Fifteen months after seeing its first five commercial mobile-broadband satellites reach orbit, AST SpaceMobile now has a sixth circling the Earth.
The first of the company’s second-generation BlueBird Block 2 satellites lifted off at 10:25 p.m. EST Tuesday from India’s Satish Dhawan Space Centre atop an LVM3 (Launch Vehicle Mark III) rocket. About 15 minutes later, mission controllers confirmed the satellite’s deployment into a 323-mile-high orbit from the upper stage of that expendable launch vehicle.
“This launch validates years of US innovation and American manufacturing, executed by our team, and marks the transition to scaled deployment,” AST’s press release quotes Abel Avellan, its founder, chairman, and CEO. “With BlueBird 6 now in orbit, we are firmly on the path to delivering true space-based cellular broadband directly to everyday smartphones, at a global scale.”
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi celebrated the launch in a post on X, saying it featured “the heaviest satellite ever launched from Indian soil” and advanced India’s self-reliance agenda. The country is working toward inaugurating its own human spaceflight program with an upgraded version of the LVM3 rocket.
BlueBird 6 is a much larger spacecraft than AST’s first five production satellites, launched in September 2024 on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Cape Canaveral, Fla. The Midland, Tex., company’s press release touts the new spacecraft as “the largest commercial communications array ever deployed in low Earth orbit,” at almost 2,400 square feet.
AST says this design’s massive antenna and processing capability will allow it to support more than 2,000 cells per satellite, with 120Mbps of bandwidth per cell for messaging, voice, and data service to unmodified phones on the ground.
Achieving that full capacity, however, will require an upgraded ASIC that a November earnings release reported is not set for “first integration” with a satellite until Q1 2026.
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AST’s Tuesday announcement predicted that the company will launch 45 to 60 satellites by the end of the year, which company executives have said would be more than enough to provide commercial coverage across the US for its partners AT&T and Verizon.
The company aims for its next launch in January from Cape Canaveral and plans to step up its delivery cadence by using higher-capacity launch vehicles. In its November earnings call, executives said the Falcon 9 can loft three next-gen BlueBirds at a time, while Blue Origin’s New Glenn can carry eight at a time.
AST, however, is now years and hundreds of satellites behind SpaceX’s Starlink, which has been providing messaging and, more recently, app-specific data roaming service to T-Mobile and other partner carriers with 650-plus direct-to-cell Starlinks.
Many industry analysts, having seen AST repeatedly fall behind its own forecasts, now predict that AST won’t be able to provide substantial competition to Starlink in direct-to-device service until 2027.
This company does, however, hold one non-trivial advantage in what looks like an extremely one-sided contest so far: It’s the one firm somewhat reasonably positioned to provide a commercial direct-to-cell alternative to SpaceX and its mercurial CEO, Elon Musk.
“Almost nobody wants to live in a world where Elon Musk is pulling the strings,” analyst Roger Entner of Recon Analytics told PCMag earlier in December. “Including the wireless carriers.”
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