Kook's Weely - March 9 - Constellation Constipation Relief: AST SpaceMobile’s Billion Dollar Guidance

[00:00:06] Speaker A: This is the AST SpaceMobile Podcast.
[00:00:09] Speaker B: We just basically turn 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. Listen, the opportunity that we have is very, very, very large.
[00:00:27] Speaker C: Good evening, everyone. I guess everyone's learning a little bit about how stupid it was to not buy calls on oil right now. I mean, my God, like, talk about the definition of asymmetry with the benefit of hindsight, I guess. What's interesting is, as someone who knows the oil market very well, as well as shipping markets, historically, Oh, and actually now that I even say this, it's even more obvious. Historically, what you want to do is basically short oil and short the tankers whenever the US military gets involved. But usually it's because there's a fight between people that are not the US. So I guess like the real issue here is in the past it was Iraq sort of screwing with Kuwait and then the US shows up, boom, short oil. And you know, usually because that means the conflict will be quick. And so that's the sort of analog I was going off of, not kind of realizing that the difference in that analog is the US started this. And I guess the market was pretty calm for a while thinking it wouldn't really spiral out of control, but now people are having to shut in oil and things like that. I still personally believe that anyone, um, buying oil here that isn't doing so from a strategic point of view of like, my country needs oil, or Or I have a problem, is gonna deeply, deeply regret it. Feels a lot to me like people chasing silver, and you know the oil market ends up a little bit being self-correcting just because with with its price going up, it acts a lot like its own constraint on demand. But I'm just looking at this chart, and it's like oh God. So stupid. Like this was like easy. You could have made a bazillion dollars anyway. So for this reason, ASTS is going down right now. Although shockingly, it's only down three percent overnight. But the the markets are just getting vaporized, and I wouldn't be surprised if I wake up and tomorrow morning they're up just because this might just be Asians freaking out. But in any respect. The timing of all this is right in line with the Ides of March, which is something that as someone who is super superstitious, so again, more superstitious than the average person, and also a big believer in the echoes of the Roman Empire, which is, you know, something I think a lot of dudes in their middle ages start to believe. The Ides of March tends to be a little kind of a recurring spooky thing. And so right now this is the week before the Ides of March, and then sure enough, the markets are super spooky. Um, but you otherwise have some amazing seasonals for the market. And so what I had been doing, just for those playing at home, is I had been building up my, my ASTS trading position. I call it Torx. And so I'd been building up my Torx, and, uh, it felt pretty good on Thursday, for example, when this thing was really ripping, because I had anticipated quite a lot of good news. And so I felt like we were at a dam-breaking moment for the fundamentals of this company. And then I believe that we were going to get a launch rally that might be surprising to the upside, and we'll get into that in a second. But this week, what I marked, what I believe to be the absolute best earnings call the company has ever had, followed shortly thereafter by really its Debutante ball at Mobile World Congress, where it was just painting the tape with announcements. And I think that this is just the beginning of of what will happen. And so very excited about about what we saw. I feel really good my position. So really, I always just take this back to a first principles position: is imagining myself well, it's not actually an imagination. I am an owner of the company. And so evaluating my business based on the report that the management team gave me and then assessing how I feel about the business, given that I do have the ability to exit if I so choose. But zooming out before we get to the company's assessment, it's always really great to just get a big picture. And I've, know, sort of become more humble to the simple big pictures as I've gotten more experience. I used to be sort of like in the minutia and couldn't necessarily separate the forest for the trees. But the big money in my view is made by zooming out and catching the super stocks and catching the big movements. And so we have CEO of AT&T, John Stankey, at Mobile World Congress, and he called D2D satellite Quote, one of the great moments of innovation, saying the race is now on to run seamless hybrid networks customers don't have to think about. I again think that we are onto such a big idea that the true magnitude of what it means economically escapes even the most bullish of us. We have so long ago departed from talking about Dead spots to thinking about the future of the broader telecom network itself. And we see this message repeated over and over and over. AT&T for one, Nokia for another. We're seeing something evolve, which I'm sure people like Katzi and Tanner and Kevin maybe have a better grasp of than I do. And guys like No Privacy who have been totally on top of things like Cohere. In some of these next generation wavelengths, I've been sort of playing from the peanut gallery trying to keep up, and I generally understand what's going on. But I don't know that I've ever needed to believe some of these things. But there's just mounting evidence that there's something bigger afoot, and I'm very excited about it. And we're getting it confirmed not by the outside. Only, but also from the inside. And so ASTS earnings report to me really marked a Babe Ruth moment of a company calling its shot. And so what did they do? They generated revenue for one, and people will say, well, yeah, it's a lot of base stations and things like that. Yeah, sure, fine. But revenue is revenue. Um, they hit their guidance, you know, toward the top end of the range. I would imagine that they would have actually beat that had FM1, FM2 been more timely. They have that same billion dollars of minimum committed revenue, which appears to just be the start. And what's exciting to me is this building production capacity. And so you can just see that the number of satellites in assembly keeps going up at a pace suggestive that We're at or near this 6 birds per month production rate. And we learned something very interesting as well this week in the Barclays fireside, which I had actually meant to incorporate into the weekly, but forgot is we, like all things, there's always a reason why there's a delay for better words. And you can accept a reason or not. You know, the better man in me would say, who cares about the reason? A delay is a delay. Means slippage, usually with a company like ASTS where there's a delay, just get the hell out, blah, blah, blah. So that was true with BW3 way back when, because usually when there's a delay so early in the formation of a company, it usually means something else is afoot. Either the tech didn't work or they'll run out of money. You have companies like EOS, which I don't know too much about, but like that did the other day, sort of like a big delay type of. Earnings release thing, which maybe it means the company has a bit problem. Maybe it doesn't. Don't know. I haven't worked into it. But but with ASTS, sometimes a delay is just simply a new challenge they're solving that they're about to pull through, and then there will be a final challenge, a final boss, if you will, of of the delay monster. And what we learned is actually quite sensible in hindsight. It's that the certification of the stacking mechanism was in fact the thing that held up on. And so if you're the first company ever to launch a satellite like this, the biggest satellites ever, and now you're not only just launching the biggest commercial array ever launched, but 6 of them, maybe 8 at a time, the engineering that goes into just the stacking of the satellites in the fairing itself is something which I had never thought about, but evidently it's a very difficult thing to do given the weights and stresses involved and the fact that the fairing had to go from horizontal to vertical. One can only imagine that there's quite a few things involved with certifying this. And that appears to have been the thing that was taking a little bit longer, which is actually an interesting kind of great news story because this really means there's just one final little straw left in the great X-lax moment of constellation constipation relief. And so now that they said, and they have gotten this certified, we might finally be at a point where the dam is going to break and we can really start shipping at pace. So what else did we learn? So they are scaling for the commercial satellite operations. They're very exciting. They're the only company capable of 4 to 6G. We're going to hear 6G mentioned a lot at Mobile World Congress. They announced a whole slew of MNO deals. We'll get to that later. The big bang moment for me, never mind Golden Dome, things like that, you know, boring, just saving the free world as we see the missile defense, you know, missile systems of Iran. Um, you know, if that doesn't get you excited, The slamdown of saying, well, 2027, we're going to give you guidance of $1 billion of revenue. That got the market's attention. That's finally drawing a line in the sand. And I think the market correctly understood that this is a company that does not give guidance lightly. I think that is clear. People at this point know this management team that, you know, the bears will say this— what I'm about to say is a ridiculous comment, but the company is quite conservative in their guiding. And so sure, they've literally missed every single deadline that they've ever given, like almost to a sport, but they've guided on things that they know they can ultimately hit with the necessary slippage that comes with the business. And so for them to put out, um, okay, they hit their first revenue guidance, uh, for 2025. Then they put out revenue guidance of $200 million, uh, and for 2026, uh, pretty easy bridge for that. And then a billion-dollar guidance for 2027. I think the market correctly interpreted that as the low number that they intend on really smoking. And that starts to get people's attention because all of a sudden, if you have a company that's scaling in 2 years to a billion dollars of revenue, There's not very many things like that. And it starts to smell a lot like Starlink and Starlink is worth a lot. So I think that if the takeaway from anyone on that earnings call is that they threw out the B word, because with that comes a whole host of other underlying assumptions, particularly around the production of satellites. We also had some other good news. Legato, things like the regulatory approval, lots of great things. And so Tanner went through the 10-K and I did too, just to see what was up. And so this tweet that I have, it's called 10-K summary, is Tanner doing the key notes. Things that stood out to me is just the speed at which this company's growing its footprint. And so I'm updating my DD all the time. Now, all of a sudden, I'm, I'm changing the square footage we have in Midland by 100%. They doubled their capacity. When this company had a 200,000 square foot facility in Midland, that represented one of the largest satellite manufacturing facilities in the world.
[00:13:21] Speaker A: They doubled it.
[00:13:26] Speaker C: This is going to be one of the preeminent Global satellite tonnage capacity engines, period. And as we look about the strategic nature of satellites, which we're seeing right now, I mean, people on Twitter are going crazy because Iran was able to damage a THAAD system and another radar system. And these things cost— I was surprised. Um, it's like one, one of these radar systems was like $500 million, never mind how catastrophic it is if you blind the US military. The idea, and Katsy's out on this, the idea that you're going to be able to have really high-powered radar from space via ASTS SpaceMobile, that's a big deal. In fact, that would strike me as near the top of US defense priorities, and I would imagine the HEGSF would agree. And so our ability to create this much capacity to generate and build these additional shells for government use, Is to me something that's going to get attention in the Oval Office, just like when Lockheed agrees to increase capacity to build more interceptor missiles. This is really at the backbone of U.S. military defense doctrine. And I think it's all going to be related, but the company is scaling like crazy. And this is why Kevin Mack sold his position because he wants to see more metal in orbit. Well, the metal is on Earth and that metal on Earth will be in orbit and there will be a lot of metal in orbit. And so then let's check on the little slide I, I gave in that same tweet thread. This is me just going past the old earnings calls. It's just a sort of an inventory backlog number. And so it allows you just to see cumulative number of satellites shipped, which of course isn't just 2 right now that's going to ship, that's going to move up. Very quickly. And then the number of satellites in assembly. We don't get a monthly update, so I'll just carry over numbers until the last update. And I'm assuming that February, you know, is basically the same as March. And so you can see now that we have 22 satellites in assembly. That's a lot of inventory. And so as they keep adding more, pretty soon we're going to start to have those pop out the other end of the Model T factory, if you will. And those are going to be putting, getting up on rockets. So it's going to be really exciting to see them start to work against that 45 to 60 satellites by year end. And whether they hit that on the button or not, it doesn't really matter because what's starting to become very clear is that plus or minus 3 months around that, this company's going to be in a really great spot. Which brings us to the infamous Kevin Mack launchpad of worry. So everyone knows that stocks have to crawl a wall of worry. We have a launchpad of worry. And so Kevin, um, he's, you know, I respect him, but he really is like sometimes like talking to my wife. It's like, yeah, I know it's risky, but that's why I like it, because I'm a guy and I like danger. And so ASTS is danger. I mean, it's what keeps my blood pumping. And so yeah, the company needs more metal in orbit and literally every single goddamn person on earth is aware of that. And so like to say the obvious thing is a little bit nutty because that's literally the resolution to the upside that sets up for excess returns. And so my belief, and I'll Die on this hill, or at least I'll impoverish myself on this hill. Is that as the company relieves itself with its constellation constipation, which appears to have had a final gating factor around certification of the stacking scheme, I believe you're going to have a blow-off to the upside, which is going to coincide perfectly with the SpaceX IPO, which is coinciding right now with the entire world getting a fireworks display over the Middle East. Which is almost entirely dependent on incredible radar and missile defense systems. And these targeting systems where F-35s don't even see the target, they just get it painted from a satellite, press the button and release. It is just so obvious that these LEO satellite systems are really the weapon systems of the future. And I would imagine that the government demand is going to be infinite. That's what we own. And so I kind of find it humorous, like, of course ASTS is going to be down right now because the Russell's getting obliterated. So I get it. That's why it's also really nice to have a fully cash paid up position in the stock. So I can just, you know, I'm going to sleep in tomorrow, have a coffee, call N-Pen Man, tell him he sucks, you know, basically an average Monday. And you don't want to have stress in your life because I still believe that even next week it could just be paint the tape green, whether it's the whole market, Ides of March is over. Don't get stuck in the launchpad of worry because recognize that that's actually what is the consensus. And so the launch cadence is about to get real. Everyone is going to want us as a customer and local content is the weapon. So we've talked about this with the ISRO launch. As much as people were kind of whining and complaining, myself included, about the Indian launch and how it was delayed and blah, blah, blah. End of the day, that was a dope launch with like the ultimate phallic symbol rocket. And I got a model of it and it's amazing. And so now we learned that ASTS is— Has added another heavy launch vehicle. So is that the Mitsubishi launch? Is that the ULA vehicle? Is that the Ariane vehicle? We don't know. But what it really does mean is that there's yet another rocket I have to buy, which is very exciting news for some people in Kazakhstan who build these rockets for me. It's another $800 that they will get. But what it is also telling you, and this is what I find to be so interesting, it's just telling you that we have Deeper commercial relationships in another market. I highly doubt that there is going to be a foreign heavy launch vehicle that is not tied indirectly or directly to a deepening MNO or sovereign relationship with host nation of said rocket, and so the. Very obvious thing to point out is that with Satellite Connect Europe, the company formerly known as SACO, as we are in the catbird seat with that company, and as Europe wants us to feel European, using the Ariane launch vehicle is going to make us feel very European. For Japan, Which is of course a very proud country, as it should be. And I really can't wait to see them play some more in the World Baseball Classic. Shohei is pretty, pretty good player. Proud nation. Doesn't really make a whole lot of sense for Japan to have a sovereign LEO network. Makes a lot of sense for Japan to have very strong defense industry. They have some pretty cranky neighbors. To their, uh, Southwest. Wouldn't surprise me either, but I think my money's on the Ariane rocket, but we shall find out. But it's just more rockets. And I believe that anyone with ambitions to be a relevant launch provider is going to be trying to get ASTS as a cargo because we're the most exciting cargo. And then we also have New Glenn 3 coming up. And so the internet is arriving at a conclusion that this launch is going to happen around the 29th or the 30th of this month. So really just in 2 or 3 weeks, very exciting for that. With all this excitement, we had a flurry of sell-side upgrades. So I've linked out most of the ones I could find or that I saw on the internet. Everyone is just kind of corralling around the same thing. Basically saying we see the end of the launchpad of worry, and when it resolves itself, the thing is going higher, and boy, the future is bright, and we have a lot of business. The same overview that was repeated by Scott. So again, it's good to listen to the CEO of AT&T, John Stankey. It's also pretty good to listen to Scott, the president of AST SpaceMobile. He literally tells you what will happen. All of his compensation is effectively earned by stock price appreciation. He is there to create value. He's here for the stock to go to $1,000. While the timing can be off, he has been dead on with the ultimate result. Listen to him. That's what I do. I don't talk to him. But I listened to him. And then you have SpaceX, which is the fast follower. So they're out again. They were trying to create noise last week when they put all these releases. A lot of us concluded that ASTS was about to release a lot of news. Sure enough, ASTS painted the tape with a bazillion MNO deals. And now SpaceX is saying have upgraded satellites by 2027. We'll see, whatever, right? And so it just goes to show you that SpaceX is playing from behind. This isn't about tech. It is helpful to have the best tech. And I don't know if SpaceX can recreate it. No one's guess. But even if SpaceX does, that's not enough. They do not have the market access with the MNOs. And then they could try to disintermediate the MNOs. That's a different debate entirely, and one we'll get back to in a second. But first, let's just talk about the MOU comparisons. And so the SpaceX bros are in shambles, and Cool Killer did a nice comparison of just where we stood. This was from March 2nd. And so ASTS just has a lot more deals. And so sure, the SpaceX deals are definitive already.
[00:24:07] Speaker A: Great.
[00:24:07] Speaker C: And ours are MOUs, but we are showing that we can mine and harvest those MOUs. companies we signed up. And I again will maintain that our company should never actually have rushed to sign these DAs beyond what was absolutely needed. The price and the value of our service is going up as we get nearer to turning it on. Wait until they can see, wait until we can see the whites of their eyes and then you shoot. And that's really what's happening. So We got the first of what I believe will be many announcements this year. And so we got Telus, which was a DA, and it said Telus will be an equity shareholder. I'm not quite sure what that means. I don't know if there was a direct issuance. I don't know if they're just going to buy stock in the market.
[00:24:58] Speaker A: TBD.
[00:24:59] Speaker C: Maybe it was in some filing, but I didn't see it. But it also just confirms that now there's a Canadian monopoly. So just like in the U.S., ASTS has an over a 60% market share position by way of the MNOs. This is the rolling conquest of the world that is AST SpaceMobile. This is why when I initially wrote my DD, I titled it The Monopoly because it is a company that has 60% plus market share has monopoly power. They won't say it, nor should they, but that's what it is. And then we got deals with Ukraine, Taiwan, Axion, Orange, Orange. It keeps coming. And then there was a whole host of Vodafone deals with, uh, and then some others with Satellite Connect Europe with these betas and demonstrations and things like that. Just shows really what's happening. And oh, by the way, The experts were wrong again. And so Asymmetric Bets points out that our friend Free Speech, who I just wish this person would experiment with magic mushrooms or something, maybe find some happiness in their life. Just, they should go talk to Bryan Johnson and share some notes. But this person who's truly miserable just is intent on being wrong on everything, trying to scare people out of their stock position. And this person said that no tellus for AST. Well, boom, AST gets a tellus deal. So just a reminder that whenever you see the experts say something, that generally means that the exact opposite will happen. And that's what has happened, which is again, to what we talked about last week is the growing immunity from FUD. To this community, which is great. And so people are less less like less and less likely to get bullied out of their position now because I think there's growing awareness that a lot of these experts are idiots. And so people are less likely to sort of panic, but still worth mentioning. So we have Katzi out with this orange analysis, and I'm trying to remember what the real. Takeaway here. I think it was just simply an issue of oh right, Satco, which is really defining how you can have this MNO aggregation in Europe. He's seen that there's the potential for that to be happening in Africa too. And so just like in the in the U.S. where you have AT&T and Verizon, so there's no kind of JV per se name for that. But that's really kind of like Team USA, where 2 of the 3 main guys teamed up to have this super duper market share position. And then Satellite Connect Europe is, was initially just going to be Vodafone, but it looks like now it's going to sop up all these other, all these other MNOs, get us, ASC Space Mobile to some crazy market share position. And now the next question is, are we going to be able to do the same? In Europe, pretty exciting. And then there was another tweet that I had from SPAC Bobby, and he points out that Orange has 150 million customers in Europe and 160 million customers in Africa. So total customers, 310 million dollars. That's unbelievable reach. If you remember, the whole genius of this economic model is the super wholesale model. So where did satellite companies go bankrupt? They would spend a lot of money on their constellation, which is expensive, and then you built it, but no one could access it. To access it, people had to buy a handset. You had to go market. And acquire that customer, related churn. Then you had to serve customer, very expensive. You had just costs on all sides of you. The genius of ASTS is not opening up new individual accounts, but having channel partners with the MNOs. They've already acquired all of us who have cell phones. And so their ability to offer one touch to sell ASTS through that channel means it's frictionless. They're the ones that eat the customer acquisition costs, the CAC. That's why our business should scale so efficiently, which is the critical observation, at least I had when thinking as to why this investment was attractive. So we had some guys out saying that the ASTS pros were panicking. Honestly, I thought it was a joke and I was like, What? Oh, and this guy said the ASTS bros are in full panic mode. Just look at the replies. Um, because SpaceX announced that they had some MNOs. So they have a total of 580 million subs, which is great. SpaceX is the absolute dominant space company in the world, having 20% of the subs tied up or with a look at versus ASTS-based mobile should shock standard buys to the core. It's telling you that ASTS is outmaneuvering SpaceX and it's not random. So Anpanman found this amazing interview from the Deutsche Telekom CEO. And Deutsche says, we will absolutely work with other direct-to-cell service providers in Europe if they can compete with Starlink. Well, I wonder who that could be. And then the guy says, I'm not naive. I know that this, meaning partnering with SpaceX, is dancing with the tiger. And so they know it's a dangerous game. He also goes on to say that they will not enable SpaceX as a mobile MNO, an MVNO. MNO, because they're not idiots, but they already were dumb enough to partner with them in any respect. And I think that they probably deeply regret that. And that's why at the soonest opportunity, I believe that they're going to partner with ASTS Space Pueblo. And Mega Constellations on this same note, it's a really good telecom analyst. Everyone should follow this person. They say that the physical constraints of DDD do not eliminate strategic risk. There is a credible long-term scenario in which Starlink uses DDD as a bridgehead into mass market consumer service and position themselves as an MVNO. In such a scenario, the primary risk to MNOs is not technological displacement, but commercial disintermediation and loss of customer ownership. That is spot on. That is why all of the MNOs of the world would be absolutely out of their mind To use Starlink, you don't want Starlink knowing who your customers are. You know Elon will go market to them. You know that he will try to vertically integrate and cut you out. That's why, never mind the tech, that is why the MNOs are all racing to a space mobile. But if that's not enough, you can then see this: the deal SpaceX is getting—they're getting 80% revenue share versus our 50-50. So they're basically just. Arrogantly saying, well, if you want to work with us, we're basically getting all the economics anyway. And then we've heard from, I believe it was the CFO of Telstra in Australia. They came out and explained just how brutal the OpEx was too. And the other costs associated with working with SpaceX because it's a totally redundant separate system, not seamless. And so it was driving incredible amount of OpEx as well. So around all these considerations, it looks like for an MNO, dealing with SpaceX is just a bum economic proposition and stupid at that, because you're potentially empowering someone who's going to go steal your customer. STS is not going to steal your customer. And then the Europeans were out at Mobile World Congress saying SpaceX faces a wary European audience. At Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, reflecting uncertainty uncertainty about Musk in the U.S., people do not trust him, and that's where ASTS has been apolitical, setting up sovereign entities and showing itself to be a trusted partner. As a partner, we're seeing our partners hire rapidly to support. Our growth, and so the Spectator found a cool thing just showing that Nokia was on another hiring blitz for positions specifically to work with AST Space Mobile, and they're adding seven positions related to building out network infrastructure needed for the commercial launch. It's just another telltale that this is all happening, and it's happening this year. It's the type of. Due diligence scheme you would you would hope to see where the the contrary state of the world would be where AST arm waving, but you had no other confirming signals of growth. You know, you had nothing happening with the partners. You had the MNOs crickets. Then you'd go well hold on doesn't add up. Here you have a company that ASTS itself is firing all cylinders, hiring a ton of people, showing you their backlog of satellite inventory, telling you exactly what the gating factor has been towards shipment. Meanwhile, it's signing up MNOs like crazy. Its MNOs have all confirmed that they have hundreds of engineers working on this project. Then the other technical partners like Nokia are hiring like crazy to support the company. You have confirmation on every single side of what's happening here. And that's what you want. Another critical path item we have is the regulatory part. And so there was a, a filing done last month that ASTS frankly just got wrong. They used the wrong, uh, spectrum band for the TTNC, uh, TCNC, sorry. And so they used the 40 to 42 gigahertz limit, whatever. And they should have been using the 37.5 to 40 gigahertz limit. It was just a drafting error. They fixed it. SpaceX had caught it. Glad they're proofreading something. Um, and now that's been corrected in the docket. It shows that they did the right math and it shows that ASTS was already performing well enough to meet the stricter criteria, which is great. So no, no red flags here. And it was really just a, uh, drafting error, careless error, if you will. And that's been fixed. So that could be one of the last things we're waiting for to get the SES approval, which I do think would be a meaningful event. That's really sort of like the checkered flag for the AST, uh, AST 5000. We'll call that our, our race. That's also the name of ASIC chip. And then we also have more talk about the future of networks themselves. So kind of how we started this chat around the big idea, Just like we have AT&T talking about it, Nokia says that it will bring satellite connectivity to every single device. It will use 3GPP-based positioning from satellites to remove reliance on GPS and provide a more powerful signal. There will be seamless mobility allowed by fluent terrestrial network to non-terrestrial network transitioning. So in other words, 6G is going to have these non-terrestrial networks, which is ASTs.
[00:37:05] Speaker B: Integrated.
[00:37:07] Speaker C: We are the solution to a reliance on GPS. How this translates commercially, I do not know, but it is very exciting to know that we are literally the backbone of the future of the mobile network. It's not about dead spots. Let's talk a little bit about some of the TAM. I call it the TAM monster. And so we have some stuff about Sirius Satellite Radio. I've traded this stock way in the past. Um, it's been kind of a dud lately. I, I don't know, I haven't really focused on it, but it popped up on my screen again. And so the FCC is doing some things that might allow Sirius to monetize some of its spectrum. That maybe is a thesis around applicable to Sirius itself. Maybe Sirius is the next EchoStar. Um, Haven't fully explored it, but certainly caught my imagination when reading it. But it made me think about something else. Um, I've seen Sirius in the docket for long enough to know that Sirius and ASTS are talking to each other. It makes all the sense in the world to me that Sirius should get out of the satellite game and should focus on what their core competency is, which is acquiring customers and acquiring content. What happens on the backend strikes me as absolutely uninteresting for them and something that they should be able to move over to someone like ASTS. And then they could also focus on monetizing or leasing or utilizing their spectrum. I suspect that there's something there and we'll see. There's also the SDA opportunities piling up. And so Satellite Development Authority just keeps it coming. And we've got Tough 4R with some of these long, very emoji-heavy tweets. And I think these brands, at the end of the day, there's going to be so many of them, they're going to kind of blur together. And we as investors are probably going to lose track. Maybe there's some of these big marquee ones that will get, you know, like Golden Dome, for example. But my suspicion is there's going to be a lot of these that sort of are too nuanced for us to Really appreciate the difference, but then the aggregate dollar amount will keep going up. And then the, the other thing that I'm just a very strong believer in that Cassie was out talking about this week again was the case for space-based radar. And this, he goes into this math that I mentioned earlier of when just looking at how expensive these THAAD radar systems are for $400 million. Wow, how economic the LEO solutions are, especially considering how resilient a LEO solution is versus a big ground radar that you can pop with a missile. And so I think that this is going to be an enormous revenue opportunity once operationalized. And we know that the company is doing that. So this no longer, 3 years ago, people would have laughed at us about this. But now we, we have the company talking about it and we're seeing in the battlefield just how relevant this is. And so it is, you know, no surprise that FM1 and FM2 are particularly interesting satellites because they're, from what we can tell, demonstrating all of this. And now it seems like a lifetime ago where we were excited about orbital data centers. And NVIDIA is hiring an orbital data center systems architect. So apparently we're not alone. And that just goes to show you again why scale platform of orbital power could be a big idea. Very few companies have the ability to produce The tonnage ASTS can produce, and what comes out the factory gate at ASTS puts more power in orbit than anything. In a world that all of a sudden looking for the future of networks for 6G, for militaries that look future of radar systems and tactical communications, all of a sudden. The look back could go holy crap! No one else had seen this opportunity, and there was really one or two companies that built for scale to capture most of it. I think that's what we're, what we're going to be looking at. And you don't have to look to the heavens to see opportunity back on Earth. The copper TAM is still TAM for us, and so this relates to as yet service levels from satellites that are sufficiently high. The FCC will let the MNOs decommission the copper systems, which cost them a fortune related to mandatory service requirements. And so the AT&Ts of the world are desperate to deprecate these old systems, pull out the copper, save all the OpEx, and you'd replace that with some kit that allows those people to be serviced with ASTS-based mobile. And that's a very exciting opportunity. And it's the same thing. We used to call this the Scotiabank thesis, but Scotiabank is now haram because that guy is a trader. But the thesis formerly known as the Scotiabank thesis was that the CapEx savings for MNOs because decommission marginal terrestrial systems would create an enormous opportunity for AST SpaceMobile, the copper replacement. Thesis is really the same idea. You're not displacing the terrestrial towers. You're actually, which is a mobile service, you're actually displacing the fixed systems and replacing it with wireless, but served through space. And this is again, an expansion of the TAM. We also Like the universe ending with a whimper, had finally write to convey affirmative support for, quote, the above-referenced application. So for those who were not monitoring the docket, Inmarsat are a bunch of sleazy shitheads, and they tried to do some sneaky stuff in the bankruptcy docket and literally got lit on fire by the judge. For some outrageous conduct, and their counsel Quinn Emanuel put on a complete clown show, which is really unbecoming considering that's the best litigation firm in the U.S. But they were making this big hoopla about requirements to quote unquote coordinate, kind of fill in the blank, and it was very clear that the coordination obligation is around spectrum, not literally ASTS. Letting Inmarsat opine on the physical satellites themselves, and it looked like they were just trying. I don't know what they were trying to do, but it was absolutely obnoxious. And the judge felt the same way, and all at court felt the same way. So Inmarsat got just like Batman slapped back into reality and forced to uphold the bargain that they made as part of the Legato settlement. And so hopefully these guys learned a very valuable lesson. about gentlemanly conduct. But in any respect, the Legado case moves forward, and that's exciting because Legado should be very accretive to the value of this company. So I sit here as an owner of this company on March 8th, 2026, with a ripping war in the Middle East, oil prices being unhinged, market sentiment plummeting by the day and whatever. But I feel very good about the fundamentals of this company and do not believe that this current malaise in the overall market is likely to last for very long. And then ultimately, when the fog of war settles, people will come to realize that we are coming up on a really a seminal 2-month period for ASTS-based Hubble, marked first and foremost by the New Glenn launch, which appears to be March 30th. But then on any given day, we could expect the first batch shipments now that the stacking has been certified. And it appears that we could also be having A positive release from the FCC on our regulatory update, and then keep in mind the pace at which things like Golden Dome are moving forward must be absolutely astonishing right now. I cannot imagine that the U.S. military is slow walking this right now. So I'm very optimistic of what's going to be happening over the next couple weeks. I'm frankly optimistic as. What's going to happen this week? It's so just if you're newer to investing, just realize that you always want to be out. Just period looking out, but really you want to look out six months from where you are today. In six months from today, people will have forgotten the Iran war that much, or will no longer will want to have forgotten it, but it will no longer be relevant. We'll be worried about something else. Just think about how 2 months ago we were focused on Venezuela and now who the hell talks about Venezuela? And so the pace at which things happen is so astonishing that you need to just make sure you contextualize that the world will probably not end. It probably would've ended if it were going to end last week and it did not. And so This too shall pass. And underlying that, you have companies of which ASTS is one of them that are doing some incredible things. And ultimately that's what will probably result in people being successful investors or not, is focusing on the companies and just kind of letting loose of some of these macro headwinds, which will dissipate pretty quickly in my view. So that's what I have. For everyone, I'm looking forward to this week. I'm still digesting last week. I need to listen to the earnings call again because I still just think that these guys came out absolutely swinging. And so last week, I remember at the end, I kind of just gave my ad-lib guess of what I thought was going to happen on their earnings call and Mobile World Congress. And I would think I was 100% accurate. I really thought that this was the year and it was all going to happen. And this was the earnings call. Those two things were true. And so for them to come out swinging like they did, and now that we have that additional information that the certification was the critical path item, I think that the launchpad of worry is about to really inflect. And, you know, Kevin Mack as my proxy, you had sort of the capitulation. Delays. And I think so. I also have a, uh, fully paid-up position. So always make sure you're, you know, capitalizing yourself responsibly too, because that's the thing that generally gets people in the most trouble. So I'll talk to everyone else, and I just was reading in You know, I got some messages that my spaces was a little choppy, so I don't. I don't. Maybe my internet's weak, but I wasn't talking to myself for an hour. Now that I'm just checking the comments, have a great night.
[00:49:09] Speaker A: Bye. Thanks for listening to the AST Space Mover 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. latest news about AST SpaceMobile, make sure to subscribe. Thanks again, and I'll see you next time.
[00:49:29] Speaker B: 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 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 NMOs.
[00:50:10] Speaker A: Listen.
[00:50:14] Speaker C: Mmm, waffles.