Kook's Weekly - September 22

[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. Hello everyone. Thanks for joining. And I realized the crap I've taken in the past when I start my Spaces while there's still an NFL game. So I know the Giants and Chiefs are still playing, but started to look pretty hopeless for the Giants. So figured I'd stay on the adjusted schedule. So we had quite an interesting week cuz it did seem to be finally a turning point. In terms of, you know, really sentiment and certainly the stock price as well, which is good. And so when you take a step back, I think King Tut's, I don't know if you'd call it an essay, lecture, love note, whatever you would want to call it. It's really important to kind of step back from time to time. And what I love so much about what Tut said is Really the house of glass that ASTS lives in, which is really crazy. You know, you have a CEO that doesn't take a salary and then you have companies like, I don't know, single out people, Rocket Lab, IonQ, things like that, where insiders just dump shares on people relentlessly and I don't know if IonQ, you know, what will happen to that. Seems like they've made some really good moves and everything like that. But at the back of your mind, when you have a non-founder CEO, you had the original founder exit, bunch of insider sales, things like that, it just gives you a feeling of, you know, are you the patsy at the table? And ASTS has done everything since the beginning to instill trust in their shareholders and trust in the market, yet no matter what they do, There's always a different standard and time will tell, but when you're held to such a high standard, it seems it's because you're doing something very special. And what we're seeing is a stock chart that is showing really kind of a classic washout. And so you had, sadly, Reformed Trader was right. You had a head and shoulder, broke the neckline, People flipped out predictably. The shorts came out in size, this Onada Capital and Pivotal Capital and some others that Anpanman pointed to. They come out banging the drums of war. Turns out bottom stock rips. And rips on what? And so we had Scott in Paris at a conference, which was It's always interesting because he's really with the dinosaurs of the industry and, you know, always for the past years too, especially when they had a weaker perceived hand, would really just tell people exactly what they're going to do. And, you know, always just kind of, um, you know, taking, taking the blows. Now they're in a different spot. They're funded. They appear to have a breakout move set up, and Scott is keeping the same tone. He just repeats the message of what we're doing, how we're doing it, why we're different. And importantly, at this juncture, you know, with all of us on pins and needles, they said that there's quote unquote going to be a handful of launches in 2025. The market liked that. So the stock ripped on Friday from what I could tell, and you might have belief. It ripped because he said there was going to be a handful of launchers in 2025. Now, why does that matter? Does it really matter, 2025 versus 2026 or Q1? Not really. But the fear is that if it slips past 2025 and into 2026, then the market goes, oh God, what, you know, does Q1 turn into Q2? Does Q2 turn into 2045? This is the way the glasshouse mentality works, as Tut said. And so with the reiteration of a handful of launches in 2025, you start to go, what's the definition of a handful? Well, a handful is more than one, more than 2, more than a few, and less than a lot. And probably somewhere in the definitional realm of several. So I interpret this to be 3. 3, I think, would be very exciting. Potentially 3 Falcon 9 launches. I think ISRO at this point, who knows, who cares? Relationship with India seems like it's gone down the toilet very quickly recently. I still think we're going to have an ISRO launch, but I think we're going to be having some I, uh, some Falcon 9s first. And so if we can get quote unquote a handful of launches in 2025, you have to realize while people get so upset about the delays, we've experienced it. We're now almost done with September. So all the anxiety, I, you know, myself included, you know, waiting for March and then, oh, it's, they said April and then it's May and then we hear it's promptly in July. And yeah, that's been frustrating. It is what it is. Obviously they're doing everything they could do to control their timeline, but now we're at the end of September. And so you start to think, I personally did, you know, aside, aside, I take a positive attitude toward things. I think the internet would call me a pumper and call me full of hopium. Fair. I think unfair, but whatever. But I take an optimistic view. And so everything happens for a reason is my general belief. And so why, why did this delay happen? Well, let's forget the actual reasons why it happened, because those are the actual reasons, like Golden Dome or military things that might've actually delayed it. But in the kook spiritual center where everything happens because of some simulation that we're in, to me, what's happened is to compress the launch timeline so that we're not just sitting there in the alternative universe where we had a July ISRO launch. And then had to wait a couple months for the next one. Maybe that would have been the same pattern we previously had, is people kind of burn themselves out and sell after the first launch, and then we would have had a decline. Now maybe this time we're actually setting up really with the kind of reformed trader kill shot of this head fake head and shoulder, and then people realize, oh my God. They're gonna have a launch in late October and then 2 in November, or maybe those slip to December. It could all of a sudden get to be somewhat of a compressed event timeline, which gets very exciting to the end of the year. And you can see the stock really perking up. And so Scott said what he said. He isn't known for having perfect guidance, I'll say that, but He said it again. And we do know that there were the Falcon 9 launches that were booked, 2 of them. They're on next spaceflight. And we've been really thinking hard about the 2 tweets we've had about FM1 about is ready to ship. I forget the most recent one said, but we started to really look into whether or not these satellites had gone back into vibration testing. I'm not an engineer, as everyone knows, but when we looked into that, started to have a theory that why would they have gone back into vibro testing? Well, you do that when you change your launch vehicle. Each launch vehicle has a different frequency and you want to make sure that your cargo isn't on resonance with the launch vehicle and blows itself up. And so an ISRO rocket is going to have different internal frequencies than a Falcon 9. And so good reason for what we're potentially seeing is it went back into vibro testing because they changed the launch vehicle. So we're really doing everything we can. I say we, the space mob in general, is doing everything we can to look for any little hints about what's happening. But the biggest one is what Scott said in Paris. So very exciting news. What we're having overnight is equally crazy. I was kind of just living a relaxed night, watching some football with my kids and wondering, well, why is ASTS up at one point over 4% on 50,000 shares in the overnight market? That seems odd. What did I miss? Are people excited because they heard the handful of comments? Are people excited because of the Legato confirmation hearing tomorrow? That's a good reason to be excited. And what we found, well, I didn't find it, but other people did, is there's an article that came out saying Carlos Slim is going to make an investment in AST SpaceMobile. So this is not out of left field. Let's zoom out really fast. You have strategic investment from Vodafone, strategic investment from Bell Canada, strategic investment from AT&T and Verizon and Google. We know Abel has a relationship with Carlos Slim. We have pictures of them together. We know that Mexico has a very interesting market dynamic where they're trying to put spectrum to use quickly, and satellite is a very good way to do that. Little thing I'd add is the Legado spectrum. Includes Mexico. So all of a sudden, Carlos Slim might be really interested in this. We know in the past, Carlos really kind of gave the Heisman to Elon when Elon, I believe, called him a drug dealer. That Elon is so funny. And so as it turns out, a great way to alienate a customer in Mexico is to call them a narco terrorist. And so we think that Abel already had a pretty good relationship with American Mobile, but as we know, Elon is really good at bringing people closer together. So that would be a really good reason for the stock to be up overnight. And what would a strategic investment look like? Well, we could just look at the past. And so these have generally been convertible bonds with a high strike price. It would show, I think, to the market What is probably not even a topical concern right now is just that they will be getting funding from commercial partners. And so I think a lot of people have wondered when this sort of transition to quote unquote non-dilutive financing would occur. And in my view, the answer is it will come when it comes, but every day that goes by is a day where the company arguably improves their pricing situation. Because now you can really see the whites of their eyes on both sides. The MNOs can see this is happening. It's no longer hypothetical. There's starting to be some FOMO. And so the time to act is now. And are they going to do big prepayment? Are you going to do a deal at all? I don't know, but it's in the press. Are they going to do a traditional injection, which won't be non-dilutive? It will just be capital efficient because it will be strategic, which is valuable. probably in a convertible bond that has a high strike price. That's pretty good. And so those types of things I think will be rewarded by the market, but decreasingly so, because previously this would've been an issue of, oh my gosh, they're going to avoid bankruptcy, or oh my gosh, they're going to avoid diluting shareholders at $4 a share or $3 a share. Now with $1.5 billion on the balance sheet, an extra X dollars is a nice to have, but not a need to have, but does show that ASTS is walking away with the market. And so in my view, the technical barriers to entry are high, but the commercial barriers to entry are higher. And as they get more MNOs, that starts to really close the opportunity for any other competitor to come in because there starts to become somewhat of an impenetrable commercial moat to doing this. So that gets me really excited if that, if that comes to pass. We also this week had ASTS update their website. And so all of a sudden now there's the next generation Bluebird page. They lack a control sat, which is interesting. And so kind of to me proves that we're, we're right. And when I say we're, I really mean Katzi's right about the design of the next generation Bluebird. So it does have a control sat, but they're hiding the design because it's so proprietary in terms of how it's working. And previously they would have shown the schematic of what's going on. This time they seem to be obscuring it. And that I think is just proof positive that the design, uh, we know it's changed and we think it's really cool and it's going to be really exciting. And so another kind of look back. This week though, I thought was interesting is just what Anpanman wrote about. Here's the timeline, and I find this actually really interesting and pretty similar to the narrative on some topics that I've spoken about previously, like SaaS, AI. I think I've related it to shale drilling. You could relate it to the cell phone itself, but back in 2020, ASTS was just dismissed. It was a small niche market. By the way, it wasn't going to work. Other people aren't doing it. Therefore, it must not be worth doing. Elon didn't do it. Therefore, it's definitely not worth doing. And now fast forward 5 years, every single MNO is interested in it. Every single handset manufacturer is interested in it. Governments are interested in it. Defense is interested in it. Everyone wants to get in on it. And SpaceX just put down $19 billion, the same type of numbers Facebook put down to buy WhatsApp. SpaceX just did for one necessary but not sufficient component to even begin to have a technical solution for this market. It just shows how far ahead ASTS was thinking. And it goes back to this comment that, uh, You know, obviously a legacy satellite guy said on this Paris interview where he said to Scott, quote, you guys bet your whole ball of wax on this technology, quote, which is really a way to date yourself really quickly. I'm going to start telling my kids like, well, you really bet your whole ball of wax on this idea that you didn't have to brush your teeth. And they're going to look at me and go. Why? They just won't look at me. They will walk away in absolute embarrassment and disgust and disown me if I ever use the term ball of wax, which I don't even really know what the, what it's really supposed to mean. I'm going to look that one up. But Scott said, yeah, we did bet our ball of wax. We did not do a half measure. We bet on an entirely bespoke system to solve a problem with first principles, correctly without half measures while defying the convention of the market because we had first principles of what we wanted to do. And we were right. And so you look at what legacy would have done. You would have used S-band spectrum. You would have had a narrowband solution. You would have had modified devices because you would have not tried to solve the link budget problem by having a huge satellite in orbit. There's a lot of things you would not have done if you were clinging to the past. And so a similarity to me is when Elon had to think about how to design an electric car and everyone said, well, why don't you put a small engine in it as well? Why don't you hedge? You know, what if you run out of battery? What, Blah blah blah. All these what-ifs. And I remember reading some some books about the origins of Tesla, and he just looked at it and went, "It is so much more complicated if you have an internal combustion engine in there as well." We we just have to start from a blank page. We have to have first principles about what we're doing. We're going to have an EV car. We're going to try to make it super simple, and we're going to try to make it cheap, and we're going to try to make it good. And that's really what ASTS did. They said. Our design parameters are obviously unmodified device, which means a very weak signal on the terminal. And so we have to have an enormous satellite in space, generate an enormous amount of power to close that link budget, so on and so forth. They had to think differently. And so as a result, I think the look back is going to be almost humorous when, call it in 3 to 5 years from now, People will look back at the really false malignment of AST SpaceMobile in a similar way to how the cell phone was maligned 30 years ago and how EVs were maligned, how the cloud was maligned. I don't know that AI was ever really dismissed, but Nvidia was. AMD was. I don't know that AMD really had a first principles approach. I think they just sort of executed really well. But it's lonely when you're doing something that no one has done before and creating a market that people have a difficult time drawing it really a comparison to because the, that market in itself doesn't exist. And you have to look at some different outside adjacencies to, to figure out what might be. And that's my bet is that the market sizing exercise I did is betting not on ASTS, the share of the market that we'll see today, but a compound bet on ASTS and a related bet, obviously on the development of the market itself. And so what is perceived now as sort of dead spots and things like that, we've been over this a million times. I think it's going to expand in ways we don't even know today, but we're seeing it already in terms of how things like IoT, autonomous vehicles, defense systems, position navigation and tracking, which is GPS systems, missile defense, emergency response, all of these things are going to utilize this technology. And I think the use cases are going to explode. And so we'll get to the market in a second, but that compound bet I think is where you can make the most money because people will ignore something at first because there isn't kind of a known big market. But when the market explodes itself and you're the leader in it, it's very difficult for anyone else to catch you at that point. So that's good. And then you're going to have a massive rerating of the opportunity. So let's talk a little bit about That head start. And so as some more weeks pass between the SpaceX announcement with EchoStar, I guess it was actually last week, we're, we're getting just more press around what a lot of us figured out last week, which is that it's going to require a lot of work for SpaceX to operationalize the newly acquired spectrum. So never mind that that deal won't close until 2027. But they're going to have, they haven't done tests yet. So they're going to start doing some tests in late 2026. Tests. Can't even remember the year we did BW3, but that might've been 2022. I mean, long time testing, long time. And then they have to integrate it with chip manufacturers. They have to integrate it with the handset devices. There's a lot of things that have to happen. Yeah. And importantly, then they have to do things like an ASIC. I think laws sometimes are just the hard critical path items that ASTS has been working on for the past 5 years that are integral to a successful technical solution, never mind a commercial solution, just a technical solution. And so I went back to Just study a little bit more of the ASIC. And so this is just ChatGPT output, which is good enough. We're just asking what would it take for ASIC development for SpaceX? And ChatGPT thinks just because SpaceX is special that they'll be able to get something in early 2028. Seems optimistic that you can have an ASIC really done in 2 and change years. It requires a lot of testing to tape it out. People have asked for comments on X. There's a lot of engineers and people with semiconductor experience seem to think that this is a much longer process. And what's interesting, and I didn't know this, is really just understanding the spectrum in terms of RF frequency, but spectrum in terms of the gradient of difficulty of an RF ASIC versus, uh, any other type of ASIC. And so I remember I was sitting down with an NVIDIA engineer and, you know, he's at NVIDIA and he was just made the point that there's not going to be AI ASICs because the industry is changing so quickly. By the time you actually tape something out for an ASIC, everything's changed. And you just can't keep up. And so the lag time to get an ASIC taped out is just too great relative to the rate of change of the overall AI industry that his view is the FGPAs were, were going to be the way to go for AI. It's interesting. And he didn't know about RF. It was just outside of his bailiwick, outside his ball of wax. But once again, AI comes to the rescue. And what I learned is that, well, it seems obvious, but ASTS 5000, which is our ASIC chip, is a mixed signal RF ASIC. It combines analog RF front ends, like amplifiers and filters and DACs, which are digital analog converters, with digital signal processing. So compared to a pure digital ASIC, like an AI accelerator, think of like a Google TPU. The chips have higher design complexity per function, despite far fewer transistors. Digital ASICs benefit from automated tools, while ASICs that are involved in RF require manual optimization for noise, frequency response, and other elements, which make it more challenging to make. The ASICs must also handle extreme conditions like radiation, temperature swings, and power constraints. That drive complexity. So I'm of the belief that this ASIC is a very big deal. And so again, what is important about an ASIC? You again need to take a step back and realize what is the constraint that these systems are operating under. And my belief is that ASTS is really an orbital power company. The constraint is power. You need to generate via Huge solar panels, a lot of power in order to do the bandwidth processing and the beamforming. This is why the FGPA creates a limitation. They're much more power hungry. In a power constrained environment, you need the ASIC so that you can get the type of bandwidth processing you want, given the real estate constraints you have with the size of the Solar arrays. No ASIC, no power. No power, no bandwidth processing. No bandwidth processing, no big signals. No multitude of waves creating very precise beamforming. And if you don't have that, you have a weak system. Which then brings us back to then a quick review of all the other technical barriers. So never mind the commercial barriers, which I think reign supreme. It's useful to take a step back and go, what, what does ASTS accomplish with a technical moat that will be difficult to replicate? So the beamforming, first of all, it's very difficult to focus signals on a small phone antenna with Doppler compensation in a low-power environment. A SpaceX-type system is used to having a terminal on the ground. Different types of link budgets that are required. And so ASTS has patented protocols that enable high throughput links without phone modifications. And while SpaceX obviously has beamforming experience, it's optimized for satellites with terminals. And so this just requires new algorithms and testing, and there's the risk of patent infringements against ASTS when they try to do this. The next thing is you got to make them big. And ASTS has solved that with the mechanical unfurling mechanism, which they think is quite clever. And so they have figured out a way to deploy massive antennas and they're reliable in vacuum and temperature extremes. SpaceX has only deployed smaller structures and again has to overcome quite a lot of patent hurdles set by the front runner, ASTS. There's the ASIC. We've already talked about that. Then there's the software. ASTS has already developed a cellular-specific stack, which is 3GPP, uh, non-terrestrial network compliant. It has all the patents and first mover advantage. SpaceX hasn't handled that yet. And then you have the core integration. And I think this is probably a big one, uh, one that I'll have to be humble to other people's opinions on. But ASTS, what I know they have done is achieve MNL core network network integration with key partners. We learned from some TIGAS calls that SpaceX has done a rat's nest integration with T-Mobile that was hundreds of thousands of hours to integrate, you know, what it almost sounded like 2 utility cobalt systems together, bridged with bubble gum and tape. And they're not seamlessly integrated. They just sort of work together side by side. ASTS uses bent pipe, allowing for it to be G agnostic, 5G, 6G, whereas Starlink uses a regenerative architecture with the eNodeB, I think it's eNodeB for exactly what it's called, in orbit versus using the terrestrial base stations for the network integration. And so there's lots of different foundational technologies that went into one system versus another. And one might imagine that it's difficult for SpaceX to pivot and make up all this lost ground. So then we also thinking about the TAM, which I think is very interesting. We had this big report come out from Bank of America and they started to throw some pretty big numbers out there in terms of what they think the satellite market could be. And we've constantly seen these sort of $30+ billion per year revenue numbers coming out from various industry consultants. There's a lot of ways you can get there, but they're pretty big numbers. And when you start to think about why there's natural monopolies in this market, which I think there are, Barron's recently wrote an article to the same effect. Granted, they got the title of the article wrong because they said, is SpaceX a natural monopoly? And I think they made a typo and it should have been, is AST SpaceMobile a natural monopoly? And the answer to that I think is yes. And so then all of a sudden these market size numbers get to be really interesting because you can start to go, well, wow, this company's going to get like 70% plus of that market. That's really special. Those are pretty big numbers with really high margins. And so you can start to go, are they going to do $20 billion of revenue per year with, I don't know, 75% EBITDA margins? And again, the interesting calculations will be sort of the net versus look-through gross revenues. I don't want to get into that complexity right now, but these get to be some really big numbers and you can start to bridge some upside scenarios of this company being worth $100 to $300 billion of market cap. Some people will say I'm being conservative, but I think those are still pretty good aspirational targets right now. So let's just stick with that until the stock is $250. But they get to be really exciting numbers and there's a lot of analogs we've seen of companies that have sort of built their own markets, built their own TAM, and are easily clearing at $100 billion valuations. In my head, I'm thinking of like Robinhood, Came out of really nowhere. Roblox came out of nowhere. Some of these things, you know, AppLovin, it's just amazing to me and they're not even that controversial. And so I don't think the world's going to be that offended if AST SpaceMobile is worth $150 billion next year. I don't think that's really going to upset the natural balance in the world. And it does look like it's all kind of right there. And what's kind of neat is to think about how flip-flopped the market has this. And so people worry about SpaceX sort of intruding on ASTS in their market. I think it could easily flip the other way around and ASTS SpaceMobile could start intruding on Starlink's market. The MNOs have an interest in protecting fiber. In keeping satellite broadband out, ASTS can do that. I think there has to be some modest changes, but you could again see in the Legato documents that this is not hypothetical; it's actually specifically envisioned that they'll be doing fixed broadcast. Why wouldn't the MNOs offer this with ASTS? This makes sense. So that's where the script gets flipped and it's not ASTS fighting for some scraps and it certainly is not going to be SpaceX fighting for some scraps. They're in a pretty good position, but all of a sudden the market opportunity for ASTS can start to expand beyond what I think people presently think. So then we had this next tweet, SpaceX challenges. And so there were some additional things I looked at. Okay. So we have, again, these articles that talk about how they have to have chip integrations. So it got me thinking, why, why would Qualcomm help them? Why would Apple help them? Why would Google and Samsung help them? Are they obliged to? How does this work? And so just a, you know, quick, I hate to even say this is research because it's obviously just me putting it into ChatGPT, but I guess that's what kids these days do. It looks like there is no legal or regulatory obligation for mobile phone chip makers or device manufacturers to work with SpaceX. And so it's usually voluntary, you know, usually there's demand. for it and everyone kind of benefits. Here, I don't see how everyone benefits. And I just really struggle to understand why Samsung, really why Qualcomm and these guys would do that. Qualcomm, in fairness, did do this Project Stardust. I think it was what it's called from memory with Iridium for a hot moment before they canceled it because then there was just zero interest by anyone in using it. But I think that was kind of their way to get some more lock-in on their chips. Here, I'm, I'm just wondering, there's just a massive explosion inside my house. I don't know if you guys could hear that. Um, that was a really big bang. Um, anyway, back to our regularly scheduled program. Um, what was I saying?
[00:33:29] Speaker B: Oh yeah.
[00:33:30] Speaker C: Why would anyone help these guys? I don't know. And so I think we got to watch this very carefully and understand why Apple, in particular Apple, would go out of their way to support this spectrum. When you think about it, if this is a precursor ultimately to an X phone, this is where things get, things get very murky in terms of people's willingness to help. Say what you will about Elon, if a next phone comes out, you have to believe it would shave 1 or 2, at least 1 or 2% market share out of the market, maybe a lot more than that. This isn't exactly a growth market. This seems like a zero net gain for anyone, a zero-sum market. And so I don't know why they'd be raising their hand to chop off billions of dollars of their own revenue. Makes no sense to me, which brings us back to how stupid T-Mobile is. And I always say, you know, you have to be a special kind of stupid to partner with your competitor, but here, here's T-Mobile opening up their customer base to Starlink. And as more and more interviews come out about their intentions, you just have to ask yourself, why did T-Mobile do this? But then more importantly, will any other MNOs be so stupid to partner with Starlink? And that's where I just really struggle why anyone would do that. It's just so obvious that they are not carrier neutral, whereas AST SpaceMobile the entire time has gone out with a very specific business plan about being carrier neutral. And that I think is going to make the difference in terms of being a ubiquitous player versus someone who's going to More or less, I think it left at the altar. They still have this spectrum. And so it's going to be an interesting thing. What happens, like Starlink has all this spectrum. I don't know how they're going to monetize it just with T-Mobile. Is that almost going to force their hand to compete directly with the MNOs? All of a sudden they have so much capital tied up, they can't not do something that's adverse to the MNOs. It'd be an interesting thing. To see. So let me get back to the Bammel report. So I posted it out, everyone can read it, but you can just see that the narrative is changing. Leo, low Earth orbit, I still think we're very early in this trend, something that's maybe been around conversationally for a decade, but it's really now on the precipice of general understanding of what it means for The space economy, and I think that this is the space economy. And so while there'll be some missions to Mars and things like that, this is the really, I think the only scaled commercial opportunity that is there in the space economy. And to be a leader in it, especially at this early time, I think there's going to be an incredible amount of scarcity value for the winners. And I think that there's really only going to be One obvious public winner, which is AST SpaceMobile, and there's going to be a lot of FOMO for Starlink. And then we'll see Kuiper. I would not want to bet against it, but remains to be seen what's going to happen. And then I don't think you really have anyone else. And so as people start to really get conditioned for the race for space, that capital is going to only have one door to go into. Well, now there's like a little side door with EchoStar because you can buy EchoStar and effectively create SpaceX stock, which is interesting for, for those who partake. EchoStar, you know, gives you a shot glass at the bar, but ASTS is the real pure play. Substantiating this big market we're talking about is, you know, little things that keep happening like Golden Dome. And so Golden Dome wasn't on any of our Roadmaps nine months ago. I think we kind of joked and people dismissed us, but we were talking about how it could be used for this. But it didn't really burst to the forefront until Trump, and now Golden Dome is quote complete blueprint. And so I don't think anyone really knows yet who has won what, and I really hope we find out soon. But it's obviously making progress. And so the Pentagon completes the Golden Dome blueprint, but silent on costs. That's the headline that came out on. And so we don't know what's happened yet. We hope and believe that ASTS is going to be part of one of these tracking layers. We hope that what they're going to do is basically be selling their satellites under service contracts to the Pentagon for a pretty healthy margin on the hardware sale and a really juicy recurring service contract. component, which I think will do wonders for the stock. When on my loose calculations, like I value this at $5 to $7 billion per share, which is just kind of as a baseline. And so that would be, you know, $10 to $25. I think the reality is if you get a deal like that, people are going to look so far into the future about the implications of being effectively a key component of our national security and could very easily blow past that in terms of then the implied value of future expected growth beyond that. Let's get the first deal first, because I don't know if they've won. And we didn't know that they're going to have a lot of military business. It would be great to get the marquee Golden Dome contract, but until they do, we have to assume they don't. But then you just see that we're really in the right place at the right time. And so you had another article came out this week where, quote, Europe is preparing its missile defenses and will likely use, um, I think this is his guess, is that they'll likely use ASTS. But Europe is having Russia problems. And so Russia just flew a bunch of drones into Poland and they had a hard time dealing with it. And so this technology Is now going global. We have SatCom. So Vodafone as a fully European entity is going to be able to offer this technology to European countries. And so when we think about the scale of the opportunity for defense businesses, we really don't know what the upper limit could be. And I still think it could be many, many billions of dollars and then put a 20x multiple on that. You start to very quickly start to justify the entire market cap of the company today on some of these opportunities. And so I hope that they materialize, but it's useful to keep seeing the change and how the, effectively the prospect pipeline keeps stacking higher and higher. Something else that's been on our prospect pipeline for a very long time has been FirstNow. And so really at this point, it's just like, come on, Just do something. And so their budget closes September 30th. They have this big appropriation of their budget. They literally have in all of their board backs satellite investment on their roadmap. They specifically name ASTS on it. So it's, it's, it's really kind of the edging session of all time. It's like, guys, come on. Like, we're not even to the point of insinuation. You say, We've allocated extra money for satellite and LEO technologies and our partners, AST SpaceMobile, and it's all filed on the FCC docket. Let's have, let's get something to the tape, guys. So I don't know if that will actually be done before their fiscal year, which is evidently September 30th or whenever, but we do know that this is going to happen. The spectrum lease is On the docket. We also have more launch sort of coming on the daily. And so Europe has been testing its own reusable rocket. Looks exciting, the Themis. And so I don't know the timeline on that. Looks like a prototype. So maybe that's a couple of years out, but it's, it is good to have more reusable launch capacity coming. And then you have Blue Origin Really gearing up. And so they're working to support multiple New Glenn launches a month next year, multiple launches a month. And so is that going to happen right on schedule? I think most people would say the nature of space is to delay, but they're getting there. And this is an enormous amount of capacity that comes on. And that's what gets really exciting is all of a sudden the launch market goes from the current sort of tight, you have to pre-plan and pre-book, which It's nice that ASTS did do that, spent a fortune securing their launch capacity for 2026 and 2027, but it's nice to know that this market is likely going to be pretty loose in the coming years just because like all commodity markets, there's this, a price signal and it happened to have a very long lead time for suppliers, but then it is coming. And then it will not go away. You're, you're, it's going to take a lot to start taking capacity out of the market. And that's, you know, why iBoats.launch is kind of like shipping markets. You can build a boat, but it takes a long time for that boat to go back to Bangladesh and meet, meet the breaker. And so all of a sudden we're going to have this scaled F9 program, maybe Starship. Blue Origin is definitely real. You have ULA with renewed vigor, and then maybe Neutron will happen. I say that just to throw a little caution to the wind because, you know, that still hasn't flown. They have a very good track record, so hopefully it flies. And Neutron coming to the market, if the Rocket Lab guys are right in terms of the velocity of their cadence, that's going to add, you know, yet more capacity. And then you have all the The other guys like ISRO, you have Ariane, and, you know, at this rate, who's to say that Trump won't just make a deal with Putin and all of a sudden we have the Russians back, although that I think is a very remote possibility right now. But the launch market is going to be very different in 2 years, and that is good for people that are short launch. So with that, seems like we still kept it Kind of on the regular time. Thanks everyone for joining. I'm really excited about next week because again, we have, what do we have? On Monday, we have the confirmation hearing for Lagarde. And to my knowledge, that is still scheduled for 2 o'clock Eastern time. And what that means is that will mean that the plan Is done. Remaining for operational purposes is FCC approval. I think what we've seen with Brendan Carr is you put it on his desk, he will approve it. And so this will be potentially a meaningful event. It's hard to know what the market cares about with AST SpaceMobile because again, we live in a glass house evidently, but in light of a couple of things, in my view, everyone assumes ASTS will be delayed always all the time. So even though we have a confirmation hearing scheduled in court tomorrow, and anyone can go see that, you just type it in Google. Despite that, I think that when that gavel strikes the bench and the deal is confirmed, I think that could end up being a big deal. Should certainly be a big headline. And it will be an interesting headline now that people recently have been conditioning themselves to SpaceX and what they've been really hyping about their 50 megahertz of EchoStar spectrum, which again is not supported by any phones or chips presently. And so all of a sudden news that has been around for 9 months, you know, we've all known about Legato. I wonder if that news takes a new character when it's A, confirmed and B, now put in the context of Elon just talking up the value of spectrum in the past. Week and a half, 2 weeks. We will find out tomorrow. So have a great week, everyone. Thanks for joining. I'll, I'll try to do these Spaces during the fall season, right after the football games end. And so I'll, I'll maybe I'll just start to set the start date time a little bit later, and then I'll generally just start it kind of near the end of the game. If it's a blowout, I'll just start it earlier. Thanks again, everyone, for joining. Talk to everyone soon.
[00:46:27] 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.
[00:46:53] Speaker B: something very, very big. And I think with this technology, we can really affect a billion lives. AST SpaceMobile is the only company that has proven technology to deliver cellular broadband connectivity directly from space to the everyday smartphone. People will just basically turn on their phone and be seamless regardless of where you are. We don't want the user even to know that it's connected by satellite. Our role is to bring this into reality, always in partnership with the animals.
[00:47:26] Speaker A: Listen.
[00:47:34] Speaker C: Mmm, waffles.