The successful launch of AST SpaceMobile's BlueBird satellites puts the broadband startup on a trajectory to provide satellite roaming to its telco partners, AT&T and Verizon.
CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. – AST SpaceMobile's plans with telcos now have liftoff. The Midland, Texas-based satellite designer sent its first five commercial BlueBird satellites skyward at 5:42 a.m. ET Thursday morning.
AST's debut flock of BlueBird satellites began their journey to low-Earth orbit (LEO) from Space Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. Eighteen minutes later, SpaceX confirmed the deployment of all five BlueBirds.
Hundreds of guests viewed the liftoff from the stands at Kennedy Space Center six miles to the northwest, watching as the Falcon's nine Merlin engines thundered, lighting up the early morning sky. Minutes later, they got a second light-then-sound spectacle: the Falcon 9's first stage performing a powered descent back to SpaceX's Landing Zone 1, followed by the booster's sonic boom blasting across the sky.
AST's vocal retail-investor community – the "SpaceMob" – was well represented in the crowd, with many wearing AST shirts and swapping stories of stock purchases during the predawn wait. After liftoff, one attendee yelled his appreciation of CEO Abel Avellan: "Congratulations, Abel!"
The launch came two years and two days after the launch of AST's BlueWalker 3 prototype satellite, which the firm used to perform tests of its technology's ability to deliver voice as well as data to unmodified phones.
AT&T's agenda
The successful launch – behind AST's late-2020 forecast that it would not only begin commercial service by 2023 for Vodafone but would have nine million customers signed up by the end of that year – opens the door to months of testing to qualify the satellites for service for an unspecified subset of AT&T customers.
Speaking before the launch, AT&T Network President Chris Sambar didn't say which customers might get a first taste of this service but implied that AST's more influential investors might rank among them: "If you want the service to be popular, you're probably going to bring on people who will talk about it."
The carrier also isn't ready to share details about how it will package and price AST roaming coverage, although in March Sambar had suggested that this could be a bundled component of premium plans and a surcharge item for cheaper plans.
Sambar did, however, voice considerable optimism about satellite connectivity's potential to transform the carrier's approach to covering the most remote areas, citing the company's experience with using satellites in disaster-recovery situations.
"We put a lot of cell sites in rural areas that don't have a lot of users on them," he said. "There's potentially cell sites on Earth that we could decommission once the technology gets robust enough."
In May, Verizon announced its own plans to employ AST's satellites to provide supplemental coverage for its wireless customers. AST will use 850MHz lowband spectrum with each carrier.
Next steps
AST says each BlueBird supports peak downloads of as much as 120 Mbit/s, but President and Chief Strategy Officer Scott Wisniewski offered more conservative performance estimates in a pre-launch interview: 20Mbit/s downloads and uploads "half or less than half" of that.
He predicted an increase in the production rate at AST's Texas facilities from four to six BlueBird satellites a month, followed by a ramp-up to a newer generation of even larger satellites – 2,400 square feet in size versus 700 square feet.
In a conversation at MWC Barcelona in late February, Wisniewski had forecast 10GHz of capacity on these newer spacecraft thanks to a custom ASIC, up from BlueBird's 1GHz, but Thursday morning, he said those new chips would not go on the first larger birds.
"Our first large satellite is Q1," he said. "That will not have the ASIC, so it only gets us half the way there."
Wisniewski added that AST should be able to include the new ASICs on this upcoming series of satellites by the middle of 2025.
The larger size, he noted, does not require a change of rockets from SpaceX's workhorse Falcon 9 – which, after Thursday's launch, has flown 89 times this year. That single rocket this year has flown more than the combined total of orbital launches for Russia and China throughout 2023.
However, AST has signed an additional launch contract for Q1 "that is not with SpaceX." Wisniewski added: "We're going to pursue several different launch vehicles."
A crowded market
SpaceX happens to be AST's biggest competitor in space-based phone connectivity. T-Mobile is now planning a commercial debut this fall of text messaging via "direct-to-cell" versions of SpaceX's Starlink satellites. The plan the two companies unveiled in 2022 has this service later supporting voice and data.
Both AST and SpaceX are part of an increasingly crowded market for satellite-to-phone service that regulators have had to catch up with; the FCC only released a "Supplemental Coverage From Space" regulatory framework in March.
Falls Church, Va.-based Lynk Global, for example, has been signing up carriers in other countries with its own pitch of messaging first, then voice and data. And last month, Verizon – which a year ago had looked content to sit out the sat-to-phone market – announced a deal with Mountain View, Calif.-based Skylo to provide emergency messaging to newer Android phones using L-band spectrum.
Wisniewski acknowledged the challenge his company and others face in building a low-Earth orbit telecom-satellite constellation.
"You need regulatory approvals, you need financing upfront for a business case that may not pay off for years," he said. "Building constellations has been a terrible business."
But, Wisniewski continued, AST has the advantage of not just its AT&T and Verizon partnerships and three US government deals (which he described as "early-stage contracts that can lead to large contracts") but recent fundraising rounds that have put "over $400 million of capital in the balance sheet" and a cost-conscious satellite design.
"The satellites we have today are incredibly cheap relative to any benchmark of cost per power, cost per bit," he said.
But AST's more relevant edge right now may be being able to point to commercial satellites in orbit.
"There's definitely a little relief when it gets out of the atmosphere," he said after the launch. "Now the team can get back to work."
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