Anpanman - Lunch Recap and SpaceX Success

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[00:01:03] Speaker C: This is the AST SpaceMobile Podcast.
[00:01:07] Speaker D: 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.
[00:01:23] Speaker E: Everyone, thanks for joining. Um, I was able to get some sleep, and so feeling pretty good. Uh, so yesterday I went to bed, I think it was at 9:30, woke up at 2:30— no, 2:20. Uh, was on with all you guys until maybe it was 4:40, 4:45, and then I tried to go to bed and I was rolling around. Uh, and I was able to get some type of sleep, and then I had to wake up and take the kids to school, and now I'm back here. But I did want to host a space and just talk about post-launch, um, some what to expect and a few other tidbits. But first, um, yeah, what an amazing evening. I want to thank SpaceX, uh, a wonderful and flawless, uh, Falcon 9 launch. We saw the 3 Bluebirds go up into orbit. We saw, um, Bluebird 10 get released, and then 9, and then 8. And so, yeah, we've accomplished the first Block 2 batch launch. And as a reminder, we, we've already had a successful batch launch previously, which was, um, the Block 1 satellites. We, we did 5 of those on the Falcon 9 back in September of 2024. But this is the first successful batch launch of the Block 2 design, and specifically the Block 2 composite design. I think it's important to note that if you want to talk about innovation, AST SpaceMobile, this is now the way I count it, the fifth spacecraft design that's been successfully deployed into low Earth orbit. The other designs were BlueWalker One, which was a CubeSat. That was the satellite that had the cell phone enclosed in it, and the company did testing in reverse where they had the large phased arrays down here on Earth, and it communicated with a cell phone that was orbiting at 26,000 or 27,000 kilometers around the Earth. And so that was a very smart choice for the company to iterate and test that way. And then you had BlueWalker 3, which was the first fully scaled satellite that was a prototype that demonstrated the viability of the technology and the platform. That satellite was also very critical in testing with the military, which opened up a bunch of contracts. And so that was a huge— back in September 2022, that was a huge watershed event for the company. That was aboard a Falcon 9 rideshare mission, and that was my first ever launch that I attended. And so that was the second spacecraft design. that was successful. And then the third spacecraft design was the 5 Block I satellites, which were the similar— which were similar in size to Blue Archer 3. These were the 8-meter by 8-meter satellite design with the control sat in the middle. And you had the slightly more complex unfolding mechanism where you had 2 arms fold out, and then those arms folded in 2 directions to create the array. And so that was the third design. And then the fourth design was FM-1 and FM-2. These were the metallic Block 2 satellites that were built for the Space Development Agency. And the first one was launched on ISRO and was successful in deployment. And I'll talk a little bit more about that one. And then of course FM-2, which was Bluebird 7, which unfortunately met its early end when Blue Origin Failed to, um, on the second stage, the, the, the second burn failed to ignite. And unfortunately, that satellite was placed into an elliptical orbit and as a result was not going to be able to sustain operations, and they had to deorbit that prematurely. But that was the 4th satellite, which for all intents and purposes was successful, um, because Bluebird 6 FM1 was successful. And then unfortunately, um, FM2 Bluebird 7, the mission was cut short. And now we are on our 5th design. And so this is the Block 2 composite satellites. And, you know, the, the key thing that's different about the composite satellites are they are significantly lighter than the metallic ones. And these are designed, as we learned overnight, to withstand 6G of force. And, um, and that's in an 8-satellite stacked configuration, which, if you can imagine, um, If you were, you know, just imagine, um, holding 8 people above you on your shoulder and everyone's standing shoulder on each other's shoulders, um, the person at the bottom is going to have the most significant, uh, force that they've got to hold and, and weight. And as well, it's 2 things, right? So imagine that you're holding 7 people above you. So there's 7 people that you're— you've gotta, um, you know, hold up that weight. But then if you were to put your I'll put all those 8 people, including yourself, in the rocket and to launch the rocket. Not only would you have to support those 7 people, but then you would have to sustain 6 Gs of force. And so a great analogy overnight that we saw was that whether— I think the one that really struck home for me was one of those satellites has to be able to sustain the weight of the Statue of Liberty without the base. And so that's pretty tremendous engineering. And, um, and so the company solved that issue and is able to stack 3 to 4, and it will continue to iterate to, to, um, be able to stack 8 of these, which will— 8 particularly will go into a, uh, Blue Origin New Glenn fairing. And then for the New Glenn 9x4 configuration, you probably are going to have 6, 6x6, um, stacked. But, but yeah, uh, this is just a testament to the company's, uh, innovation, and it's something that I keep pointing out, um, when I make this This, you know, I talk about not betting against American innovation. This is really complex and hard stuff, right? There's no other satellites in— and, you know, I'm not a historian, so— but from what I can tell, I don't think that there's been anyone else who's accomplished this feat of creating this specific design where you don't need an LVA, a launch vehicle adapter. It's all encompassed and you you're able to deploy this massive phased array, which is 200 meters squared in size. And then of course there's the tail as well, which, you know, the company doesn't advertise, but there is an extension, a tail that has additional solar arrays on it. There's been some speculation perhaps there's some phased array functionality on that tail as well. But yeah, this is, This is not easy stuff, and I know obviously some people have given the company stick for delays in the past, but this is why it's able to do these unbelievable things, right? Which is the the large phased array is what differentiates ASD Space Mobile from Starlink and potential future competitors. I think it's important to reiterate that that large phased array is what allows the company to speak. to your unmodified phone on low-band spectrum. It can do that with not as much, you know, it's able to hear the phone that's down here on Earth traveling, you know, the satellite's traveling at 26,000 kilometers, 27,000 kilometers, and it's able to get those signals and communicate with your low-powered phone, which is unbelievable, right? And this is not You know, Starlink is their phased array, which is currently around, call it 2.5 meters by 2.5 meters. That's optimized for mid-band spectrum. And even then they have to put a lot of power. They've had to get waivers from the FCC in order to operate and to connect and make the link budget with the phone. And that's of course with newer phones because Starlink can't work with older phones. But it's going to be newer phones that have a specific chipset in order to communicate with that mid-band spectrum. Whereas AST works with existing phones and prior phones as well, which is an important point, which I will, I guess, connect to this JLEO project out of Japan. It's one of the reasons why I think AST SpaceMobile and Rakuten are well positioned to win that contract because AST's technology, the Block 2 satellites, can communicate with any existing phone currently, right? And so, uh, I don't know about you guys, but I, I rarely upgrade my phones. I'm probably on a 4 to 5 year cycle, um, although I guess recently I've been upgrading a little more frequently. Um, but, you know, I think for disaster recovery and, and national security, uh, it's important to have backwards compatibility. And it's important to note that Starlink is not compatible with existing phones. You have to buy something new. that works with their satellites right now. And then of course you will have to buy another phone in order to utilize the EchoStar spectrum that they plan to deploy sometime in 2028, 2029. So yeah, this is a key differentiator. This is why AST SpaceMobile has pounded the table for many years that you need a large phased array. There were a number of competitors who said, oh, that's not having a large satellite, it doesn't make sense. And we can communicate with smaller satellites, which are then, of course, like, as we've seen over time with Starlink, any of these players, you name it, everyone is moving towards larger phased arrays. But given the technology and the architecture that some of these folks have, it's going to take them quite some time to get to where we are. In addition to the fact that we've got all these patents, I think the company updated the number of patents today in the press release, but yeah, there's a massive moat there, which, you know, the company hasn't been— I don't think they've been strict in enforcing those patents. But one of the things you do is you allow your competitors to try to solve a problem and let them get intertwined in the technology that you've deployed and patented. And then you come back later and say, hey, now that you've committed your entire roadmap to technologies that are fundamentally covered by our patents, it's time to pay. It's either you pay with royalties or you stop doing what you're doing. And so I don't know ultimately what the company plans to do around the patents, but rest assured, I'm more than certain that they will look to monetize those or enforce them. But But yeah, so going back to the launch, so we had a successful launch. The 3 Bluebirds were deployed. We got a great press release this morning, which gave a number of details and nuggets, which are updates to the business. And so this is, I think, one of the first times that the company has confirmed that the Block 2 design are optimized for 200 megabits per second peak speeds. And so this is much higher than the Block 1. Satellites, which they've achieved around 99 megabits per second recently. And so it was at the Bluebird 7 launch where, when Abel had welcomed all the guests, he did talk about the current Block 2 satellites hitting 160 megabits per second. So I assume that's where BB6 is right now. It's getting that speed level and through further optimization, they're probably going to get to 200 megabits per second, which is— Huge, you know, big news. The current Starlink satellites currently top out at around 7 megabits per second in a cell, whereas we again are for Block 1 at 99 and call it current, you know, testing, we're at probably 160 for Block 2, which they expect that to get to around 200 megabits. So that just shows you the differences in speed and performance. of the satellites where AST is putting forward a true broadband service, whereas Starlink in its current generation is really narrowband texting, SOS messaging, some pictures perhaps. But the next generation of Starlink satellites, they're hoping to get to, I think it's 150 megabits per second. And of course that satellite is dependent on Starship being successful and at a commercial cadence. Let's see, so a few other things. This is a big piece of news which, uh, Space Mob had been speculating, but we got confirmation today that, uh, Bluebird 11, 12, and 13 are in final preparations for shipment. So, uh, there is some word, word, um, analysis here. I think in previous times the company had talked about, um, the previous batch being in final testing, whereas this looks like they're saying it's in final preparation, so perhaps they've already finished testing. And, um, and yeah, this just shows production cadence. So I think we are pretty close to getting a press release that Bluebird 11, 12, and 13 are ready to be shipped. Um, now I did talk about this before where there might be a difference between the satellites being ready to be shipped versus actually being shipped, uh, because depending on when our next Falcon 9 launch is scheduled, if that's sometime in July, then those Bluebirds are probably going to ship relatively soon. However, if that next launch is in early August, then we might end up holding those Bluebirds for some period of time before we ship them, because you don't want to ship them before they're ready to be received. You know, you don't want to be an unwanted guest. And so this is something, by the way, that the company— I mentioned this last night— the company is prepping for. So I believe the company is procuring offsite storage and processing down in Cape Canaveral. Because if you can imagine, if we're gonna be launching 248 satellites over the next 2 years, 2 to 3 years, there's gonna be some level of logistics that need to be worked out. And you don't want to take valuable factory floor up in Midland for storage. And so I think you're gonna see first more boxes, more of the black AST SpaceMobile boxes being purchased. And then, um, you're going to start to see, you know, some of these things being— some of these satellites being shipped before they're ready to be processed. Um, we know this because ASD SpaceMobile, um, was looking to hire— was looking to hire a manager down in Cape Canaveral, um, for payload integration, receiving and integration. And so, uh, that could be another, you know, we might see a, a lease or a purchase of space down in Cape Canaveral, uh, in order for, um, in order for that to happen. So, so that's pretty exciting. But yeah, uh, I think now we're seeing production cadence, um, now hitting like a steady state, getting close to 6. And 11, 12, 13, um, we should see some news about those 3 relatively soon. The other interesting nugget that came out of the press release, um, now we are at, uh, production levels for 37 Bluebird satellites, and that's up from 32. And so when they talk about 32 versus 37, I believe that's the cumulative number, although I could be wrong. Actually, I should probably get some confirmation from the company of what they actually mean by 32 versus 37. But we are, well, more importantly, we've incrementally added 5 more satellites to the production line. And so we're pretty much getting close to 40. Which is great. Again, this goes back to the whole notion that production cadence is ramping up pretty rapidly here. And so we are going to start hitting some constraints around launch, just given that Blue Origin New Glenn is going to be offline for a few months. But I do expect the company to announce more multi-launch agreements, and we will start getting one, additional Falcon 9 launches in the pipeline, and then two, Uh, you probably are going to see in the near term, my guess is multi-launch agreement with something formal put on the tape with ULA and also Mitsubishi. Uh, and then Arianespace could be another one added as well. And then some of the more frontier type of launch guys like Relativity, uh, may get added, um, as a, as an MLA as well. Um, as some of you guys know, Relativity is supposed to launch the Terran R, which is a pretty large rocket. It's, it's pretty much, um, I don't think it's, I wouldn't call it a medium lift. It's a heavy lift rocket because I think it can take something on the order of like 6 Bluebirds. And so that is supposed to enter its first maiden flight sometime in Q3 or Q4. So that's going to be pretty exciting to watch. But I think my guess is the company's going to enter or have this like layered strategy where they're going to anchor Bluebird launches via Falcon 9, and then they're going to layer on, of course, Blue Origin, but then some of these other providers as well. And so with that matrix of launch providers, which are going to be quite a few, and I forgot to add ISRO, they're going to be able to get to where they need to go and not have all their eggs in one, two, or three baskets. Although the most important One, of course, is Falcon 9, and then hopefully Blue Origin New Glenn after a successful commercial mission or 2, then they'll start launching on that platform.
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[00:19:39] Speaker E: So, um, for Bluebird 8, 9, and 10, um, now what we're looking for— so this morning, Abel confirmed that the, the mission was a success. Um, the satellites were injected into the proper orbit and operations are nominal, meaning that they've established communications with the satellites and they've powered up and cycled. For those, this is an interesting tidbit. I did email Abel Avalon. I rarely ever email this guy because I know he's busy, but I only do it on these types of occasions. And I congratulated him and his response was to thank me for the kind words. And then he said, it really went perfect. So I'll take that as a clean bill of health, that everything went as expected and things are looking good. So now that the Bluebirds are inserted into orbit, I mentioned before, they need to be detumbled, meaning they need to be oriented in the right way. You might— you're going to rely on your magnetorquers and then also some of the— perhaps some of the propulsion to get them in the right spot. And then when at the optimal time and condition, they will unfold the Bluebird. So they'll deploy the large phased array. And so this is not the first time we're doing it with this particular spacecraft. We've already done it with Bluebird 6, and now we've got 8, 9, and 10. They'll probably do these sequentially. And in terms of timing, it's important to note that since we've already done it once, the team has an idea of what to expect and, you know, a process to unfold these. And so it should be less risky this time around based off of our learnings from Bluebird 6. And so previously when ISRO launched Bluebird 6, I believe that was like December 23rd, and then we got a PR confirming successful deployment on February 10th. And so that's approximately 49 days. My guess is that they probably unfolded it successfully and deployed it I don't know, maybe 40 days or maybe 45 days, but then they waited for a few days to make sure everything was stable and everything seemed good before actually PRing it. And so on that timeline, I would expect that we will get a PR from the company that the Bluebirds have successfully— and I guess something to keep in mind is that there are 3 of them, so it might take a little longer, but it's probably going to follow A shorter timeline. My guess is, you know, anywhere between 35 to 45 days. And so we probably will get some confirmation of successful deployment 1 to 1.25 months out. And so that's going to put us sometime in mid-July to the second half of July, mid to second half of July. So that's another big, you know, milestone to look forward to. And I will actually add that to the Catalyst tracker. And so another thing I wanted to talk about is I did get some confirmation that we are getting shorted to wazoo. And I think this dynamic is because of the SpaceX IPO. If you were someone who wants to put on a speculative position, whether it's program-driven or if you're a long-short guy, one of the things you could have did is to go long SpaceX and short a basket of space companies or short know, you could short individual companies. Interestingly, let's see, I looked at real-time short interest and we have hit an all-time peak. And so we actually hit an all-time peak yesterday. Some of this data, it gets updated every day and sometimes there's revisions because you have late reporting from some of these prime brokers. But our previous high short interest was around $69 million. And that was when the stock price was much higher. And so the reason why I mentioned that is the— you will have some level of convertible arbitrageurs shorting the stock to hedge their bonds, the underlying warrant that's in the bond. And so when the stock price goes up, they would short more. And when the stock price goes down, they actually cover, they get more long. And so we actually have hit an all-time high for short interest at 72.2%. 3 million shares with the stock price down here versus where it was the previous high when the short interest was at 69 million. And that was like mid-May. So I think we were closer to 100 or so. And so you've got a number of these hedge fund guys who are, I guess, they're doing this based off of a trade, right? They're shorting AST SpaceMobile and they're long SpaceX, or they might just be short all space stocks. Which is probably the case, just given how space has performed in general. But the reason why I point this out is I think it's an interesting dynamic where we've seen this time and time again, where you've got a number of finance people who short ASD as part of a basket. They really don't know what they're shorting, and you know, it's the five minutes of due diligence. It's like, oh, okay. Yeah, there's a company that's competing with SpaceX. So or Starlink. And so there's no way they can win. And so there might be some fundamental guys in there shorting as well. But usually when you have these massive spikes in short interest, it's been good in terms of an ingredient and a catalyst, right? So I've mentioned, let me just look at the tracker that I have here. There's a number of big catalysts coming up. Obviously the first one is batch 11, 12, and 13 being announced ready to be shipped. You've got this $1 billion plus potential project out of Japan. That decision is coming at the end of this month, so in under 2 weeks. We also have Bluebird 8 through 10 successful unfolding and confirmation of operations. That's going to be happening. And then I think another interesting milestone is the achievement of 200 megabits per second per performance, which I expect the company will give some type of update. Perhaps we might get that during a quarterly call. But yeah, there's quite a few things that are coming up. The FCC STA being granted for testing in 900 MHz for military applications, that should be, you know, we saw the FCC application for that last week and just given the new world at the FCC, I think turnaround that could be very, very fast. And then yeah, there's a few other things here. I mean, like T-Mobile definitive commercial agreement. I think that's probably two two quarters out or more, but you might start seeing some hints of that, which of course you can rely on to get some of those signals. But there's a lot going on, and in between that, you probably are going to see some multi-launch agreements and additional launches with Falcon Nine. But as I mentioned before. You know, you could see ULA, Ariane, Mitsubishi, Relativity, and others. Sorry, I'm just typing. I'm updating this catalyst tracker, which I'm going to tweet out in a bit. But yeah, it's, you know, I welcome short sellers. They've always been great friends of ours. They've contributed their hard-earned dollars and capital to fueling our our stock to ever higher levels, all the way down from $2, all the way to $1.33. I can guarantee you whoever was buying at $1.33, those were probably shorts who were covering. And so I think we're going to hit a new all-time high in the next few months. And the rocket is being loaded, right? You've got all these guys who are piling in, which is great. I don't despise short sellers. I think they They serve an important function in the market. And when they're wrong, they have to cover and they represent incremental buying. So yeah, thank you shorts for pressing your bets. But anyway, I think that's most of what I had. Not sure if anyone dropped any comments or have questions. Let's see. Friend Ben Deverin is asking, what do you think of SpaceX being a potential buyer of paired AWS-3 still owned by EchoStar? I know Ben is a big EchoStar bull. For those that don't know, EchoStar owns through the SpaceX transaction for its AWS-3 spectrum. They received, I think it's like 2.2% of SpaceX's overall outstanding stock. And so That's a pretty interesting, some of the parts trade because EchoStar in its parts, the Spectrum that owns still and the Dish Network pay-TV business. And then if you add it all up, I think it trades at like a 40% or 50% discount to all that stuff added up. You've obviously got to take some liquidity discount and tax against that. But EchoStar has not traded very well in face of SpaceX doing well. And so That's an interesting dynamic. I think for those who've been in the hedge fund industry, the tough thing is when you don't have enough buyers or capital to basically compress a spread that wide, then it's going to persist. And so that one is pretty much a trading dynamic that will persist until there's some catalyst that unlocks that value. But, um, but yeah, I mean, I wouldn't be surprised if, if, um, EchoStar— let's see, if SpaceX buys more spectrum from EchoStar. Although I think it's a little weird that they didn't purchase all of it, um, I guess in one go, if that's the question that's being asked. But, um, okay. Hearing Ant-Man on X 40,000 feet in the air hits different. So I think he's on a flight. back from Germany, I believe, or he's going back to Germany. Um, let's see. How many AST space mobile satellites are required for full service in North America? Uh, I think we need approximately 45, right? And so once we hit that, we're, we're going to get to beta service at 20 to 25, which is going to be intermittent. And then for, for near continuous service, we need about 45. Let's see. Can you touch on why hedge fund pair trades long SpaceX, short ASTS like this? For me, it appears to concentrate risk in a singular decision, but I realize it doesn't. It's an odd concept for a non-finance brain. Um, so when you work at a hedge fund, uh, there, there are times when folks want to— there's 2 ways to express it. Well, there's 3 ways. You can, um, for a hedge fund, it's not like working at Fidelity where you can just be long stocks and, hey, I'm a long-term investor and not worry about volatility. Although those guys at Fidelity do have to beat the index, which is really hard. But at hedge funds, you typically are going to be running a neutral book or maybe slightly net long, which means for every dollar you deploy long, you have to have some offsetting short because clients are paying you the big bucks to generate true alpha. They don't want to pay you for beta, meaning like if you're just going to be long the market or long your favorite ideas, that's not interesting to them. They want absolute returns. And so they want alpha. So allocators want you to outperform something in good times and bad times, right? So if the market is down 20%, you shouldn't be down 20%. You should be, maybe if you're good, you should be up 2 or 3%, or you might be down just 5%, right? And so as part of that, you have to run a balanced book where you have some longs and you have to offset that to a degree with shorts. There's 2 approaches to that. 2 main approaches. One would be to long a stock and then you short a basket of comparables. And so a basket, if you're long SpaceX, my guess is your basket is going to be short Rocket Lab, AST SpaceMobile, Planet Labs, like some of these companies in various percentages. And you know, you can go to Goldman Sachs and they'll create a basket for you. They'll try to, they'll look at historical data and the underlying exposures of the businesses, and they'll try to give you as good of a fit to short and hedge against SpaceX, right? And so it'll be some combination of those companies. I, my guess is that AST is going to index pretty high against SpaceX. And so it's going to be a bigger part of your basket, including Rocket Lab as well, which Rocket Lab, by the way, doesn't have that high of short interest. But, but that's one way to do it. Or you could do a pair trade, right? And so an easy way to think about a pair trade is back in the day, if you were at a hedge fund, there's like a new company, it's smaller in size, but it's taking market share from the bigger company. And so pair trade would be, you'd go long This is an easy example. You go long Apple when they release the iPhone and you short Motorola. You short Motorola who has the Razr or you short Motorola and BlackBerry, right? Or you pick one of those, right? You could go long Apple and short those 2 or short BlackBerry, right? And so that's a perfect pair trade because one is taking share from the other. One's growing, the other one is losing share. And so you're not only making— you're you're going to ride the— you're going to hedge out the beta of the sector, which is handheld phones. I mean, it's not perfect because obviously Apple has exposure to other stuff, but over time Apple's going to accrete way more value and BlackBerry's going to lose value. And so you're going to make money by being long the thing that's gaining market share and you're going to make money being short the thing that's losing share. So that's a pair trade versus going long something and then shorting a basket, which is what I mentioned before. And so Yeah, I think, I mean, here there could be some, there could be like fundamental shorts in AST SpaceMobile Group, might not be long SpaceX, or they could just be short everything. But I think with the advent of SpaceX coming to market, clearly there are some folks who want to hedge some of their exposure. And so we saw some of that running up into the IPO, but then you're seeing some of that happen now. So that's why short interest is at such a high level. And so if you really believe in SpaceX and you're at a hedge fund, but the risk managers are like, hey, you can't just be long this thing, you need to have some offsetting shorts in the sector, then AST would be a natural, one of the natural things that you would short, which makes for interesting dynamics, right? Because everyone thinks hedge fund guys are smart, but oftentimes they're not. And When you have this type of trade on and you don't understand the stuff that you're shorting can blow up in your face. I've had it happen to me many times over my career. And so yeah, this is pretty dangerous stuff, especially with a company like AST where it's working with 60 mobile network operators. A lot of these hedge fund guys probably have no idea that T-Mobile is going to come on as a customer. And so they're not pricing in that risk, right? And so you've got $3 billion potential subscribers, once the constellation's deployed and you turn it on, that trade's going to absolutely blow up in your face, or it's going to blow up in your face as the name gets de-risked and people start pricing in additional financial upside. And so that's why I think it's funny to see short interest at an all-time high. And for a lot of these guys, they're going to learn the hard way, similar to the shorts that were in at $2, at $20, at $30, at $40, at $50. Um, it's, it's tale as old as time. Let's see. Okay, someone's asking about shorting. Uh, I already answered that. Let's see. No one wants to buy the stock for some reason. It's had bullish news for the last 6 months and has been flat to red. I guess the market wants to see revenue now. Any bad news will crash stock. So let's level set this comment here. There has been a lot of bullish news and there's been some unfortunate news as well. So first, the two big pieces of unfortunate news was Bluebird 7 failing to make orbit because of a failed second stage for Blue Origin New Glenn. And then the other big piece of bad news was Blue Origin New Glenn 4 blowing up on the launch pad.
[00:36:05] Speaker B: Right.
[00:36:07] Speaker E: For those that don't know, Blue Origin New Glenn is an important part of our launch campaign, and that rocket being out of commission for, call it, the next 6 months is important. And that's why the company, the stock price did derate, and also the entire space sector for that matter. At the end of May, the entire space sector was trading at all-time highs, and then it absolutely derated on that mishap. The reason why the space sector derated is that having a heavy lift alternative to SpaceX is important for not just AST, but for any number of companies and including the US government, you know, defense applications. And so that was an unfortunate mishap which caused all these stocks to rate lower. And yeah, that was a big piece of bad news, which I don't think anybody can deny was a pretty bad impact on AST. I think we had hit 133 before that news, and then we've obviously derated back down to 86. But that's part of investing in space. And so I think we should see with the settling out of the SpaceX IPO and with a bunch of positive catalysts coming up for AST, it's going to be hard for the market to ignore that. Let's see, more Dr Pepper, please. Yes, I agree. I, it's kind of funny because like when I, when I was growing up, I used to drink Dr Pepper every day. It got to the point where I think I grew sick of it and I don't drink it anymore. But whenever I do want to think back to my childhood, I pop open a Dr Pepper. Let's see, Amit Agarwal, do you even sleep? Not really. I don't sleep as much as I would like to. And it's one thing, I'm older than probably a decent amount of listeners. As you get older, um, you should savor your ability to have nice deep long sleep because as you get older it's actually hard to sustain that. Um, it's just part of growing old. Let's see. So, uh, I think that's pretty much it. Um, maybe in wrapping I'll just say, you know, this is a tremendous milestone. Um, as I mentioned before, this is our first stacked launch. Uh, this is A testament to the company's engineering prowess. You know, this is the 5th spacecraft design and we've got, you know, a spacecraft design or Bluebird Block 3 in the works and Block 4. Block 3 would be the mid-band constellation, which I believe we're going to have one of those satellites produced by the end of this year. And then you've got Block 4, which is either going to be the C-band constellation, so 3.5 gigahertz, of spectrum that will be utilized in partnership with AT&T and Verizon and soon T-Mobile. And that's going to get the constellation up to the gigabit level of speeds where, yeah, I mean, that's like replacing fiber and those types of delivery mechanisms, but that's in the future. And then also what we call Blackbirds. I don't know if the company will ever refer to them as Blackbirds, but the government constellation. Um, that's going to be in the works, uh, over the coming months. And for all intents and purposes, I think, uh, FM-1 and FM-2 were Blackbirds. Um, unfortunately FM-2 did not make it. But, um, but yeah, I think what I forgot to mention, um, I guess before as potential catalyst is I do believe we will get some additional news around defense contracts. And, um, and so Golden Dome and otherwise, whether it's, um, communications related or radar and sensing. Those are going to be coming here soon. And so yeah, there's a lot of exciting things to look forward to. This is not like previous times back in the day when we would have a launch and then it was many months until the next catalyst. We've got Bluebirds 11 through 11, 12, and 13 that are lining up to be shipped relatively soon. I think it's important to note that the company will have a shareholder event for that one. So If you can, keep your July calendar slash early August calendar flexible because I'm definitely gonna make it down for that launch. And and also shout out to Space Mob the Cook in all his big glory. Tweeted a meme of him walking into tomorrow, which is quite quite funny. He actually doesn't look like that, but he he was there with Tanner and a few other folks at the courtyard in Titusville who. They watched, they did their push-ups, um, which was, which added positive juju to the launch. And they watched launch down there. Um, they also paid respects to our friend Steve Larison, who's buried, uh, nearby at the hotel. But, um, but yeah, thanks everyone for, for joining down there and for showing up. I apologize I couldn't make it, but I will definitely make the next one. And with that, um, I will end this space and we'll probably talk again soon. Um, I would expect we get a PR of that Bluebird 11 through 13 ready to ship in the next day or two or perhaps week, and that'll be the next thing that we look forward to. Anyway, thanks everyone for joining, and we'll talk again soon. Take care.
[00:41:31] Speaker C: Thanks for listening to the AST Space Mobile 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 Space Mobile, make sure to subscribe. Thanks again, and I'll see you next time. Listen.
[00:42:00] Speaker E: Mmm, waffles.