch sometime in early October. But we'll see. What else is there? Yeah, and I would say, from people that I've talked to who've talked to the company, and I've had a very brief conversation with the company, they seem pretty bullish, or not pretty bullish, they seem very bullish with the prospects of various things that they're working on. And of course, that's not indicative of the stock price and the market being bearish overall. And so I think it's important Keep your wits about you, make sure that you understand why you're invested, and each day, if you have an issue and you're finding yourself— and this is natural, right? When the market is down and your stock is down 5% and it's been down from what a few days ago it was like at $72, $73, it's going to test your resolve, right? And you're going to think of reasons why things aren't going well. Maybe you missed something. And there's human psychology where it's like, well, man, what if we don't ever recover? Or we could— I saw some people tweeting, we could go to the 40s or the 30s. Yeah, absolutely. You know what? Any stock could go to zero. I mean, yeah, obviously I'm being sarcastic there, but— But also the stock could easily recover to $100 in a short period of time, which it has done in the past. But when you're in a tough spot and the market is down and it seems like there's little hope, that's usually a bottoming— that's part of the bottoming process, where people are like, oh my gosh, Warsh is going to raise rates and SpaceX is has taken all investor liquidity in space away. And so AST or any number of names, I don't know how they're going to recover. And yeah, when you're in a period where correlations are 1 and everything's moving together, which is clearly what we are in, then these things don't matter. Company-specific news doesn't matter unless AST announced that they had a T-Mobile definitive agreement tomorrow, then that would definitely matter, right? Or if T-Mobile— or sorry, if AST cured cancer, that would matter. But AST shipping Bluebirds 14 to 16, even launching them successfully, honestly, in this environment, I don't think it would've mattered. Now, would we be at 60 or 61 instead of 58? Yeah, maybe. I could justify that, but at the end of the day, I think the market, the sentiment is just really poor, right? And it's positioning. And so today, the carriers, the MNOs, you couldn't sell that stock to anybody. They were all up 2%, 1%, whereas the space sector was down. It's all factor movements, right? People are trying to position for names that are going to do well if rates, if we're going into a more restrictive environment, and they're going to sell names that are more sensitive to rates going up. So that's just kind of— that's the game for Wall Street. But I do want to— I guess I'll end this space. Well, I'll see if there's any comments, but I did want to just reiterate one thing, which is really important, is do not be a hero. Do not do anything stupid. Do not use margin. Now, I've talked about in the past, if you want to use it tactically and maybe if you dabble in 5%, 10%, whatever it is, but you set risk limits and you set— if you use it, it's for a very specific reason and for a limited time and you feel like you have edge, then yeah, you could utilize it, but don't be reliant on it. And I've seen with with our friend Jacob, who obviously did really well from margin, but kind of went through 2 periods where he made a ton of money, lost it all, made a ton of money, or almost lost it all, made it all back, lost it all, and then made even more, and then basically got wiped. I've seen that in that particular instance, and then with other people too. And unfortunately there's someone who has gone through something similar. And it was almost like a similar pattern where when talking to this person, it's like, hey, in their previous harrowing bouts of almost losing it all, but then making it back and then almost losing it all, making it back, having people around them intervene and saying, hey, you know what? That was luck. It's just a matter— and I always say this, when you have margin, if you use margin or options, if your primary position is all options or margin, you could be right on your thesis, but the macro backdrop can overwhelm that thesis. It's not going to matter. And that's where you get taken out. Never use margin on high-beta stocks because it can work, but it's not going to— eventually, if you stick with that strategy, ultimately you're going to get wiped out. It's not a matter of if, but when. And for some people, unfortunately, you have to learn that lesson because of this If you kind of survived it and you make a lot, and then people tell you, hey man, don't do that again, and don't be on option, or be loaded, your primary position being options or being on margin. I don't know. It's this weird thing about psychology. And this is something where I think all of us have to have a lot of awareness of the person you are. If you have an addictive nature or sometimes like— and there's been a few people like this over the course of the last 5, 6 years where it's like they've made an extraordinary amount of money and then they gave it all back. And then sometimes they actually made it all and then more. And it's almost like it feeds themselves where there's actually this one guy who When I was on this one Discord, it was called ISS Discord, really young guy out of Europe, and he had turned— this is during the really rough times, I think in 2022 and 2023, but he had turned, and he had posted on WallStreetBets as well. He had turned, I think, $70,000 or $80,000 by trading various names, and then ultimately ended up in AST. He had made like a million dollars. this is for someone who's in university. And so there were a number of us who were like, hey, you truly lucked out. You should just sell and sit on it, do nothing or do something conservative. And this guy had delusions of grandeur. He was like, well, I'm going to turn— I was able to turn $70,000 into $1 million. I'm going to turn $1 million into $10 million and then just keep going. We kept telling him, you're gonna end up in ruin. And it's like this mentality of, it's like, well, if it's meant to be, then it's meant to be. If I lose it all, then so what? And of course, he lost it all. And I don't know, it's tough. It's like, I think for some people, they kind of want that. even under the advice of people and interventions, there's no path except for ruin. They have to end up there because they can't think straight. I've talked about this ideology where people, when you have a peak, let's say you make like $10 million, you turn a few hundred thousand dollars and it's $10 million, and then you have a drawdown and you're down to like $3 million, there's this mentality that people have. It's like, well, that $10 million, I need to make it back. That's mine. I deserve that. And that's what drives people. I got to make it back. That mentality is what drives people to ruin. And so in that instance with our friend Jacob, or then there's other people as well, like this one person recently, it's that thing that's in the back of their head where they're like, I need to get it all back. And that's where bad things happen, right? Where when I look at AST, for example, and this is again, any space company, we've had, I guess at the end of June, we had this ride back up. So some reprieve after May, but we were back in the 90s and then we just went straight back down. We went down to 52, and then all of a sudden we're back in the 72s and people were putting leverage on again. We had this bounce back and I was like, oh, okay. Well, this means we're going back to 100. And no, we actually got clobbered back down to 58 today. So yeah, I just want to make sure people are aware. And if you have issues, reach out to friends. Don't be shy about it because it's like— the analogy is— and I've done this myself too. It's like when you're in Vegas and you're— when I was really young and I first started going to Vegas, one of the worst lessons I learned was Never play blackjack by yourself because there's no regulator. There's no peers there to slow you down or you can get really caught up in it. And if you're down, you're like, okay, I'm going to bet bigger, or you just do irrational things. And I remember when I was young, it was like my first year, no, my second year working as an investment banking analyst. And I went with friends. We were in Vegas. I think I lost on that trip, I think I lost like $9,000, which is a lot of money, especially when you're that young. And that was primarily because I'd got to this point where everyone else was away and I was playing by myself, and that was the worst feeling ever. And I think the same analogy can be applied to investing, where if you you're doing it on your own, you're not interfacing with people that are keeping you honest, then you can get into these really tough situations. And so when people— hopefully you have friends who are good and will tell you like, hey, this is not— you shouldn't be using margin, or you're going to end up in a tough place. Hopefully you'll listen. But oftentimes, especially I mean, not to generalize, but there's a lot of guys who are investing. They probably have families and we joke like, oh, well, we may have kept losses from our partner. But yeah, you should to some extent make sure that your partner does have some understanding of what's going on because sometimes you do need If you don't have friends that can give you some balance and hold you back, you do need someone to regulate you, right? Because sometimes people can go crazy, right? Where it's like, oh, I'm down. I need to make it all back. And that's when really bad things happen. So I've been talking about that. Maybe I'll just pause there. But yeah, I just want to make sure that people are aware, especially in this environment where, yeah, it's very unclear. You can be right about the company you're invested in, but if the macro doesn't cooperate and you're on margin or you're fully loaded on options, yeah, you might get wiped out, which I don't want to see anybody see that happen to anyone. I'm going to check and see if there's any questions or comments. Let me see here. Let's see. Could there be any chance a single satellite could get loaded onto the Antonov for launch via ISRO, or do you think some other launch vehicles that might be able also to launch BBs within the next few months? No, we're not putting a single satellite to go launch on ISRO. We would know if that were the case, but yeah, I mean, there's plenty of Falcon 9s to go go launch on, especially with the manifest being cleared of Starlinks. And so I'm not certain, but if you pay a premium, you can get a dedicated launch now, or if you can, which the company has dedicated launches lined up, or if someone misses their deadline and a Falcon 9 frees up, then my guess is that there is a lower discounted cost to go launch on that, which I think the company is also pursuing. So as I mentioned before, it's not cheer, but hope for some of these guys to miss their deadlines because that would be good for us. Don't forget to talk about margin. Okay. I didn't. I talked about it. So let's see. Are the rumors about Falcon 9 being fully booked and AST has no room to launch this year or other than already scheduled to launch true? No, that's not true. So what we have is we have booked launches for this year, and then we also have options for standby. Right. However, I do believe that if you want to buy more dedicated launches, you can. But there's this balance, right? Because obviously, I mean, we could buy a bunch of dedicated launches, but if we don't have satellites ready, then what's the point? But I think the Antonov coming in with 7 to 8 rings should tell you what the company is thinking in terms of their game plan. So I think we are likely going to see quite a few launches towards the end of this year. Let's see. Do we have a sense for the capacity of the composite structure supplier from India? Hadn't done diligence in this aspect of the supply chain. Let's see. Air freight is 25 to 40 times more expensive, more if dedicated, so it would make sense. Let's see. If payload risk, less touches with air, AST wants just-in-time to minimize working capital, they pay for an OpEx capacity-constrained supplier. All good questions. So I think ideally, and the company's talked about this, they would rather want all the composite rings to be shipped by boat, but because of the iterations of the composite rings and then the need to bring more sooner, I think that's why we're seeing these things being flown in. Now, the thing that we don't know, we don't have Space Mob camped out on the West Coast at any of the ports to see if rings are coming off of ships. Maybe you could have some of the guys who monitor highway cameras, that maybe they'll see rings coming in via other means than the Antonovs. But my guess is in the future, we should start seeing more rings coming in via ocean freight versus air freight. But yeah, I do think the company Bringing in rings faster means that they're hoping to get production up and a backlog or an inventory of finished Bluebirds ready for what will be a much more active launch cadence towards the end of this year. Let's see. Might the company PR any of this soon? Where Scott— okay, so Scott was saying— Scott on the Q2 call said that they plan to talk about these awards publicly soon, the 3 new contract awards. And so yeah, that's a good point. I forgot about that. My guess is that yeah, they should talk about it soon, but to be fair, it probably doesn't make sense to talk about it right now, right? Because it's going to fall on deaf ears. I think it's probably best to wait until the market kind of stabilizes more where people will actually care. So yeah, let's see. Posting before Spaces in case you cover this, can you speak to the Citadel activity and Cook's comment about space MOMO trade not being fully completed yet? Yeah, this is something that I haven't been able to figure out, but Citadel has been a top trader in space stocks recently. And so it's been, Actually, let me take a look at what they did yesterday. It's not just top trader in space stocks. Pre-market, they actually trade quite a bit. So as we know, pre-market oftentimes will dictate sentiment in stocks. So just to give people an idea, let me just see here. Let's put in some of these dates. Oops, okay. On any given day, Citadel is the top trader in AST, in Rocket Lab, SpaceX. Let me just give you an idea. Over the last 7 days, Citadel has traded advertised volume. Now, this doesn't mean it's all their stuff, but it's what they advertise to the street. They did 4.5 million shares, whereas Morgan Stanley did 3. JP Morgan, $1.5 million, Merrill, $1.5 million, and Virtu, which is retail primarily, $1.2 million. So interestingly, over this period of time, Citadel has been an overwhelming amount of execution, and oftentimes you actually see retail pretty high up there, but retail has been pretty low. And so I think as Kuk mentioned, volumes have been just in general very anemic. Yesterday, we only traded 6.6 million shares and today it was like 9.4. So I guess the point there is that August and summer is not necessarily indicative of what real prices are because it's been such low volume. So we'll see when people come back from vacation in August and as school starts, obviously the East Coast, school starts post-Labor Day. So we'll see if the activity picks up. But yeah, I'm not sure if there's something sinister to Citadel trading the space sector so heavily, but it is weird because they were not— prior to the Situational Awareness blowup, they were not active trader in any SPAC stock except for maybe a few. I think they were somewhat active in Redwire, but you just never saw them. You never saw their abbreviation, which is CSIN. They just never showed up, not even in the top 20 or so. And then all of a sudden now they're the top trader in all these stocks. So not sure what that is, but I don't know. Maybe we'll find out. Let's see. Liquidity is improving in September, expecting momentum to be back on the table for a short period until midterm pressures. I'm not sure. That's a good question. Yeah, there should be more liquidity coming in in September. And so hopefully that's good for the sector. Let's see. All right. Here we have a Chinese written in Mandarin. Okay. This company is doomed, full of deception, utterly devoid of credibility, with extremely poor execution, terrible reputation. Everyone in the company is a liar. The stock price is about to crash. The stock price is going to zero. The company will soon go bankrupt and collapse. They're finished. Okay. So I think this person, Tim, is emotionally distraught. Now, oftentimes we've seen this as from people who are overleveraged and maybe have gotten in over their skis. Okay. I'm looking at this timeline. It's all doom about AST. So I'm assuming that Tim may have lost some money on AST, which I feel really bad for you, Tim. But for those people who've been following the company for 5, 6 years, yes, the market is subject— sorry, the company is subject to market volatility and that's kind of out of their hands. But Outside of that, the company has done for the most part an excellent job in execution and the company's prospects are— I've talked about this in the past. The company has never been in a better position. So we've got Deutsche Telekom and T-Mobile who are currently in talks with the company and we'll see when those agreements get finalized. There's the 4th MNO in the US, which After thinking about it a bit and talking with a few people, I think that 4th MNO is probably the joint venture itself. So not only will AST have direct partnership, definitive commercial agreements with AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile, it will also work through this JV, which my guess is that spectrum will get contributed, maybe it's grain, infrastructure will get contributed into the JV. And so yeah, it'll be interesting to see. Maybe that's something that AI can help with. What is the advantage and what structure would the JV have and why would the company have direct agreements with each of the M&Os, but also work through the JV? That would be an interesting one. But anyway, yeah. Sorry, Tim. I know it's tough, but I will say if you invested in any other high-beta names, unfortunately you probably would be in the same position. All right. Well, it's coming up on midnight and— Oh, all right. Kook has released the weekly, so I'm going to read through this. I guess I'm featured on the COVID But yeah, thanks everyone for joining. It's a rough environment. You're not alone. Everybody's had a pretty rough go of it. But yeah, I would just say as a word of advice, first, don't use margin. If you use it, use it sparingly and have very strict limits around what you do with it, but do not have it be— do not use margin as your primary deployment method. Don't be on 50%, 60% margin. And conversely, do not be all in on options because that increases the time pressure on you. And yeah, your stock may actually outperform the sector, but if the sector is down a lot, then because options are fixed in price, it won't matter. And so don't do that to yourself. And I think when it comes to mental health, there's a ton of trolls out there, and whether they happen to be guys who are short or they happen to be people who are invested in other names who are just trying to trigger folks because, I don't know, they find entertainment in that or I don't know, maybe it makes them feel better to put other people down, just mute or block these people. Muting is good because they don't even know that you aren't paying attention, and so they'll just continue to kind of waste time and energy talking to you, even though you have no idea what they're saying, which is funny. Or you can block them, right? And so actually, I was talking with Cook about it yesterday, where I guess he kind of got fed up with some people who obviously were, yeah, taking their frustrations out on him. And so he was like, you know what? I'm just going to block these people, which, you know what? That's good. For me, I'm doing this for fun. In my investing journey, I'm sharing ideas or talking about some of the things I'm invested in, and some work out, some don't. And that's kind of investing. If you're batting 55%, you're an absolute genius, and hopefully you've sized positions such that that 55% is good. But not every investment is going to go from point A to point B and it's going to be a smooth ride. There's going to be volatility. So if people can't handle that, and as they say, you can't borrow conviction, it has to be your own. Yeah, people get pretty ugly. For me, I'm totally fine with it because I'm used to it. I've been doing this, just hanging out here with everybody for the last 5 or 6 years. And I really don't care. I've got no agenda. I'm not selling something. I'm not whatever. So the thing is, yeah, my philosophy is keep life simple. And if something is not compatible with that, if it's contradictory to your happiness, just remove it. It's pretty simple, especially with a platform like this, you can just block people. And yeah, some people might be like, oh my God, this guy blocked me, what a wimp or whatever. It's like, no, it has nothing to do with that. It's just that I don't need to deal with people who are negative or trolling or whatever, trying to get a reaction. It's like, hey, I'd rather just remove this. And so sometimes there are people, now obviously, In AST, there are a ton of really obnoxious people, right? And they may not be obnoxious until the stock price is down and they're feeling negative and people have various ways to express that. But yeah, just don't be a dick. There's people who proactively go after other people who invest in other names like Rocket Lab. I mean, there's been obviously a lot of vitriol between the 2 investor bases. And one day, maybe I'll talk about the history of that because it goes back to a handful of individuals on the Rocket Lab side many, many years back in 2024. But it's not as if AST investors helped the situation because there's plenty of people who can't help themselves and they threw in. And so it just snowballed. And so even to this day, it's like people who know better, they just get involved in it. But for me, I don't care. I'm just here to enjoy company of others and hopefully make money on the way in this investing journey. But With that, I'll end it. Thanks everyone for joining. And yeah, take care of your mental health. This is a weekend. Hopefully you can go out and enjoy not looking at markets because guess what? Everything will be back on Monday. And so yeah, just make sure if you're having doubts, go back through and re-listen. The good thing is go back and listen to the Q2 earnings call, listen to it in detail. Right, and take some notes and just think about what's to come within the next few weeks and months. It's gonna be big. So I'll end it with that. Thanks everyone for joining, and I'll see all you guys on the Kook— on Kook Space on Sunday. Take care. 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. Bye! Listen. Mmm, waffles.