Kook's Weekly - December 14

[00:00:06] Speaker A: This is the AST SpaceMobile Podcast.
[00:00:09] Speaker B: It will just basically come to your phone and be seamless regardless of where you are. We don't want the user even to know that it's connected by satellite. Listen, the opportunity that we have is very, very, very large.
[00:00:28] Speaker C: Okay, let me just give it a sec and also just check the chat and see if people tell me it's working. I don't know, the last one all of a sudden just showed everyone getting kicked off. So Elon didn't realize I was actually about to compliment him, which is ironic, um, before he shut me down. while proclaiming the importance of freedom of speech. And so it looks like people are saying it's all good. Okay, great. So let's start again. The thing we started with is really just this high-level aspect, which I think is really important. One thing I always ask my team when we're looking at investments is to zoom out and ask, is this a strategic asset? And so really to me, the definition of a strategic asset is one that someone else needs to buy to either pursue an important new business or be relevant versus something that's just kind of a cash flow-based investment or a point solution where no one necessarily really cares. And I've said this many times, but I think what happened, the big surprise for the Mag 7 is that you had some billionaire hobbyists by appearance build these space companies that masqueraded sort of as You know, build a superyacht, build a space company, nothing to see here. And then you wake up and you have these globally important businesses all of a sudden. And, you know, 2 weeks ago when we saw Sam Altman say or revealed that he was considering buying a space business, I think that was a wake-up call for a lot of people where they had this kind of, oh shit moment of, is this strategic? And this was always my belief, both on SpaceX too, is that there was more to me than meets the eye to these space businesses. And Bezos himself, when he had that interview, now at this point it was a couple months back, you know, very, he's a very calm guy. He doesn't have to prove anything to anyone and he's not raising money. He funded it all himself and he, you know, very clearly said, I think this is a, you know, $1 or $2 trillion opportunity. And a lot of people in the audience, including me, would probably think, well, how and why? You know, a lot of people look at launch and think it's maybe a small market. That's certainly what I thought. And I don't know that many market participants really got their head around the telecom opportunity until maybe recently with Starlink. And then now we're really quickly learning about The opportunity with space-based data centers and other things. And actually, I was just, as I was out Christmas caroling, one of the other dads works at NVIDIA and I was asking him, I mean, what do you think? And he was explaining to me, he's like, well, I don't know. It's a lot of power you need. And he was explaining to me these racks. He had just been with a, in a 1 megawatt rack and just was telling me how crazy they were with all the piping. And he's like, most of the weight is just coolant. in these, it's just a big water cooling facility with some chips inside. And so we were talking about this a little bit. He didn't have a, he didn't have a real strong point of view on this, but I did say, and he knows ASTS because of course that's what I talk about around the campfire. And he said, when I told him that they already had the ability to do 120 kilowatts of power, his eyeballs kind of, he's like, wow, that's a lot. Um, it's less than a megawatt though. No, there's a lot of questions we have to answer when it comes to Space-based data centers, but answer those questions we will. And so then also kind of stepping back about this other thing that Peter Limart retweeted from Vodafone was also very telling, where on the history wall of Vodafone, ASTS appears three times. And so we're we're strategic assets. So getting to where the rubber meets the road, I know a lot of us saw this tweet from. The company that came out just an hour or two ago with a, frankly, a beautiful picture of FM-1. Yeah, FM-1 in the fairing, ready to launch. They've handed it over to the launch provider, which is really a way to say, hey guys, we've done our part. If there's any type of delay, that's really on the launch provider at this point for reasons that are outside of our control. And Should be, uh, pretty soon. So maybe in the next week or two we get that launch. And what I'm particularly excited about is actually what might happen in between now and FM1 launch. I, uh, personally believe that there's a chance that FM2 gets shipped. I think that that's going on New Glenn 3. Could be wrong, but that's just what I think. And then I think there's a very real possibility that, uh, Bluebird 8 and 10, which is really kind of like a 3-shot, and then 11 and 13, which is another 3-shot. Those might get shipped, uh, very shortly as well. Now, I don't know that. I'm not trying to get people all excited, but I'm, I'm personally very cognizant that the risk to the upside on those things is near and present. And so for, for me, the, you know, you might, well, how cuck, what does that mean? Well, that's where I'm pretty cognizant on things like, do I want to sell covered calls next week? You know, what do I want to do? And I did buy some ASTX, which I use this very, very much as a trading vehicle, very small size compared to my core position. When I say, when I mean small, I mean 0.1%. So we're talking like really on the edges. It's really just so I can feel my heartbeat. with excitement with some of these little things, but economically has zero influence on my actual position whatsoever, just so that people context that. But that's kind of how I think is that this could happen this week. It's a good week for it to happen. And I also think that Golden Gnome could get announced. And so in the 2026 NDAA, which is the appropriations bill to fund the military that got passed by the House, And it has to go to the Senate and then Trump will sign it. And I think that there's going to be a real push to have that done before Christmas. My, my belief, again, could be wrong, is that that is what unlocks some of these big golden dome contracts. And I think that ASTS is the recipient of one of these big golden dome contracts, but we'll talk about that next. Another thing that caught my attention this week, which is neat, is This post by ASTS Investors, which is a Twitter account, which if you could believe it, they tweet about ASTS despite their handle being ASTS Investors. And they highlighted that a new job opening had just come online and that was for someone to help scale the manufacturing process for the composite satellite buses. So for those that are not as deep in the weeds, The FM1, FM2 use a metallic structure for the spacecraft, and it weighs more. And then Bluebird 8, 8 Plus, you're going to use composites. And to our knowledge, the composites have been the critical path item, which is to say that Progress could not move forward until those composites were received. We tracked and saw composites being dropped off with Antonov And we believe that they are now receiving a continuous stream of these from their vendors, which is good. We won't say why we know that, um, but we think we do. And so then seeing the company hire for the capability to bring this in-house is important because this is a critical path item. We want to have as much as we can vertically integrated so we control our own destiny. And here we see a job opening, which tells you, uh, just that. The company is not the only one keeping us updated. We also had AT&T directly this week say, hey, Space Mom, check it. And then directed us to FirstNet at a very specific time to share a testing update with us. And then sure enough, FirstNet punctually produced some cool videos showing a bunch of first responders Testing out the equipment, showing that it worked. Da da da da da. Very exciting stuff. And what's great, and people might not appreciate this, but it's just a very important point to make, is that the company is always very deliberate when they have real technical details to share. They have those releases done with their partners to add that credibility and. And very, you know, verified results. So going to the short pumpers, uh, like I mentioned earlier, there are Christmas carolers of motivation. Uh, they've been lately saying, hey, this company looks a lot like Nikola, you know, how do you trust these results? Blah, blah, blah. Well, the point is like Nikola, I don't want to get too sidetracked on Nikola, but like you had this FOMO where some idiots at GM were just kind of like scared of missing out and then didn't, didn't do any of their work. Versus by contrast, AST SpaceMobile has been working with their partners for 5+ years. And along the way have had progress press released by those partners and multiple partners. It's not just some fly-by-night company. It's AT&T, Verizon, Rakuten, Vodafone, FirstNet, which is a separate legal entity, but is controlled by AT&T. And they're all showing this work and we're having this feedback. From the first responders, which is great. So people would note that these tests, you know, do show it working outside. Well, guess where first responders are generally working?
[00:10:11] Speaker A: Outside.
[00:10:11] Speaker C: It's a natural, natural place for them to try technology. Um, and also Block 1 satellites are not as powerful as the next generation satellites that are coming. It's just a function of size matters and FM1 is going to be much, much bigger than the other satellites, which with a phased array means that the beamforming is much more advanced and sophisticated. And so with low-band spectrum, you will get indoor coverage, at least through one wall. But in any respect, getting broadband service from a satellite is itself a very good thing. So then FirstNet is something we've talked about for quite a while and it's kind of become the joke of FirstNet soon. But what's important about it is the validation of the company for one, two, frankly fulfilling the mission of the company. And so this will save lives. That's great. If you're starting a company and you have a great economic case, well, that's what you're supposed to do. But to the extent you're going to save a bunch of lives is certainly something that should make people Feel good. I've just remembered this is a good time for me to put my Jets hat on. So let me just put my Jets hat on, fulfill the prophecy. You're welcome, world. And just visualize me right now sitting behind a microphone looking at my weekly as I have it written in Microsoft OneNote wearing a Jets hat. That's the visual I want to give Cory as he slips into bed tonight. But the important thing with FirstNet is it should be a big contract. You have 7 million or so subs that are going to be paying premium rates. Uh, it's going to unlock a ton of spectrum for one. So the way this is working is this is going to utilize FirstNet spectrum, but when it's not being used, then AT&T has the ability to use that spectrum for commercial uses. So it's actually quite interesting. And Katzy is the person that brought this to all of our attention. And now let's do, let's do some math with Endless Capital, who is, uh, Definitely not known for being quiet and calm, and that's why we love him. And so his math, 7.5 million devices, ARPU of $10, which is low, although he might be doing net, said $900 million of annual revenue. And so then when you put a margin on that and then put a 30x multiple on it, that's $20 billion of value. and that's $50 per share. And I think that's about right. That's kind of the math I think is going to be applicable for FirstNet. That's the math I think is going to be applicable to Golden Dome. And so I think these things, because they're going to be such extremely high multiple lines of business because it's government and very stable, I think these things are going to drive $50 of value per share at a clip. It adds up Real fast. Now let's check in with Kevin Chen on, on his math. And so we've actually had people disclose these numbers. And so June 26th, we have Mohammed Beg of FirstNet AT&T. There's a video out by him and he talks about it. It's called the ASTS Initiative. And the current services are between $20 and $100 per month. And they're targeting a price of about $20 per month for AST. So these ARPUs are pretty well triangulated, and then it's about the uptake. And I truly believe that FirstNet users are going to have a very high level of uptake of this service, which is great and drive demand. And it's going to validate it even more so. And again, it's a big spectrum unlock. In the world of spectrum unlocks, we also had the Legato FCC application file. So we've been waiting for this and then we started to get visibility that this was really gated by our SES filing, making sure that the comment period was closed before we then filed another FCC application. And it's pretty uneventful, honestly. I read all the filings and I don't know that I saw like, frankly, that much to report on. It's a, it's an amendment to Legato's current license. They're saying that, you know, they're going to deploy the Ligata spectrum on ASTS spacecraft and please approve it.
[00:14:40] Speaker B: Thank you.
[00:14:41] Speaker C: And so hopefully it will be pretty straightforward. And I have the link to the SEC filings if anyone wants to read that. It does give us a little bit more insight in terms of how the constellation will look. And so the next tweet is Katzy breaking it down. And so we've got, uh, 96 satellites that will be this mid-band constellation. It's going to be weaved right in with our low-band constellation. This starts to give us beamforming capability to have incredible coverage. And so in the DD doc, which I almost actually am complete updating, but there are these, uh, slides, really they're just Katzy tweets, that show just the difference of what happens when you project low-band beams and then mid-band beams in terms of coverage, amplifying data rates and having a very robust service. So it all works kind of as a symphony of radio frequency being put on the ground and the Ligado spectrum is going to be very important. It seems like a lifetime ago. So again, I think a lot of people share this, but what we What we experience on a week sometimes can feel like a lifetime, and it really does feel like a lifetime ago that we had the UBS fireside chat. And Scott gave us a lot of information. For one, just when thinking about, again, the strategic nature of the business, we have Scott saying there's not an operator around the world that doesn't want to meet with us. And that I believe, but it just goes to show you who's driving the bus here. DAs are a function of what ASTS wants to sign, and they've signed some big ones, but there's going to be a lot more coming. Right now, obviously, this company has some different priorities. Getting these satellites up in the air is the necessary condition for DAs to mean anything. And so they're working on that, which I'm sure is just making their MNO partners that are in wait all more anxious to make sure that their phone call gets picked up first. And if you're wondering why, I would just ask you to go back to a weekly from 2 weeks ago, maybe where there's that ViaSat market study, which is really interesting. Notwithstanding the Mobile X CEO responding to me on Twitter saying, oh, market studies can be wrong. Thanks, douchebag. No shit. But when your competitor puts out a market study that directly shows why they might have rendered themselves obsolete through catastrophic misinvestment in technology and fumbling the ball with their very own spectrum going to their competitor, you might want to listen to their market study, which shows that the market is going to be way the hell bigger than they had ever anticipated. And that should be a wake-up call. And so these market studies, while they're not going to be accurate to the, to the T, they're directionally telling you lots of market sentiment. And so the ViaSat study Was an interview. I think it was 12,000 people, and it's you know getting a good cross-section of people around the world in terms of what they care about. And the the thing that MNOs are going to really see is never mind the ARPU bump; it's the reduction in churn and the ability to grab subscribers from other MNOs because consumers value this. The perception of how important satellite coverage is. Is far greater than the actual need state. Need state being high anyway, the perception of the need state is very, very high, which is why consumers want it so badly. I'm the type of person that sort of lives my life to solve for the edge case. And so I'm thinking about the scenario when I really need to make a phone call. And that's how I believe a lot of other people think too. So interestingly, Scott also says very specifically, we're putting more power into orbit than anyone else. Well, and that's really going to the AI data center use case. And it's also going to military use cases. And just think, why is Scott being so specific with that? And is it because, you know, some random cartoon Twitter accounts started, you know, berating them about this and we forced the company's hand? The answer is yes. We forced their hand, like the market forces the Fed. Space Mom is undefeated. Um, and it's probably because something happened. Scott's not a dope. He's certainly not listening to me when I say jump. He's definitely not saying how high. He's saying delete your account, kook. But there's something going on of why he brought that to everyone's attention. He also confirmed that there's 13 launches scheduled for 2026. That's cool. And then this is, I mean, if you hear one thing from me tonight, it's he specifically talks about other things ASTS can do. He specifically says and mentions its radar capabilities is what bought— brought the company into the Golden Dome discussion, specifically saying they are involved in Golden Dome and why they're involved in Golden Dome. And then he goes on to talk about how they have a separate Micron facility they're spinning up. For government programs, huh?
[00:19:54] Speaker A: Interesting.
[00:19:54] Speaker C: And then he says the government wants government capabilities that ride on commercial platforms. Then he talks about how each program of record is $100 million per year, and they're currently working on ten. Then he talks about how the production is almost up to six satellites per month, and that they'll disclose that when it's done because he knows it's a big deal. Talks about the 90% margins. This is an issue I don't. people getting hung up on because it's really a function of net versus gross revenue reporting. I have a slide on this at the new DD doc and I'll just share that when it comes out. But the simple math is ASTS is going to report net revenues. And so if I pay $20 a month to AT&T, you know, that's the gross revenue of the company. ASTS is only going to report the $10 of their revenue share. And so if they reported the full $20 as gross and then had the profit share coming out, Their EBITDA margins would be 50%, or más o menos, not 90%. When you report net revenue, which is reasonable way to do it, you're going to report much lower revenue, but a much higher EBITDA percentage and the same EBITDA in both scenarios. But that's why the 90% margins are accurate. It's because that revenue share represents their CAC, their customer acquisition cost. It's, you know, in a way you would, you could argue all day about this, but it's important just to understand what's economically happening. It's a genius model to effectively push your CAC all to AT&T, who's going to be able to acquire customers far more efficiently than you, blah, blah, blah. So this UBS call was great. Let me just go through some of the links. There's 5 links I posted related to this. So There's the replay. I listened to this twice. I think most people listened to this multiple times. And then let's just check in with some other notes with this. So yeah, ASTS Investors. Again, this account for some reason continues to post about ASTS despite their handle's name, and just repeated what I just said about the government use cases. Let's check in with Redrum, which it's unbelievable to me that I only realized that his name was Murder spelled backward recently. That's why you shouldn't listen to me. I'm not a very high-Q individual. He did also post the whole thing on his Spotify Empire. And then Kevin Shen, of course, comes out with like 15 pages of notes because that's why we have KevBot. And so let's just quickly scan what he said. So they have the flexibility to go to multiple launch providers. They're hitting the 6 per month cadence. There's lots of DAs. More power in orbit than anyone else. This is the Golden Dome part again. Their large array allows them to do radar to support many strategic capabilities for the U.S., which has brought them into the Golden Dome conversation. There's dual-use capabilities, which is exciting. What else we got? Basically, not a whole lot more to report on there, but you know, nice nice to hear this stuff repeated. And then what I've really glommed onto, and I have some more research slides that I've put together to this point, it's around just how big the market could be. And so Scott's been really clear, said we're building this company because we believe there's tens of billions of dollars of revenue capability. And when you sit down on these panels, The other company, you say, well, we don't know about the TAM. And, you know, it's fine. You know, they, from a legacy perspective with their narrowband solutions, they have been TAM limited because they have very high friction services. And so there's, you know, there's a change in the world in terms of demand for data. There's also a change in how this is being delivered. So low friction model versus a high friction model. And ASTS took a bet, full ball of wax saying, we think it's a big market. So we're building really, really big satellites, super expensive constellation, you know, $3 billion. And we believe there's a big market. So once we're up, we're going to put that to a test. And if it is big, we're actually going to be able to realize that much money. And that's an important comment to really reflect on, frankly. You want to, when you find a company like this, you want to understand how the revenue model works. So how it scales. You know, do you have to push a rock up a mountain or, you know, once you build a stadium, does, you know, a crowd of 70,000 people just show up? And it's important because there are a lot of people looking at the current revenue and saying, well, I mean, this space mob, these clowns, they think this company's going to do $4 billion of revenue, you know, in 2027. They did $14 million in Q4. Look at these knuckleheads. How stupid can you be? And I'm just kind of like, well, why can't people be nice is really what I'm thinking. Like, why would you go to like hurling insults as opposed to try to understand someone's perspective? But it's pretty obvious when you're building a fixed cost infrastructure, the revenue is not ratable. You know, before Union Pacific had a lot of revenue, you had to build the train track. Once you have the train track, then you can move the cargo. And so right now we're building the train track and what's great is then you can move all of the cargoes all at once on like a train, which means that the revenue ramp should be, we'll find out, but it should be dramatic. And so when I, when I hear that tens of billions of dollars of revenue from Scott, that's not a random number. I know Scott well enough. He doesn't, he's not a random guy. And so that's when I did some math to try to back into that. And you can do that various ways. You know, there are obvious ways. You look at the number of covered subscribers on the MNOs, you assume attach rate, you assume an ARPU, then you realize there's IoT. Some people have multiple devices. I have, you know, look at my household, we have 3, 5 AT&T plans. Is that all? Soon to be 7 once my kids get phones. And then my cars are connected. I have multiple cars, blah, blah, blah. You know, like each family's going to have more of these connected devices than I think they probably even realize. And so there's a multiplier effect. Then there's things like Golden Dome and FirstNet, which can each be a billion dollars. Then there's Satco. Then there's the, you know, the great, you know, developing world where God knows what. But interestingly enough, that ViaSat report shows that those people actually have the highest demand and the highest propensity to pay as a percent of their current ARPU. So it's a lower ARPU, but they're willing to pay a lot to get this service. And then you can kind of back into, you know, is Scott right? If you get to those types of numbers, you can really start to quickly justify a market cap of hundreds of billions of dollars. And the other way to do the math is just look at the data production rate of the company. And so the company can, you know, build lots of satellites. They can build multiple shells. It's not limited to 243. That's what the current application is. And then you can start to actually think about how much data they're going to produce. Assume that it'll get sold one way or another. And that's another way to value it. That's how I tried to value Ligado Spectrum is calculate the spectrum reuse, the value of the data they can put down and figure out how much revenue that should generate. Triangulate that with how much revenue MNOs are generating off their spectrum portfolios. The numbers actually match. It's kind of cool. And it gives me confidence that we're speaking the same language, Scott and I. We both think there's a big opportunity. And then just take a look, you know, Google's introducing the first AI glasses. You know, I, do I see myself wearing AI glasses? No. Ask myself, do I see myself inducing glioblastoma? No, I don't. But who knows? I was a late adopter of AirPods for the same reason. I didn't want to give myself brain cancer for fun. But, you know, if this stuff takes off, that's just one more device that needs connectivity and I think AI at the edge is, is going to be a thing. More connectivity equals more use for satellites, more people paying a couple bucks a month, and it adds up real fast. And then what I think is so fascinating is when our competitors actually tell us things about our company we didn't know. And so in the FCC filings related to the SES application for AFT, we have the RWA, which is the Rural Network Association. Complain and say, don't, you know, don't approve ASTS because they will kill us. Well, well, that, that's not a reason to not approve the service. You know, you got to make an argument that they're going to interfere with your towers, et cetera. And they said that the problem is with ASTS, AT&T and Verizon will not need to utilize expensive third-party systems, which they pay handsomely. So unbeknownst to me, when I'm in the US, I was not aware that I was not always on an AT&T system. Never really thought about it. And so if I'm driving through, you know, wherever, I might be hitting some local rural association tower. The RWAs is an association of local providers. So it's not literally like I'm hitting a rural wireless association tower, but those people that have Agreements back and forth. And AT&T is spending between $100 and $200 million a year on roaming fees when I'm driving, you know, to some random place using a, a third-party tower. Those will go away because AT&T will just service me with ASTS. The rural telecom providers will still have to rely on AT&T for roaming unless they strike a deal with ASTS. But this is the type of TAM discovery that I didn't know about. Initially, we started, you know, dead spots. That was the math. It's like, well, how many dead spots are there? What is existing wireless coverage? These things. And then we started to realize that, well, the MNOs are going to pay capacity payments for redundancy of their network, for surge capacity, for FirstNet. And then it's, you know, thinking, oh, wow, they're talking about copper replacement. They're going to decommission on Economic Towers. And now we found out, you know, it's like pulling a $100 million bill from your couch. Now it's like, oh, no one told us that they're paying these crazy roaming fees that will go away with ASTS. This is where the TAM just keeps on going wild and goes back to the first thing we talked about. What happens when you stumble upon a strategic asset? And that's what Amp Man and I talk about a lot is, you know, this week we, Okay. Got really excited about Golden Dome. We think we have got this. I'm not a paid pumper despite the accusations. I actually don't know the paid pumping business. I don't know if I'm missing out on some great career opportunity, but it doesn't strike me that that's a good way to make money. Um, so we just kind of self-pump each other and we're talking this week and we're just kind of telling each other, can you believe we backed into this? You know, when we made this investment 5 years ago, we had no idea how this market was going to evolve. And we just honestly cannot believe our luck that it starts to look like the world is going to need space-based AI data centers. And this is the company uniquely situated to win. And then we think that this company is going to power a golden dome. That's really cool. We didn't have that in our bingo list 5 years ago. That's what happens when you have a strategic asset. They grow in importance. They're a platform. They create opportunities for themselves. It's a really good way to live your life is to own a strategic platform and then just chill out. And so then the other cool thing is just how all these other MNOs have a really strong incentive to use us. We are going to be a common layer Across all the MNOs. It now seemingly eliminates cross-MNO roaming, and we ourselves become the global roaming network. And so it's a big deal. And the company was always built to be a carrier-neutral solution. And so we're not doing what SpaceX is doing, which is directly threatening The existing balance of the MNOs. Elon could take the view, and I don't know if I'd take the other side of him, that he could in fact create a very successful MNO. Not going to doubt that for a second. That's an expensive proposition though. And ASTS is a bet that the incumbents, you know, sort of the empire will strike back. And sometimes the empire does strike back. You know, remind me all these fintechs in 2020 that took a dent out of JP Morgan? Basically not. JP Morgan's doing just fine. And so sometimes, you know, the evil empire can hang around for quite some time and ASTS is enabling, you know, I don't want to call AT&T the evil empire because they gave me some free swag, so they bought me off for life. But I don't think that SpaceX is going to find it very easy to go scale an MNO. But in so even talking about that, there's certainly alienating those MNOs from wanting to work with them. So now let's get to Golden Dome. And so Golden Dome seems to be happening faster than the market is expecting. And so General Gutline said that Feinberg, who's the Assistant Secretary of Defense, founder of Cerberus. Is, uh, quote, working really, really hard to scale out the industrial base to expand the magazine depth of our weapons. And that the Golden Dome office has, quote, injected our requirements into that process. And so they're, they're moving on this. And I still think that there was a hope to get a lot of this out before Christmas. And that, I believe, is evolved with this 2026 NDAA, the Defense Authorization Spending Bill, which did pass the House and now has to go to the Senate and then the president. So exciting stuff right there. The military opportunities keep heating up. So there's a tweet from Katzi and he found out that a bill just dropped where this thing called T3TL is back on the menu. And it's actually, I don't even know what that is, but it's something related to defense that relates to us. And then, you know, we kind of pit it though, and this is where it gets actually pretty interesting about space-based AI. There's a lot of people fighting each other on the internet over this, of course, because that's what Twitter is all about, is to say something and then have a swarm of people attack you immediately. And so the Wall Street Journal helped put some fuel on this fire by having an article about Bezos and Musk, Race to bring data centers to space. So again, it's like I was telling my wife, it's like, well, you know, space-based data centers—it's really just like me, Anpanman, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, and Sundar and Eric Schmidt talking about this. So just a bunch of knuckleheads that don't know what they're doing. You take a step back; it's like literally the most important people on planet Earth. X. myself and Ant-Man are talking about this. And yet all the people who have done nothing with their lives of any material substance in terms of progressing the advancement of humans are all naysayers. And so it's like, I don't know, I might like listen to the guy that figured out how to sell books on the internet about his views on space-based data centers. And, you know, he would probably have better information than I. And so I've been digging into this and it's pretty interesting. I don't, I can't say that I, you know, Again, who's the Cook Report? Am I going to be the person breaking through with some mathematical proof that shows this is going to work? No, I'm not. I'm going to be collecting a lot of notes from other people and try to put it together. But what I would say is that, is this going to replace, you know, a 100-megawatt data center overnight? Probably not. Is it going to potentially add capabilities for very high value and specific use cases? Related to the military, huh? That starts to make more sense. And so now think about things like Golden Dome. I don't know this, but all of a sudden I just had an epiphany. Does it make sense to have a bunch of AI compute in orbit to help with a super duper advanced ballistic missile targeting system? That seems to make more sense if we're using these. big arrays for radar purposes and tracking, does it make sense to have some compute up there as well? That's where I think this is going. And so I started to realize that there's a very strong possibility that ASTS with this new array, uh, Micron facility they're putting up in Midland, my suspicion is that this is not necessarily going to be Phased array antenna for communications. It might be something on the other side of the solar panel, and it would make sense that ASTS is uniquely situated to be putting up some GPUs as part of an overall mesh for Golden Dome, where money really won't be an object. Again, for a specific high-value use case, this starts to add up, and. I don't know if I'm right, but I'm perfectly empowered to have a view and it's my money. And so I think that's what is potentially going to happen. So I'm betting my money on it. And if I'm wrong, I still have the original thing I bought, which is worth, in my view, a lot more than what the current price is. So then I have what's called free optionality, which is cool. And so people can, you know, slam us on the internet for saying these things out loud. Fine, whatever. But for people who are pretty interested in this company, trying to understand the optionality that they're long in their investment, I think it's a pretty interesting discussion to have. You sometimes you are willing to pay for an option, but it's better to get an option for free. And so if you've done the work and you believe that ASTS SpaceMobile is a very exciting telecom company that's worth, let's just say more, and then you start to realize they have a really interesting way to expand their business and expand their TAM. With these other use cases, then that's a good thing to own. And if you're wrong, it doesn't cost you anything. And the company's not going to pursue something that is wrong. And so the only way you're wrong is if it literally just never happens, in which case you didn't pay anything for it. There's not capital at risk in this. The company's not going to go build a speculative AI data center constellation. That's going to be something where a customer takes them to that. In which case, by the time you know for sure you're right, you already then are economically right, as opposed to a build it and they will come type of risk where then you could get killed on your investment. So it's interesting when you put it in that context and just keep in mind when people are kind of slamming us as all too speculative and blah, blah, blah, put it in context of you have your base case investment and business that you're And then you have these outgrowths of incredible high magnitude optionality for which you're not paying for, in my estimation. And importantly, the company isn't having to put capital at risk against those things. But then it goes to, I believe that because the company is now building a dedicated Micron facility, and they talk about that in the exact same breath, they talk about non-communication use cases, radar, and Golden Dome. Call me crazy, but I'm putting one and one together and saying they were brought into business that justifies that capital investment. And that would make sense based on how this company generally works. So Redrum did a nice tweet that says, did AST SpaceMobile just become an AI play? And this is where, you know, he just pieces out all these other things we've learned. And again, Scott said, quote, the add-on opportunities are really impressive. And you see that with all the data center conversations in the last week or so, whether it's communication services, non-communication services to the US government, or the next generation of commercialization of space, we'll be in a great position to build that out, being vertically integrated and having this fantastic ecosystem and then having an orbit. Architecture. That is exciting. And so then zooming out, why are we in a position to win? We can generate over 100 kilowatts of power. So that's a lot. That's already a big number. And like I said at the beginning of one of the 3 Spaces I had today, I forget which one, if it was one of the dead ones, but When I was just out with my friend who's at NVIDIA and I was kind of asking him his view and tell him, as I told him, again, AST SpaceMobile can already do 100 kilowatts and he kind of was like, wow, that's a lot. So that will get attention. So then you also have the thermal management. And so you have ASTS has already really solved the way to radiate the heat. They have incredible thermal expansion on this because ASTS satellites are not in sun-synchronous orbit. They're going in and out of the sun, although they will have an SSO shell as well. But they've already solved this problem to have a giant radiator, which is important. And then we already have the backhaul solved and things like that. So interesting things, but then we want to compare it to Starlink. And so Elon has been out giving us some numbers as well. So Elon says that Starlink V3, which is their new big satellite, which they can't launch yet because Starship crashes, says that Starlink V3 will be 20 kilowatts. Again, ASTS SpaceMobile, we believe, is 120 kilowatts. And so then Elon is saying, well, then they could basically rejigger that whole satellite to get to 100 kilowatts if they Get rid of the giant phased array antennas. And so I'd be curious to know what could AST SpaceMobile do if it rejiggered its own mast to optimize for that as well. And I don't know any answer to that. Um, but it is interesting that Elon is telling us how it works for himself. And then Anpanman also tweeted out a really nice comparison between the two as well. So like we said earlier, I personally think the military AI opportunity is where this thing happens first. And Katzi comes out with a really nice thread, kind of talking about that, where the use cases and the problem statements of the military are pretty specific. And he does a nice job breaking it down and why every soldier, drone, and sensor is really connected and why ST SpaceMobile is in a great position for that. But then you also have Pete Hexteth talking about it too. So the Department of War is on it. And the, uh, tweet from Pete is they unlaunched genai.mil. And this platform puts the most powerful frontier AI models directly in the hands of every American warrior. And this just goes to why you're going to need enablement and edge compute. And I think we're going to play a really big part in that. And so then as we look at kind of what's happening in the VC world, I did give some links for some new entrants that are doing this. They're all kind of small scale and sort of exploratory. And so they're going to, they all seem like they're in the BW-12 phase where they're launching the cell phone into space just to see if something could work. ASD Space Mobile has launched the full ball of wax in space and solved the scale problems. more so than anyone else. So there's some other links I've supplied for people if you're trying to get up to speed. One from Dan Piermont was good and just talks about why SpaceX, you know, really by extension, not really specific to SpaceX, but why the incumbents, SpaceX, Amazon, and he doesn't know AST SpaceMobile, but If he did, he probably would've added them of just why the data center in space idea is a pretty interesting idea. And he thinks that there really is a dual-use way where when these satellites are dwelling, in other words, not being used and kind of flying over, you could add AI as a workload to take advantage of that power. I don't know how that would work. We need the space on the satellite for that. But anyway, just one man's opinion. And then, you know, we look at what the market is really dialing in, and that's where this week we also had the news about SpaceX valuation. So initially we heard this $800 billion valuation, and that's driven on some things that are on the come, only for Elon to then, you know, really drive the media cycle. By saying that they were going to pursue an IPO with a $1.5 trillion IPO. Well, that has to clear the market. Who's to say it won't? SpaceX is a very exciting company, but that starts to get a lot of attention when people go, well, how the hell do you justify a number like that? That implies a really big TAM. That implies a TAM far larger than the launch market by any stretch of the imagination. They're telling you that the TAM for the telecom applications is absolutely astonishing. And it's telling you that there's on-the-come use cases like data centers, et cetera, that are promising. These are all good things for AST SpaceMobile. It's waking people up to the enormity of the market opportunity. And it's like we talked about earlier. when you're long a strategic asset, you begin to bolt on market opportunities as opposed to being the little bolt. Other things, there's a Crossroads Capital letter update. Ryan does a really nice job talking about the investment, so I'd recommend people to read that. But then we get back to the, you know, I don't know, it's not FUD, but like the SpaceX problems. We have Dr. Ollie, who's very technical and a great contributor, is posted here under this SpaceX interference tweet. And he just is bringing more attention to why these amateur radio telescope guys are picking up the Starlink emissions when they're not supposed to. And so they're picking up and they can hear Starlink, which is telling you that there is interference and really high side lobes in terms of how those beams are performing. This should come as nothing new. This was all in the FCC filings, but now we're actually seeing it in the real world applications. Next, and this thing I thought was actually particularly Interesting. Is you have Dish, uh, sorry, uh, DirecTV. So I mislabeled my tweet. Um, I'm sure I'll get a libel charge for that in 15 minutes, but DirecTV, uh, came out and said that SpaceX's testing is validating the results of DirecTV's simulations, which is showing very high interference. And so SpaceX is causing reduction of service for people watching satellite TV, and that there's a very high impact on users of satellite TV because of SpaceX's inability to have an efficient system. And so DirecTV filed its data in an FCC docket that is really just showing that SpaceX is impacting them On an everyday basis at locations that would normally have a good, strong link, SpaceX is spamming that and causing a degradation of service. This is potentially a very big problem for SpaceX. It means that they might not get a permanent waiver to scale their service out. And if they don't do that, they have to power down their system, which causes all sorts of problems. The specifics of the math on this is in, is in my DD document and will certainly be included in the updated DD document.
[00:49:31] Speaker B: Okay.
[00:49:31] Speaker C: document that release sometime shortly. Uh, for anyone that is dealing with feeling a little bit sad, I just recommend that you read Katzi's annotations of the FCC filings. If that doesn't cheer you up, then nothing will. There's no better comedic content produced on the internet than Katzi annotating FCC filings. And so these were classics and I think they've become kind of a cult following at this point, the classic CATSE annotation. So we got that, which was super fun to read. And then the last thing is there was a slide that was out from the chief scientist of space systems at ASC SpaceMobile, which just showed really, I call it orbital pinball. Just shows what's happening with different constellation sizes and the impact those have on radio astronomy and space environment and debris impact. And so it just shows that Starlink, things just become inevitable that something will go wrong because they have to have over 10,000 satellites versus AST SpaceMobile having hundreds. Big difference. And so as it relates to the burden of orbital collisions, The impact on science and things like that, it just goes to show you that our model is more sustainable and that the Starlink constellation is going to be a significant nuisance to everyone around them, whether you're a neighboring satellite constellation or observers on the ground. And then again, right before that, we had that SpaceX is killing the video star. It's as simple as that. Um, you're knocking out DirecTV, and that's the primary user of those frequencies, and you're not allowed to interfere with them. So that's what we have for the weekly. I really think that Scott has the chance to do the funniest thing this week. It would be a great week to ship FM7. It would be a great time to unload the revolver of all 6 of the next birds we have, you know, Let's just bang, bang, bang, bang, bang. Do you feel lucky, uh, punk type of thing. And then it would be really convenient if President Trump would tune into this Spaces right now and humor me by inviting Abel to a joint press release when they announce the winners of Golden Dome at Mar-a-Lago and do that ideally before Friday, before this jerk um, has his $75 one, one-call contract expire. I would like for this guy to eat it and eat it hard. Um, that's my only request for Christmas is I want to see a person lose money on one call that they sold short. Is that too much to ask? So I think we have a big week, but again, really think, think for yourself for, for one, but really think about this mosaic of facts that we think we've found As it relates to Golden Dome, the change in tune from Scott, I think is a big one. He's directly not even saying hypotheticals, like we're going to go after Golden Dome. You know, he's now saying we are in Golden Dome. And then he's following that by very specific capabilities and infrastructure that the company is building To do that. So I know I can speak for Anpanman because we talk every day, all day about this, and admittedly we can talk ourselves into lunacy, but we think we've put the pieces together that suggest something really big is happening on that front. And then when you're tying out the timing, which is the most difficult thing to do with this company, but the progress of the defense authorization through Congress, I think is the thing that unlocks this. And the way these space stocks traded last week, they kind of just got lifted. It really, you know, some, someone always knows something. I wish I were one of those people. I'm not. And so I'm usually kind of last to know the actual thing, but I'm pretty good at anticipating the actual thing pretty pretty far in advance. And it does seem like the market might've glommed onto something last week. And I think from our bottoms-up diligence that we've seen a lot of those pieces in place as well. And I hope we're right, and I hope it happens next week just so that people could have like a big revelation of the fundamentals of this company before they go away for the holidays. I'll end there. Thanks for joining me, and I hope everyone has a really great Next week. Talk soon.
[00:54:26] Speaker A: Thanks for listening to the AST SpaceMobile Podcast. If you enjoyed this episode and you'd like to help support the podcast, please share it with others, post about it on social media, or leave a rating and review. To catch all the latest news about AST SpaceMobile, make sure to subscribe. Thanks again, and I'll see you next time.
[00:54:50] Speaker B: We're doing something very, very big, and I think with this technology we can really affect a billion lives. Safety Space Mobile is the only company that has proven technology to deliver cellular mobile connectivity directly from space to the everyday smartphone. People will just basically turn on their phone and be seamless regardless of where you are. We don't want the user even to know that it's connected by satellite. Our role is to bring this into reality, always in partnership with the animals.
[00:55:23] Speaker A: Listen.
[00:55:31] Speaker B: Mmm, waffles.