More🅰️nt

🚨 THIS IS 6G! $ASTS 🚨 This seamless handover is a moment as important as the first cellphone call. That was when cellular networks conquered the terrestrial domain and first connected to towers. There has been an intermediate period of parallel networks, but now the systems has hybridized. They have fused. Now it is one single converged multi-domain network. A heterosis effect. Not simply coexisting. The power of that hybridisation will be fully understood only after the fact. It’s one AI orchestrated multi-domain network from now on. That’s new. Humanity didn’t ever have that in their pocket/ on their wrist. With new services, everywhere. Fusing not only two domains, but also the physical and digital words. It might look gradual. But seamless handoffs really is THE gateway into this new fused multi-domain world. It’s not possible you see without deep core network assimilation of two radio access technologies. We will see intelligent, sensing networks that has a reach and precise positioning way beyond legacy tower networks and we will see user equipment adapt to it at an accelerated pace going forward in what now is a global standards based mutualistic multi domain ecosystem. With a user base that will surpass the number of humans as intelligent and autonomous machines needs this - craves it - and holds no biological barriers for their growth rate. This exact hybrid network and the seemless nature of it is a key enabler for machine communications drones and automotive. Do not make the dinosaur analyst misstake to judge the future prospects of DTC by its current performance or by its value in isolation. It’s premier function is to augment the existing terrestrial system. Not to stand alone. But to fuse and inform. And like the capacity of towers today is vastly beyond the capacity of towers 20 years ago. In such fashion will also the space component rapidly evolve. Only much faster. Much faster because time to deploy a new tier is not a decade as with the G’s it’s iterations more akin to the handset which we see new versions of every year. The sats on orbit will see upgrades at that rate and iterate very fast. Because payback time and time to field is measured in months not decades. We observe this faster evolution already by simply plotting ASTs throughput over time. It will continue. When your in the midst of it it seems slow. Looking back it will seem to have happened rapidly. We made history today unlocking a defining function of 6G.

The blue field shows the ramp up of the constellation at a production & launch rate of 4 per month. It’s my current floor estimate of output capacity from observing gating item input rate june-nov at at least that pace. (Might be higher if there are add’l sources of those items). Might also be lower if other constraints are bottlenecks, namely testing / TVAC. But I think ~4/mo is fair / accurate. The yellow field shows an additional ramp up during 2027 of adding 2+2 per month on top of that. Also reasonable to assume as they’re targeting 6 currently and are ramping beyond that. As can be seen production cadence together with orbital dwell time decides ultimate constellation size. Therefore production rate and ramp up decides not only when the product comes to market, but also together with dwell time the ultimate scale of the business. Size of fleet. $ASTS However, what exact month they’re launched on, if for example 3 satellites or 6 sit and wait a few weeks for next launch, is ultimately of zero importance to the things that matter. Please chill with “launch delays” on weekly timeframe. Production rate on the monthly timeframe is what matters along with orbital dwell measured in years. 3 sats sitting a few weeks at Astrotech is just noise not signal. Launch will be there for those with cash and AST has that. A few conclusions can be made. As for example: To keep cranking out satellites while in parallel setting up new shops for more production capacity might be a good idea. You don’t want the existing production line to pause to field new versions, but rather use new versions as an opportunity to expand the overall production footprint and overall constellation size. We can see new AST production sites popping up all over Midland to that effect. Another revelation is how important the long orbital dwell time is. The graph shows 7 years. AST satellites believed to live 7-10 years. So 7 is conservative.

Apparently $ASTS lost some (not most, that’s the market, but some) shareprice due to waiting for launch an extra 5 weeks and 5 days post production of last batch. I have held AST for more than 5.5 years. And so this “delay” registers as 2% of the timeline. And putting a launch or two worth of BlueBirds on the shelf for a few weeks changes exactly nothing on that timeframe. Launch will catch up soon enough and time to full constellation hasn’t changed a minute due to this. People should therefore chill out a bit and remain focused on the price. Can’t freak out one week that launch is more plentiful than production only to freak out over the opposite next week. It’s not healthy. It’s perfectly normal in the space industry to sit and wait for launch multiple months and routinely (= more often than not) launches slip by days to weeks for operational reasons. Man up.