Kook's Weekly - May 25 - The End of Constellation Constipation

[00:00:07] Speaker A: This is the AST SpaceMobile Podcast. It will just basically come to your phone and be seamless regardless of where you are. We don't want the user even to know that it's connected by satellite. Listen, the opportunity that we have is very, very, very large.
[00:00:27] Speaker B: Good evening everyone, thanks for joining. I know it's a little late, um, I've gotten into hockey and I just kind of have to watch it. So anyway, always kind of anticlimactic when the opposing team scores because all of a sudden it's just quiet and you're like, wait, what happened? And everyone's sad. Um, so anyway, last week this time I had sarcastically said that I thought it was going to be a very boring week and that nothing would happen and just to chill out.
[00:00:53] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:00:54] Speaker B: I was kidding. I knew it was going to be an awesome week because we had done our research, but just felt like for once just not being a hype machine, you know. I feel like they're saying A people, A-tards, clueless cult pumper, you know, like, okay guys, so fine, I'll get on MySpace, you know, last week and I'll say it's all just very lukewarm, tepid. But that was wrong. That was bullshit. But I knew it. I hope most of you picked up on the sarcasm because this company is now ready to rip. And so you can tell by the cadence of what the company's putting out that they are feeling really good. So the Bluebird Convoy— convoy, but it'd be really helpful if I could communicate— the Bluebird Convoy is underway, said the company. And they showed the production cadence. We now know that some of these birds are already at the payload production facility, and so it actually went in a weird order— number 8, 10, then 9. So we are seeing these videos. It's very clear to me that the infamous Constellation constipation is over. And this is a seminal event for the company's scaling. It is the precursor for metal in orbit. So hopefully the launches go well, but you know, like I'd be surprised if a SpaceX launch doesn't go well. But at this point, we're going to now have 3 till infinity. That is really what's happening here. These satellites are going to be pushed out of the Midland facility like widgets, and there's a lot of them coming and more on the way. So it's happening. And I thought that, uh, Argash at Argash11, who I've been following for God knows how many years, had a really interesting sort of take on this. And so under the tweet, the, uh, Bluebirds Flew the Coop, It really is a way— the company really communicated in a way that was showing the scale. So they didn't just PR everything once it was all done. They did it incrementally. The bears, interestingly enough, kind of globbed onto this as usual. They're like, oh, it's a partial news announcement, something must be wrong. No, company is being very transparent. And so they're showing you exactly How and when they shipped the 2 satellites. They acknowledged that the 3rd one was about to ship but hadn't shipped. Now it has shipped. Stock rocketed on that. And it shows— you know, I wonder if this was actually conscious by them or not, but by piecemealing the PR with such a tight cadence, it really did show that the satellites are rolling off an assembly line. like cans of tuna right into the cart. And so like I said before, at some point, hopefully no time in the near future, there's going to be another launch mishap. Launch is not perfect, but it really won't matter. This is not the James Webb satellite. Interestingly enough, it has as many mechanisms as the James Webb satellite, but we have effectively an infinite supply of these things. popping off the production line. And so they have flexibility. Now they're starting to open the kimono and show how they're doing it, the scale this company is operating at. And I think that in videos to come, we're going to see more and more automation and more and more proof of scale. And so for the naysayers that are doubting this company's ability to execute, these videos directly contradict any last doubt that people should have. Again, they got to get the satellites in the air. Have a lot of confidence that they will do that, but it is now prime time, and I for one am particularly excited about that. I started to get sort of jumpy last week where I had some little trading positions on, and I just went, it is time to go full fucking tilt. And so whether that's a top or not, I hope King Tut's not on the line because he'd be like, oh my God, I gotta sell everything if Cook is bullish. But what dawned on me, not to get out of order, is never mind that the stock always does well in the summer, and we'll get to that in a second. I think a lot of that, or at least something that coincides with that, is the Russell rebalancing that happens this time of year. And with a company that's scaling, with a company that has had meaningful share price appreciation really every summer, it creates this positive correlation where as we go up, Mathematically and systemically, more people have to buy it, right? As we always have this massive spike in the short interest. It's almost comical at this point on really institutional hedge fund guys kind of going like, hmm, what's this? Is this a supplement or is it a cyanide pill? Let me crunch it and find out. And like, oh yeah, dude, it's a glass pill. It's one-time use. And every time these guys pick up a glass pill and, you know, ground control to Major Tom, they take the pill every time and they blow themselves up. And, you know, here we have the stock, you know, pre-market or whatever it is, aftermarket, already up. And the last time I checked, it was $112. And I'm thinking, did I miss some news here? I'm just trying to live a peaceful life and, and root for Montreal. So where is this Stock. Yeah, $112.20. It's just rocketing. It feels like people are, are blowing up, but also a lot of people probably were taking the weekend to reflect and see what's, what's going on with this stock. I didn't check the actual overall space basket. Maybe space in general is going up, but we had— yeah, it looks like— yep, yeah, yeah, everything's kind of going up. Okay, so it's not really specific to us, but space is ripping. I think people are pretty excited about, um, Starship launch. We'll get to that in a second. But just going back to ASTS, we have just a classic example of the experts really primed the pump for us. And Tim is, you know, God bless his soul, I mean, this guy, this guy really wants to go down with the wreckage. It's incredible. I was watching Batman last night and the scene where they're in the plane and Bane is like, no, no, they're expecting one of us in the wreckage. And the other guy's like, oh, okay, I'm gonna sit here and die. Like, Tim Ferriss is that guy that's just the clueless dope that is gonna— is the guy that's gonna be found in the wreckage. And the guy, you know, the equivalent of Bane here is Globalstar, Viasat, SpaceX, all the people that are paying Tim Ferriss. And they're gonna kind of move on, sell their companies or do whatever. And Tim is the dope that is gonna be Just smoked, and you know Kevin Chen has been doing a great job of keeping receipts. Really, probably for two reasons: one, the general vindictiveness of this group. God bless us. You know we've been through a lot. I think it's okay to hold a grudge against someone, especially for sport, especially if it motivates you. But two, to help people understand the track record of these experts, and so in isolation. If we didn't basically take receipts and have a record of this, then this FUD would perpetuate with a high degree of harm. Because there's this track record, because we call it out and remind people, it hopefully tells— teaches people, you know, where appropriate, to ignore these guys so that they don't screw up your position, so that you don't end up selling at a low price if you otherwise intend to be an owner. No one's telling you to buy the stock. No one's telling you to hold. No one's, no one's doing any of this stuff. But what Space Mob is really trying to do is for people who share a common conviction, ideally where people are sharing their own research and what drives their own conviction with a broader, uh, I don't want to say group, a broader community of people, then, then that's self-reinforcing learning. But what you really don't want to have is people in isolation being picked off by nefarious actors. And so here, Tim, you know, quite rightly would have scared a lot of people if he, you know, came out and said they cannot launch on Falcon 9 because of the New Glenn 3 mishap and these things won't fit. Someone looking at this business plan would go, oh my God, if they can't launch on SpaceX, if New Glenn is grounded for years— which of course was instantly proven as also wrong— And they have no other launch providers. Again, wrong. They're launching on ULA. They're going to launch on MHI. If you ignore all of these other facts, which we've uncovered, someone could go, well, this company's cooked. They have a critical path dependency. It's like someone trying to spin up a data center business and they cannot get Nvidia chips. You wouldn't buy that business. You'd go, well, they have a critical path dependency. This is a problem. But they, you know, were proven wrong instantly. We've shipped our satellites to the SpaceX payload processing facility. That should go a pretty long way of convincing people that they can fit the satellites on the rocket. And, um, that's why we keep records of this, because if you just rewind in April, I remember the night I was calling Tanner late at night. I'd spent the morning listening to all the TIGAS calls sort of in succession. And I remember just being kind of bummed out going, I understand why shorts are attacking this thing. I listen to this stuff and as I internalize what I hear, never mind what I believe, it certainly can be sobering to hear these negative expert calls, especially by competitors. And then you take into context some events like New Glenn 3, It's easy for people to spiral into negativity. Well, that was at $63. That's when the short interest went to all-time highs. This is what happens with this stock. It's very emotional because it's pre-revenue effectively. It's certainly early in its development curve, so it's very susceptible to changing opinions. That vol will at some point die down. I personally hope it doesn't. There's a lot of fun things you can do with a stock that has 100% implied volatility. But at some point, this confidence interval around the company will go down. But right now, buckle up. You know, as we saw just in the past 2 months, we've gone through violent extremes of sentiment. But going back to again what really matters, the Constellation constipation is over, or at the very least in the advanced stages of ending. And so as we see these trucks just Barreling out of the facility with these massive boxes online. This is the beginning. This is the thing that for a lot of us, we've waited 5 years for. So I'm really excited about it. I'm an excitable person. I will refrain from posting pictures of the ASTS cheerleaders. Message has been received. I've taken your feedback. But at $200, can I please do it, is my request. But I sat here this week just thinking, we're really just thinking, what is the path from here? And I always think, well, first of all, I think stocks are fascinating, but I'd always had this belief that if the stock were worth $20, then it would instantly go to $200, which is to say that the distribution isn't normal. As you pass various unlocks, which is sort of my terminology for critical path items, Once you knock down a domino, the market can race ahead to the extreme on whatever that domino represented. And so once you've got regulatory approval for the US, the market can instantly go bang, US market is ours. There's still going to be ARPU assumptions, there's going to be speed of deployment assumptions. These are big assumptions, but you've knocked out in that instance a big binary domino. Pretty important. With this JV with the MNOs, we might have just increased our US market exposure by 50%, going from 2 of the market share MNOs, each kind of split a third, a third, a third, to 3. Pretty exciting. So that should be good for a pretty big jump in the stock price. Again, with the other variables still having their appropriate risk weightings. But once you knock down a certain variable or change a risk weighting from perceived as risky to perceived as unrisky, these revaluations can be violent to the upside. And so this is something I understand really well. I've been doing this for a really long time, and I have, I think, a pretty good visceral understanding of how securities are repriced. I've studied everything ever going back as far as market history is recorded, and I find that the human psychology of it all is sort of a labyrinth that you can spend your entire life studying, never perfect it, but certainly get better at it. And so I thought to myself, a basic question is, I think being in the Space Mob is really fun, but one of the biggest risks to me of Space Mob is falling in love with the stock for love's sake and not being the brutal capitalist that you need to be to make sure you own a security because your belief of future value, magnitude of future value change, durability of the business, which is to say that it's not just going to implode on you. You need to be thinking about these things every day. And so I'll often respond to people that say, well, Kook, you're good. You already made your money. Well, dude, I still own my shares. So there is literally no difference to a person plopping down 9 figures tomorrow to go buy an equal ASTS position as I have, to me waking up tomorrow and holding it. I can press that red button on my brokerage account and go to cash. I can make it go away. And the reason I don't is because, rightly or wrongly, I think that Tomorrow morning at the open, it is a good investment. And so what does that mean to me? Not everything is going to be a gazillion-bagger. And certainly the dynamic of the stock is different at $112 versus $2. At $2, it was a— hate to admit it— a very binary option where the company had a very real possibility of going to zero, at least in perception. I didn't believe that, which is why I owned it at $2. The stock at $112 is less likely to have the sort of rapid resolution to financial distress type rallies that you see with low-dollar price stocks. It's just math. It's harder for that to happen with a company with a $40 billion market cap versus one with whatever we had, $600 million. So those sort of rapid moves are probably off the table in terms of the type of resolution of financial distress moves we've seen in the past. But at this point, our downside is very different. And so we have a lot— we're not going to jump to zero. The company is in a dramatically different financial position. And for me, it really comes down to where do I think the velocity of good news is going to be? If the velocity of good news is going to peak or go down, the stock is probably going to go down. If the velocity of good news is likely to go up and accelerate, stock is probably going to go up. It's very hard for a stock to go down when the velocity of surprises is picking up. And so when I think about what's likely to happen over the next year, the velocity of positive surprises is going to really pick up. So we've de-risked a lot of things. sort of market adoption, we'll get to that in a second, regulatory outlook, commercial outlook, the performance of the satellites, the balance sheet financing, these sorts of things that took us a long way. But what the market has yet to see, it's pricing in some of this, is what scaled execution looks like. What does it really look like when the company is popping out Six to ten satellites per month. What does it look like as they start to stack that into a monetized constellation? I really want to find out, and so I think it's going to be really exciting because the wrong way to look at this, in my view, is on 2027 revenue. People are going to go, "Oh my God, it's trading at like 40 times revenue." No, the market's. going to ultimately see through it. So again, on my construct of if it's worth 20, it's worth 200. If this company has a certain amount of value, it implies that satellites have certain unit economics. Then what happens is if you can build 45 satellites, you know, you can build 450. And so then the remaining question is, is there any diminishing return to scale? I don't know. We could discuss that later, but my initial view is probably not. There is likely to be near infinite demand for a premium data service within the realm of the imagination. And so in that respect, the market can look out very far once it sort of wets its whistle on some near-term success. And so the crux of this tweet, was really around knocking down the necessary components the market needs to really look further out. The analogs to this are SpaceX itself, Palantir, CrowdStrike, Tesla. Those companies each did enough for the market to go, it is no longer a question of success. It is an issue of how far out we're willing to look. And that question of how far out you're willing to look, is going to have a lot to do with the underlying market. For one, if you could make a case that there was going to be a secular decline in mobile data usage, well then that would be something you want to consider. I don't think any person on earth would make that argument. So then you would say really competitive dynamic. And so if you can look out 3 to 5 years and not really see a strong competitive change, your stock can go to the moon. Now we can argue about SpaceX because that's certainly within that 5-year horizon, or could be within that 5-year horizon, that that's going to be a wall of worry that the stock is, is probably going to have to climb from increasingly high dollar valuations. But very quickly over the next 6 months to a year, the bear case of can't build and launch the constellation is going to be disproved. The bear case of Starlink is going to win DDC. I think the S-1 is really showing that they are not, and that might be really what's helping the stock. The bear case of M&Os are going to compress economics. We'll see. I think there's been a lot of discussion around the JV. I talked about it a lot last week. I know Anpanman has a lot, so we'll see. But it's worth noting that ASTS has aligned MNOs for profitability and growth. They're on the cap table and they participate on a revenue basis and they don't view ASTS as a cost. We're about to get a lot of spectrum, which adds a completely different dynamic to our company. And then we could get some big-time, I hope, some big-time government deals, which solidify us as really too big to fail. So those things happening, which I think are likely, could allow us to have, you know, I think an incredible upside price participation. And one thing I learned actually, and I actually see him on this call, you know, I'm always learning from this community. It's really been the, I don't know, most certainly most rewarding thing I can remember doing. It's basically the parts of my old job that I used to love. but on absolute crystal meth. Like, I used to be a really networked guy and had my communities, but they were all in real life through idea dinners and things like that. I really enjoyed it. But when you digitize that on a global basis with no barriers, like very few people on these calls, I think, actually work at hedge funds and things. So this is really just crowdsourcing raw intellect and talent. So you learn a lot of new things at a rapid rate. And one kind of frame of mind aspect I learned, which was new to me, and again also kind of just tells you learn from the culture, is the idea of a moon bag. And so Littrell, um, what is his actual ticker? Um, there is Littrell, Littrell SPAC. Well, uh, and I've been chatting for years. I haven't talked to him directly in a long time, but he just kind of always gave me this advice when I think he was seeing how I generally traded. And I'm always kind of a 0 to 1 type of guy and a 1 to 0 type of guy. I think I drive Anpanman and Tuck crazy about this because if the second I kind of change my mind on a name, I just blow out of it. I just want to get it off my books. I don't want to be half in, half out. I'd rather just be all in, all out. And Luttrell really kind of emphasized the concept of keeping your moon bags because on, on something that has kind of white space upside, it's very difficult to have a target price. I don't really believe in the target price idea. Again, I go back to the idea of the velocity of good news and understanding the competitive position and the platform effects of the business. If those things are intact on a big secular winner, don't overthink it. Start to size things based on your own personal preferences. Do you need money for a house? Uh, are you destroying your family life because of position sizing? You know, are you on margin? Don't be on margin, you know. And like, do you own your stuff through ASTX? Don't do that either. So, you know, a lot of things can drive position choices, and you shouldn't be bullied by anyone, um, on what's right for you. But the idea of a moonbag is an interesting concept on something like ASTX because there's going to be a lot of people to blow out of this thing if we rip to $130. And imagine their surprise if we conform to my framework that I posted and we're on our way to something much, much higher. And I saw someone doing a poll today. I think it might've been Anpanman on what we think the stock price might be in June. And someone in the comments was like, well, that would be very surprising. And the point was, yeah, that's the point. People can be very surprised how quickly and how high things can go. I don't think a lot of people thought SpaceX was going to be a $2 trillion company. That might be the opening price. So it's a very interesting dynamic. I'm always very humble to the power of momentum. Certainly at my firm, we have this humility of thinking we've had a good return, sell a company, and then someone else 10x's after they buy it from us, and we go like, oh God, stabbed me in the neck. It's just brutal. And so you want to keep Keep moonbags if you have a secular winner in a growing big market with defensibility. I think simple as that. But you really don't want to ask me for advice, and you just look at what's going on. And so Bezos, who knows a thing or two, is out there just saying space is going to be a gigantic industry. What does this guy know? When has he been right? What has he done? You know, who is this kook? You know, Bezos is— I really respect him the more I've kind of listened to him speak because you can just tell he's, he's very quiet, but he is ruthless. And so he doesn't have the same histrionics as Elon Musk. He seems much more of just put his nose down and, and do it. And he's saying— here's another thing from Shay Bloor— Jeff Bezos says space-based data centers are, quote, very realistic. but 2 to 3 year timelines are probably too aggressive. Okay, that seems fair. But the market is going to start to look through this stuff and they're going to start to ask, what is the space economy? And this is something I've been talking about for a couple weeks because I always thought space economy was sort of like yo-yo language for dopes, one of these broad sort of Cathie Wood things that really said nothing. And the space economy previously has just been telecom. That's really been it. You have some sideshow stuff, like some imaging and things like that, but the big meat on the bone, do something business has been telecom. And you could say TV too, but that was kind of a dud. I think we're rapidly coiling where scalable economic space applications starts to rapidly change. Telecom is the very obvious one. SpaceX showed that. ASTS is hopefully about to show that. And then military applications for core infrastructure, I think, is the easy, easy follow with radar and PNT and things like that. I think it's a very easy follow for that. Certainly not as big as telecom, or I wouldn't think as big, but pretty big. And then the big kahuna appears to be power generation. And the corollary to power generation is the AI data centers. And so there are going to be platform businesses that are early, that build big moats, that are able to then adapt with changing trends and the changing nature of the space economy. And that's where the multi-trillion-dollar outcomes happen. When I think back, just off the cuff talking right now, this again, I never do any real prep for this. get what you pay for. But people that are early to a big idea start to have degrees of freedom that other people cannot get. A great example, really a great example in so many ways, is Amazon. They built out the infrastructure for online commerce. Books was just the test case because you could have incredible depth of inventory, which was valuable to the consumer, And books don't go bad, and they're pretty easy to ship. And people know when their book is a book is a book. So it's high trust to buy online. And then they moved around. You know, they would test some things. You remember Zappos? That guy, that CEO, I forget his name, but he certainly was a kook and learned a valuable lesson about drugs the hard way. So don't be like him. But people were like, you can't sell shoes. And you know, You could. Not that that's a huge business, but they started to experiment and grow. And then Amazon really obviously grew to everything. But to beat Amazon once they had already accelerated down the path with books was very difficult. They had a head start. They started to have logistics infrastructure. They had the trust. They had solved so many of the problems that it was very good and it was very hard to catch. You had Jet.com make a go of it, And sort of acquihired themselves to Walmart. And then take things like Tesla. I don't know if that's a perfect example, but they're so far down the line with EV technology, low on the cost curve, that it's hard for people to replicate. Take Nvidia. They started to really have a deep expertise in— and I might get this wrong in terms of how I say it, but uh, matrices. And so doing a different type of semiconductor compute than the x86 platform that was perceived as niche, but they were the best at it. And it gave them degrees of freedom to solve very different problems. And so I think that the space economy is going to go down this line. If you're starting to build state-level satellite production scale, You're gonna have a kick-ass advantage on whatever business comes next because you're going to already have all that infrastructure. There's 3 companies that can do that. Screw Mag 7, how about Mag 3? And so this is what gets really exciting. How many of us are going to be around when all this comes out to play? Who knows? These are champagne problems at the end of the day, but it is an interesting thing to really think about. I don't want to get people bulled up or overly excited, but these are the types of things I wrestle in my mind because there's lots of stocks, there's lots of incredible opportunities in the market, there's lots of ideas, but this one is mine. And so I've chosen to focus on what I believe is a great idea and own it and not let all these tangential things interfere with my thinking or hop around or get confused. but try to think like an owner, think like a founder. Jeff Bezos, not a trader. You know who traded?
[00:31:01] Speaker A: Bill Gates.
[00:31:03] Speaker B: Countless hundreds of billions of dollars of wealth destruction because he just didn't own the thing he knew the best. Steve Ballmer, just owned Microsoft. You don't have to trade to be one of the richest people in the world. You just have to know what you own. So that's what I'm focused on. I think I've probably beaten that saying to death, but things that matter when you think about the long-term scalability of business really comes down to structural advantage. And so my friend Justin at JustBar23, which everyone already does follow him, but if you don't, you should. He just, I didn't check this math, but intuitively it makes sense to me that a Block 2 satellite will cost $23 million to build and launch in its final state. So again, that's not what these satellites cost yet, 'cause we're really on the production curve. It's kind of, think of like a Rivian. Everyone that bought an early Rivian was buying like a $200,000 car that they bought for $70,000. Rivian to make money needs, needed scale. I don't know the latest with Rivian, but early satellites certainly cost more, but as they absorb the costs, they will go down. So just use the $23 million as a long-term cost. But this is the equivalent of 16 Starlink satellites in cost, but those satellites, our Block 2 satellites, will have 100 times the capacity. And so that's really the scale benefit here. And so what's really driving that? Simple, the micron. Abel invented the sun sandwich. On one side of the sun sandwich, we have solar collecting energy from the sun. On the other side of the sun sandwich, we have the thing you do something with. So you create a lot of electricity and then you do something. And that's what is market-driven. That can be beaming power down through microwave beams in the future. That can be AI data processing in the future. That can be radar in the future. Right now it's radio frequency. Generation and processing. So that sandwich means that our entire square footage is being dedicated to power and commercial application. That's not how SpaceX is designed. They have a separate solar array and then they have their array, 2 different things. Um, and so useful to know, but that capital efficiency thing is important.
[00:33:30] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:33:31] Speaker B: We would note that Abel and Scott—we'll get to Scott in a second—were really on the offense this week, and that got me pretty excited because you don't often see Abel out doing interviews. For one, I don't think he's particularly comfortable doing this. He's an engineer. I don't think he likes to be out really not pumping, but like talking about himself. I think he likes to be in the factory floor getting stuff done. So you know when he's out doing it. He's he has Scott to do that, so that means he's doing it on purpose, and that means it's about to rain because he's making big things happen. So he was out there doing interviews, and then he implied in no uncertain terms that we got T-Mobile, which again is the final boss, really. And so Abel said, "Quote including now we will have access to every operator in the United States." Really amazing. Space Mob called this shot from a mile away, and, uh, and we got it. So pretty exciting. And then we also had, uh, John Stankey from AT&T talking about the JV. And so Anpanman did a Spaces that summarized it, but he also did a nice job providing some notes. Let me find those notes. And, um, So yeah, this is actually a very long tweet he did, but all the summary is out there from Anpanman. So thank him for for doing that. And what can you say? The the JV is something that initially, and then I look at this tut this tut post where they summarize what AT&T said, and they said we've had a great relationship with AST Space Mobile. The technology and the approach that they're using is unique for direct-to-device. I think it's gonna be a great path for the first product that comes out that is effectively a seamless and straightforward product for a consumer to use that extends the network, and we're gonna continue down that path. And Tut's remark is, this is usually what you hear before a company goes to zero. He's being sarcastic. And so we have a lot of great things happening. Again, not the least is you're going to have, or you are having all of the MNOs coalescing around ASTS, really the way chipmakers coalesced around ASML. That analog, which we had talked about for years, is looking to come true. And again, it goes down to a lot of the reinforcing moats that this company has, not the least of which is the tech, but also the regulatory. And then by the MNOs acknowledging the tech and the regulatory advantages ASTS does, they create our commercial moat. And then it's really just self-reinforcing because then as more MNOs join, this becomes the absolute low-cost best service, which causes more MNOs to join, which then definitionally makes it much harder for any other satellite competitor to have an economically viable solution. I hope it plays out like I've said it, because a reinforcing barrier to entry is a very good reason why a company should trade at a high trading multiple, which is a way to pull forward your returns. And so next we have a tweet by Dr. Ali. Dr. Ali is Certainly an OG. And, um, whether he's correctly or incorrectly sort of followed and acknowledged, I don't know. But certainly when Dr. Ali tweets, I drop everything. It's sort of like on a Katzi level of insight. So I just suggest everyone read all of his tweets. And he comes out, really kind of builds on the, the Katzi works in a way here. And he goes, one of the most overlooked details in the AST SpaceMobile thesis is the company stating that Bluebird satellites can operate using 4 different frequencies simultaneously. I think that completely changes how investors should think about the network architecture. A lot of people originally assumed that this would become an exclusive competitive advantage for AT&T and later Verizon, which is why many believe T-Mobile would never be allowed into the ecosystem. But I never really viewed ASTS as a traditional carrier relationship. I always viewed it more as a tower company. At the end of the day, while the technology is revolutionary, it is still infrastructure. Tower companies do not really care which carrier is paying to use the real estate as long as the infrastructure is monetized efficiently. This is why I think the recent JV and AT&T's move into nationwide 600 MHz spectrum may end up being far more important than most people realize. My current theory is that this could evolve into a roaming-style framework Where AT&T utilizes Band 71 satellite coverage while leveraging portions of T-Mobile's terrestrial infrastructure and ecosystem in exchange for T-Mobile joining the ASTS network. Wow, this is interesting. When you combine the idea that ASTS— ASTS's ability to support 4 frequencies simultaneously, the puzzle pieces start fitting together. Huh. Spoiler alert, grain. You could theoretically have Band 5 carrying AT&T traffic, Band 13 carrying Verizon traffic, Band 14 supporting FirstNet, and Band 71 extending rural and dead zone coverage for T-Mobile and potentially AT&T, all on the same orbital infrastructure layers simultaneously. Pretty exciting. You can start to see where all of these frequencies find the most efficient platform, which is what Katzi had said all along. And we become a spectrum holding company, either directly because of our ownership of the spectrum or synthetically because of the partner relationships we have, which aggregate all of it. It's killer. So thanks to Dr. Ali for that. Again, you should really look at all of his, uh, tweets. He's been contributing and leading um, as a contributor to Space Mob for years and years and years. Um, we also had Scott out there. So Scott had an awesome interview at JP Morgan. I listened to that, seems like a year ago at this point. Listen to that, um, entire thing, and he really just states what they're doing right out there. Um, you know, business as usual. So they're in clear execution mode. You should listen to Scott speak whenever he's in these fireside chats because he gives a lot of not even clues, he just tells you what they're going to do. And so some of the key highlights were free cash flow positive before $1 billion in revenue, not after. So what that's telling you is assume 80% margin, that's $800 million of gross margin. What he's telling you is they're going to scale the OpEx because they're going to hire, but they're going to very quickly move into operating leverage mode and then it's game over. And so his definition of free cash flow, he obviously was speaking off the cuff, so we don't know if that's after maintenance CapEx, growth CapEx, or whatever, but with fixed costs of about $400 million, this company starts to generate a lot of free cash flow very quickly. He talked about the $1.2 billion in revenue backlog. That's That's really exciting. He talked about 10 distinct government use cases. I think there's 3 of which, which are meaningful in terms of revenue right now. I could get that wrong. Uh, confirmed SpaceX. It's exciting. And then he talked about the different launch providers we have: Falcon with 3 per launch, New Glenn from 4 going to 8, Vulcan at 5, ISRO with 2. MHI at 3, and then Ariane 6 at 5 per launch. That's a lot of rockets that we can launch on. I'm excited to try to go to all of these, maybe not the Ariane one, because I don't even know if you can go to French Guyana, but it's going to be really exciting to see all the launch capacity that we are going to be using. And we have a well-diversified base. And so this goes back to what the shorts are finding out that they had done incorrectly, which is they thought that there was a critical path partner for this company's success and that that critical path had gone wrong. They thought with New Glenn 3, our key critical path launch provider relationship was toast. Not true. They're finding out the hard way as we literally ship our satellites to SpaceX. He talks about Vodafone and their $1 billion investment in ASTS. Of course, $1 billion in appreciated equity. They've made a fortune. They have exclusivity across Europe and Africa. They're really locking up market share everywhere. And trying to think of what else was important, but there's quite a lot in this interview and I recommend everyone, if you have a chance to read it. We're really starting to go gloves off in terms of talking about the government applications now. And so Kevin had a nice summary of specifically what Scott talked about related to the government opportunities. And importantly, one thing that I've always found interesting, I'd speculated on this last summer, is ASTS building out a government-only shell. And Scott confirmed that, that if the US government wants to go that way, they can do it. That would be consistent with the massive expansion in factory space that the company has rolled out. You wouldn't necessarily go build all that capacity out if you didn't know you're about to get something big that would utilize that dedicated capacity. And so a lot of us think that ASTS is already, or, or will shortly be doing government Microns in a separate security. Something like that would fit very well with a big Golden Dome award, and we will find out. And then we also saw some interesting stuff out of Anduril this week. Anduril came out with a new— whatever they call it, I'll click on the link— it's some tactical gateway which looks pretty cool and sure looks like it's the type of thing that would pair With AST Space Mobile, the device will not be using MSS connectivity; it'll be using global cellular broadband connectivity. And to our knowledge, there's only one company that can do that, and that's AST Space Mobile. So never mind that it would be cool to have an official partnership with Andoril; it would also be cool just to watch the shorts scald themselves with the hot water of being mispositioned on a really fun PR that says. ASTS and Andoril doing some cool stuff together. That's certainly not the type of thing that if you're short the stock you want to see, because you do not want to be short Andoril derivatives. I can promise you that. And, um, then the shorts might be having that hit them in the near future. So back to what can drive exciting stock outcomes, because again, that's hopefully everyone is on this call. There might be a few enthusiasts here and there. I was in a Twitter Twitter debate today with a guy, I think from Oregon, that was saying, I don't know why you guys are saying bad stuff about SpaceX. I care so deeply because I'm just a space enthusiast. And I told him, I was like, hey dude, you did the meme. He's like, what do you mean? Well, there's all these actual paid shorts that claim to be just enthusiasts, but they work for Viasat. And you know, the real, the real thing here, if you're not an enthusiast But if you're a capitalist, which I am, you are really trying to study your competitive moat. That is the great question. And so one thing I learned from one of my portfolio company CEOs, which he in turn learned from one of his mentors, he said, Kook, the question you got to ask yourself as a founder and really as an investor is, If I invent something cool, what happens when everyone copies it? Do I still have a great business? And that's the question you should ask yourself on any of your companies or any of your investments. If you actually have identified a great idea at the company level, once everyone understands it's a great idea, can they copy it? If so, What will that impact have on your company? Will it totally commoditize it and drive it to zero? Well, you should be very careful. Is it something that is fundamentally very difficult to copy, so it's not clear at all that there will be competition? Does competition have incredible challenges because of a self-reinforcing barrier to entry that the first mover had? That's where I think ASTS falls in. Maybe people can engineer around the patents. Maybe they can't. We'll find out. But the comments from Scott around this issue are very encouraging. And so, as the @DisgustingPlebe says, "My God!" And he's referring to what Scott said. We were always prepared for competition. While there will be a healthy market over time, in the near, medium, and potentially five to year. 5 to 10 year term, this will be a high growth market where we will hold a leadership role. And so when I've gone through this painstakingly, I think I tweeted some of this last week. When you actually go through all the different long pull items, if someone were to really start today to compete, it's years before you could be in striking position. And then even then, I don't know how you get commercial access to the users. And so people can fret about SpaceX. It sure looks like a paper tiger to me. And if that's true, then this opportunity, the ASTS, is really, really good. I don't know how companies like Equasis, or you can't even say it, the Viasat JV, I just have no idea how these are going to get off The ground. I don't know how Amazon is gonna really make it happen. I'm not totally convinced Amazon is gonna do D2C in the way they've described it. I think that they're gonna do their own flavor in sort of a Fire Phone type of way, whether it's an actual phone or not, or like a really cool Kindle, or who knows, you know, would make a little bit more sense. Um, But the length of our competitive advantage is something that I think the market is going to come to appreciate is quite long. The other thing that's a surprise is how long our satellites last. And so we have Dr. Ali back for seconds, um, this week and pointed out a tweet from another Smith here who's another incredible diligencer of this company. So pay attention to The account at one. So number one, Moore Smith here, very smart person, clearly has a background in the industry, and found in a Legato filing that our satellites are now supposed to have a useful life of 15 years. So this is likely as a result of changing our altitude because it's a nonlinear relationship between drag and altitude as it relates to how long satellites can station keep. And so this is probably the answer. And so what's great is if our satellites last 15 years, that massively reduces our maintenance CapEx. And so as people point out, you might have the issue of the useful life of satellites in terms of the underlying technology, but having the physical satellites in air for that long is certainly something you'd rather have than not have. It reduces the potential for maintenance CapEx, which means we can be investing more toward growth before we get into replenishment. Which is a really big problem SpaceX has. I was talking to another guy this week. SpaceX is really starting to get into a wall where the decline rate of their satellites— so think of them as almost an oil company where they have wells, which are their satellites up in the air, and those are deorbiting. And so they have to spend a considerable amount of their resources every year just to stay still. Their satellites are flying at a low altitude, I believe 300 kilometers, and so they do— they deorbit quickly. And that means that a very significant portion of Falcon 9 capacity is going just to preserving the existing capacity before you get to augmenting it. That's why Starship is so important for the Starlink business. In fact, might be vital for it. But if ASTS can push off its replenishment needs yet further, that just frees up capital going to growth. And then down the line, I wouldn't be surprised if we do have massively different innovations in next-gen satellites, I'm sure that the old ones will be useful for providing different services. And so just like telecom can still— I forget when 3G or 2G were deprecated. I don't know if 3G has been, but some of these other network layers still exist because you've hung the towers and then you just push demanding traffic to the new stuff. So let's get to the seasonality of the stock. Uh, we had @HiriniPK just do the simple seasonality chart of what happens to ASTS SpaceMobile whenever we get to June. And the answer is the stock just goes straight up. And I personally think that has a lot to do with the Russell reweightings. And we've also tended to have launch activity and de-risking type stuff that has, that has hit Um, at this, this time of year. And so in 2025, we had Block.one going up. Um, I actually really can't even remember 2024. I believe we had AT&T DA, then Verizon DA. So that was really, you know, a kick, a kick in the butt for this horse to get going. And now this year, if you're looking for what a future narrative is going to be You have all-time high short interest, you have all eyes on space because of SpaceX, and now you have the end of constellation constipation, which is really one of the great final unlocks for the thesis. The remaining ones are going to be market size, ARPU, competitive dynamics, and things like that. But the point where you can ask those questions and have those debates is entirely reliant on the company actually getting metal in orbit, which is now what they're proving That they can do. And so the debate down the line from a stock price, which my guess is higher, that will happen is going to be around the network usage. And so you have things like T-Mobile saying that satellite represents 0.0002% of their network traffic. Well, I haven't done the calculation of what their network traffic is. That is surely a gargantuan number. And what they're not saying in that statement is the value of the long tail. And so satellite service is going to be capacity constrained, it's going to be a premium service. And so never mind that Starlink doesn't really have any capacity, um, some of these T-Mobile statements aren't all that particularly useful to think about, especially when you have SpaceX, which has a crappy MVP service. Um, but you're going to have those things out there, and it's going to cause some consternation for people from time to time. But looking forward, what really matters is the aggregation of spectrum. And so what we had— we talked about this last week, I think— is ASTS getting authorized by Brazil's Anatel to operate the constellation on S-band in Brazil. And so ASTS is getting a 10 by 10 megahertz swath of spectrum. And so ultimately when someone says, hey, you know, the network usage is this small percent, well, it's definitionally going to be a small percent for SpaceX because they only have this, I think it's a 5 by 5 sliver of S-band that they're working with. Small amount of spectrum. So even if everyone in the world wanted to use it, they couldn't. There's just no spectrum. And so ASTS keeps aggregating this low band, and hopefully increasingly so, these big swaths of low band, and then complementing it with the MSS spectrum. Spectrum equals the ability to push data, which is the ability for people to use it. It's always going to be constrained. This is always going to be the premium segment of the market. which will ultimately get us to an ARPU discussion. But another paper, just to switch gears a little bit, we have the Hennessy letter came out really, I believe, last week. It might've missed the weekly. I can't remember. But I think I did talk about it a little bit, but it's just worth revisiting the Hennessy letter because these guys have also been in the stock for quite a while, which means a couple of things. They've been in the stock as a small position. It became a huge position. They kept it as a huge position. That is uncharacteristic. That means that they made an exception for their risk management protocol, which means that they learned something. They saw something. They know something. They're professional investors. They're going to have the access and the ability to pick up the phone. People will pick up their call. Who knows what they know in the granular details, but they very generously shared the high-level details of their conclusions. And so they're expecting ASTS to generate $2.4 to $4.4 billion in annual revenue from worldwide military and first responder opportunities. And then in addition to that, US national intelligence adding on top of that. And I would just say that based on my knowledge of Hennessy, based on my general belief in my own street smarts, I would say that their numbers are probably not random. And you could look at something like that and go, what do they know? Through induction, can I just guess at what they know? And wow, $4 billion for a business line that wasn't even contemplated by investors 5 years ago. That's pretty exciting. That's probably worth 2 times the current stock price by itself. And so that's going to always be the little addendum to these market sizing questions around consumer. And I don't want to say that I'm bearish on the consumer market. I'm not at all, but it is so easy for people to lose sight of the diverse applications and market segments that this technology has. That they could very easily be blindsided by what could happen here. And the inflection around the overall sentiment is something that is also, uh, rapidly evolving. And so at the JP Morgan conference, we had this quote: whilst direct-to-device was initially seen as complementary to the wireless ecosystem, a number of developments have raised concerns this technology could over time develop into a threat. We see a need for Deutsche Telekom to take bolder steps to protect its moat. Well, you know, that's what happens in life. Disruptive, great technology starts small, can be easily ignored, and then The next thing you know it, it's knocking at your door and eats you alive. Just like EVs were gonna be this like small little niche, just like cell phones are gonna be this small little niche, just like the personal computer was gonna be this small little niche. All of these things started small and expensive, but ultimately gave consumers incredible amounts of utility and convenience. With scale, prices went down if they're seamless. low friction at a low cost, people will want them in the extreme. And technology improves. And so we've looked at this with Catseye's work. As the spectral efficiency improves, the cost-competitive nature of satellite starts to take on your highest-cost towers. As it improves more, you take on more of those towers and more, you start to eat American Tower alive. American Tower very obviously saw this problem. They realized it was probably inescapable, which is why they hitched their wagon to ASTS. So it's, if this is going to happen anyway, we might as well, A, know a lot about it by being an investor and being on the board, and B, have a big stake in this company to make a lot of money from it. But the telecoms saw that this was knocking on their door, and that's what led to the JV. And so they're all bear-hugging ASTS to at the very least keep SpaceX at bay. And they're hoping that ASTS will honor their gentleman's agreement to be a carrier-neutral technology, which as best as I can tell is the most efficient business plan for ASTS to have anyway. But the sentiment around DDD can very quickly change from, oh, it's only good for national parks, don't worry about it. to, oh my God, it's coming for us. And that's the exciting thing about how stock prices can inflect. That goes back to the Luttrell-Spackwell moonbag concept. It's an interesting concept. It's very difficult to spot the terminal upside of a secular winner. If it's a good business model with defensible moats, especially self-reinforcing moats, with good capital allocation— that last part remains to be seen. I'm pretty sure Abel won't do do dumb things with cash flow once he has it. But if, if we continue to see those things being true, we got to test those things, uh, then just go while the going's good, you know. That's kind of what it is. So next we have a long Katzy tweet. I don't know if I have the mental energy, um, to go over that with everyone right now, but Katzy's doing Katzy stuff. I'll just leave that tweet there for people that want to read Katzy stuff. But let's go to SpaceX. So I think the world realized, it was actually funny. I was talking to one of my buddies and he's like, yeah, this morning I was watching the news while my wife wanted me to get my kids ready. And I learned that SpaceX is really just the world's most expensive internet service provider. And I'm like, yeah, that's what it is. And people are learning that launch is sexy to watch, but as a business model might not actually be really that exciting and certainly might not be that scalable. Where have you heard that before? And, you know, like, yes, do the Rocket Lab bros hate me forever? Yeah, you know, whatever. I am rooting for their success regardless, and I think Peter Beck is a total badass. But I don't think launch is really the space economy. It is the conduit to the space economy. If there is valuable stuff to do in space, you need launch. If there is not valuable stuff to do in space, you do not need you need launch. Launch in and of itself is not useful but for the cargoes that you are launching. And so launch should start with, are there useful cargoes? That initially started with governments. We need spy satellites, we need ISS, things like that. There's a limit to how much governments will spend. It's gonna be a big number. What you really want to do is hit the infinite money glitch of commercial applications. That's what Starlink proved, that broadband is a product people like. And so it goes back to telecom. I'm increasingly of the view that the AI data center thing will be right. That's, that is really big. And that's probably what people are going to get really excited about when thinking about the SpaceX IPO. I really find it hard to believe that bona fide investors are actually buying SpaceX because of launch. I just don't think that there's that many people that think that that's really the thing. Launch is really a means to an end for them that happens to be vertically— vertical integration because of design choices they made and lack of what had then been a substitute launch provider, because that didn't exist for the Starlink business, and then subsequently their other brave endeavors that they want to do. But as people read the SpaceX IPO S-1, they're starting to realize space economy is real. Telecom is a massive scalable opportunity. And I think they're going to glom onto the Facebook analog. I've been screaming at the clouds for the past 5 years of Facebook desktop was the entree— was the appetizer, sorry. Facebook mobile was the entree. Mobile is where the money's at, and ASTS is mobile broadband from space. That's big brain thinking. And to do that, you need the terrestrial spectrum, and that means you have to make nice with MNOs. Do you guys see the problem SpaceX has? Wolf has hard time making friends with highly educated sheep. How are they going to do mobile? They're going to have to go direct, which reinforces the fear of the sheep of the wolf. Onward and onward, the world does the great cascading hug into AST space mobile. That's what I think people are going to be really figuring out. Um, but let's check in with Only 6 Inches, another great Space Mob contributor. Uh, if you've followed his stuff, you realize that, uh, he absolutely knows what he's doing and he's a professional and probably is being overly generous with his time by posting on X when he has a day job. But the summary of the S-1 is one, they are extremely reliant on one MNO. That is T-Mobile. And this is core to D2D. And so if they don't have a lot of MNOs, they really don't have a viable business. They are extremely reliant on manufacturers to modify both hardware and software in the phones because their spectrum does not work with existing phones. So how generous are Qualcomm and MediaTek and Apple and Samsung going to be With a company with a demonstrated excellence at the mass production of affordable consumer hardware. If you can make a car, which itself is a big phone, you can probably make a phone. So I just would have a hard time believing that Apple is going to prioritize helping out SpaceX, but I could be wrong. The other most fascinating thing is just simply that SpaceX hasn't launched any of their D2D satellites since June 2025. So that's a year. I've questioned, sort of half joking but half serious, when and if SpaceX is actually just going to abandon the D2C market, because I just don't see how this is viable for them. There's opportunity cost to launch. If you launch your own payload, that is $70 million or $74 million you're not getting from someone else in a market that has demand for launch. If you're launching a D2C payload, that's mass in orbit that could otherwise be going to support your broadband business. These are basic capital allocation questions. I don't know. Well, what I do know is Elon is not dumb. That I do know. I do know that Elon understands math. And so for him to put up more D2D satellites where there seems to be mass rejection by the MNOs, Just doesn't make a whole lot of sense unless he feels the need that he has to have that constellation in position to do some other things down the line. But it's a real mystery to me what they're actually going to do. And importantly, again, Kevin Chen keeping everyone honest, is the S-1 confirms that SpaceX's partnership, quote unquote, with Apple was, quote, bullshit after all. How many times did our stock get destroyed because of Mario Narwhal dipshithead? And Bloomberg should be nice to those guys, I guess. But they did call me a zany furu, so I don't know, Sana, if you're listening. Um, I already did send her my comments actually on things that I disagreed with. But anyway, how many times did we have people put out BS rumors about Apple and SpaceX and then ASTS got demolished. S-1 clearly says we do not have direct contractual arrangements with handset manufacturers. Instead, we expect MNO partners as major purchasers of mobile devices to encourage or drive such adoption. Guys, please help us! Please help us! David versus Goliath! Please help us! Said Gwen Shotwell to literally no one listening to her. So good luck getting other people to help you. It's called have a business model that does not challenge your would-be partners, and maybe they will help. There was also quite a lot of drama on the internet about the SpaceX TAM. I didn't really pay a whole lot of attention to this, but there was a $720, $740 billion number put out. We all know intuitively that mobile broadband is a monstrous market. I know intuitively that I don't need to worry about it because it's really big, but what is neat is that the ARPU is really high. And so they had a global weighted average of $8 per user, and that's $710 million of annual revenue for Starlink, which is 10 months after commercial launch of a minimally viable product with second-rate MNOs. It's pretty exciting to see actually what they've achieved because you start to think about What's the likelihood of ASTS smashing its 2027 number? Seems pretty high to me. And that really goes to the— we'll call it the, uh, the Cook 900. Um, you know, thinking of the Indy 500, you know, the Cook 900 race, you know, between now and next year. If the market can see through and go, we are comfortable with X dollars of ARPU per user And we know you have these M&O contracts of 3 billion people, and there's gonna be some attach rate, which will go up over time as people learn about the service coming in and out, different ways in which you packet the service, importantly, uh, increase overall capacity. Market can start to look ahead. That gets pretty neat. So now we get to Starship. So I was glued to my computer on Friday watching it. Reason why Starship is in a way something we have to follow is not just as enthusiasts. And so as someone who has become a space enthusiast, it is, it's pretty great cinema to watch these launches. They do an amazing job. Uh, how these cameras survive orbital reentry is really a question I actually posed to Elon Musk, 'cause I just can't understand how those don't blow up. But the ship survived. The booster did not. They made it to 100 kilometer altitude, which I think was the wrong altitude or the wrong orbit. Um, they landed it, the Starship exploded, whatever. But I think it, it proved that it could get a Starship down intact. But the booster was problematic. It didn't— they didn't reignite the vacuum engines in space, they didn't make the right orbit, the booster blew up, and we have no idea if the ship is reusable. But other than that, it was a great success. And so as a layman looking at this, I watched that launch and went, holy crap, this is amazing. As someone who's tried to become more of an expert on all this, I started to wonder, how long is this program going to take until it is commercially usable? It sure seems like that, that is well over a year away. They haven't really gone to a usable commercial orbit yet. I think there's lots of questions around the reusability of Ship. I have no doubt they can land the booster. This was the new version of the booster, so I'm sure there's some tweaks there. Probably were just torquing it anyway for fun, give the people a show, who knows. Um, but when I take a step back, I wonder— they made a choice. So I, I don't know this to be true, but intuitively Ship costs a lot. The basis of Ship is that it's reusable. So something that costs a lot but reusable means your amortized cost is presumably lower than your consumable cost if Ship were just a normal second stage. New Glenn seemingly went with solving solvable problems first. So the booster is reusable, they've demonstrated that, but then they use a standard second stage. They're pumping out a lot of those. I think they have 15 of those, Intuitively, those seem like they're much cheaper. They're engineered to a very different standard because they just have to go up and then they deorbit. So a real basic question I have, I'll pose here, and if anyone has views, just comment me. What is the break-even price that Starship ultimately underwrote where its entire design philosophy ever made sense? Because we have no idea what the refurbishment cycle is going to look like on Ship. So their ultimate cost to delivery relies on how fast Ship could turn around if it's successful and the cost of refurbishment. We don't know any of those variables, but what we do know is for New Glenn, what it costs— I don't actually know this, but, but they know, the royal we knows what a, a, just an expendable Stage 2 costs, and they can pump those out real quick. Choices were made. And I don't— we really don't know if Starship made the right choice, and also what they were solving for. They might have made the right choice for doing something wild like humans traveling on a Starship. Obviously, an expendable second stage isn't very good. It's like, all right, people, we're now boarding your flight from New York to Shanghai, and, uh, you will all die on re-entry. Yeah, that is not going to be a great spaceship airline. And so you can see why New Glenn is not marketing the guaranteed death on reentry vehicle, uh, for people, whereas Elon was solving for a far greater ambition. But when we isolate his ambition to just the one thing that people on this call care about, which is launching satellites into orbit, did he make the right choice, or did he choose something that's fundamentally so difficult solving for a use case that is so wildly beyond the one we're thinking of that he might have, A, bitten off more than he can chew, but B, might actually not really be cost competitive with something like New Glenn for the satellite launch application. I haven't seen anyone talk about it like that, so maybe what I'm saying is easily disproven. But if anyone has any views on that, please start a thread and let's have a discussion because I've been thinking about that Um, a lot. And then Katzi, you know, always puts out this just incredible thought leadership. Um, who is this guy? Um, but, you know, he, he's certainly coming to a conclusion that Starship might be, you know, again, something really problematic. And he came up with this observation that they might have taken a Russian approach to the problem, which is Interesting, but by using too many engines, just statistically, where you have one engine out, you start to have cascading failures. And so your rocket is really just doomed mathematically because you just have a system that is too complicated because of too many engines. And so just reading his thread—I'm not a rocket engineer—is I hope everyone in the world understands. Reading his thread and kind of looking at what the Russians did, what they. ended up pivoting to versus what the US program did and what was successful and what was not, you start to see some logic in, in what he said. And then we just look at what hap— is what happening with, with, uh, SpaceX. They're having a lot of engine failures on this, and then you have vehicles start to fail. So I don't want to get buried in the SpaceX bro fights on the internet. with enthusiasts, but it is a really interesting, uh, dynamic. Um, but switching gears to New Glenn, New Glenn is going to be back on the pad real fast, and that's exciting. And then we also learned that New Glenn 3 was literally just a plumbing accident. Um, and so that's important in knowing that it wasn't a structural design flaw. It was a leaky valve, which caused, I think, propellant to drain out, which is just kind of a learning lesson. And so I think there's also been a rapid shift back to an understanding around New Glenn and that that program is really back on track. So lastly, ULA— I'm getting tired— ULA Vulcan is on next spaceflight. And we'll see. Um, that's gonna be an exciting launch whether it happens this year or not. I think there's a lot of room to doubt, but almost certainly they're going to be launching on ULA Vulcan as well. And that just goes to the point of more launch vehicles. So I'll end it here. I think we've been going for like an hour and a half. Um, I'm exhausted. So next week we'll see. Looks like space is just bid up across the board. Congratulations to all the people that own Redwire. It's always like the— I don't know if I want to choose violence this late at night, but all the people that own the levered piece of crap companies that make money in the rallies think they're heroes. And good for those people, but I'm not going to get stuck buying low-quality kind of space engineering services businesses. I'm going to go down on my first principles, but it looks like things are pretty strong out of the gate, and that's exciting. And I would just keep in mind, you know, my, my sort of thinking that I had this revelation, uh, last week. It's easy to forget all the things we have going on, but I am personally pretty humble to these Russell rebalances, and I had forgotten about it even though I posted incessantly about it. And so just never underestimate power of incremental dollar flow coming into a stock as the velocity of good news is increasing, as overall market liquidity is moving into a space. And so it really does seem like we have the trifecta of exciting things going on. And so I certainly made sure in my book, I don't have any a short call position for one, because when the stock starts to trade sort of like an uncaged animal, I've certainly had my face ripped off violently before. I was absolutely obliterated last October. I had some covered calls and holy crap, it was like someone electrocuted a bull that I happened to have been riding. And I was just hanging on for dear life and having a total mental breakdown that my shares were going to get assigned. And I had to manage out of that pretty carefully and ultimately did get out of it. But right now, this isn't investment advice, it's just sort of Kooks musings on his own personal failings of yore. When ASTS starts acting like a good stock, I would be very careful about being too cute. If you want to sell because of your portfolio needs, whatever, But if you start to get a little cute and sell some covered calls on shares you actually really want to own, I would just chill out a little bit, let the stock run because June has proven to be crazy for this stock. And I don't know that the market is fully absorbed that we could be very easily shipping our next batch of satellites. Inside of 2 to 4 weeks. And that is something I want to see how the market really reacts to. I don't think people have totally internalized what operational execution looks like for this company. I don't think that people have totally internalized the weak position that SpaceX is in. I don't think people have totally internalized the importance of the MNO JV. There's a lot of things that I don't think people have totally internalized. So look inwards, my friends, and I look forward to another week of people doing really great diligence. And I would be remiss if saying that I left out some very thoughtful tweets from my new friend Leo Edge. He did some great analysis, but when I'm doing the weekly, I don't always catch everyone's tweets. Or if I catch the content, I don't necessarily catch those who wrote some of the other great content. And so I like to try to include a diverse group of people contributing so everyone can be on the weekly, but sometimes I miss. And I did realize that this week Leo Edge, who's sort of new to Space Mob, has a pretty cool background in ASICs and things like that. So someone who is bringing real meat to the bone and real meat to the discussion. Uh, I, I was looking back and noticed he had done some really awesome tweets and I had not included them, but I just want to make sure everyone knows that, um, he had made some really cool contributions this week as well. Have a wonderful Monday night. I really wish it were Memorial Week. I do not want to wake up and go to work. I'm sure I'm not alone. I need to recover from the weekend. So talk to everyone soon. Bye.
[01:21:20] 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. We're doing something very, very big, and I think with this technology we can really affect billion lives. AST SpaceMobile is the only company that has proven technology to deliver cellular mobile connectivity directly from space to the everyday smartphone. People will just basically turn 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 MNOs. Listen. Mmm, waffles.