$ASTS: Strap In by Anp🅰️nman

are from some material news, but aside from that, you wouldn't get these micro updates from companies. Now, there are investor conferences where institutions would go and sometimes you might get some updates there. But typically, if you were an investor of importance, maybe you have a good relationship with the company and you have a big position, you would call the company, call executives or IR, and get updates from time to time. But that's how typically things played out. And so nowadays, with the advent of social media, and of course, information that's really available people expect more updates. But this is not the norm. And so it's just a reminder that it's good that the company communicates and does release things from time to time, but it's not something that people should expect consistently. Because it really depends. If there's a news to communicate, they will. And then if there isn't, then there's nothing due to say. And then, of course, it's part of the culture where I think this company is engineering driven. And they typically will highlight things when they are ready or when it makes sense versus speculating or putting things out that may not be fully big. And so I think that's something to keep in mind. Over the past few weeks, there's been people who have pushed back on that notion and people have said, well, management is lying. Or they claim they were going to do this. And then it didn't come to fruition. And so they must be lying or they're fraudulent. Things are hard. You may think that you can build satellites to a certain production cadence, or you try to have these goals. And you just don't, at the time, you think they're true. And that is your goal. And you may not get there and things get delayed. And that's life. I was going back and looking at Tesla production hell. And that lasted for an entire year. It lasted for over 12 months. And it's not as if the company was trying to, you know, deceive people, but that was their true aim. They're trying to accomplish milestones. And then it took longer than expected. They came up across difficult problems. And it took longer to solve. And so as with anything, that's difficult to do, which is putting up a brand new broadband constellation in a market that you've created. That's going to take time. And so those three things, implied volatility, near time, near all time lows. Short interest, all time high, incentive it, near all time lows. That makes for interesting setup, right? Because now you've got everything that's washed out. And people are concerned about Bluebird 11 deployment, batch three shipment, batch four shipment, launch a whole host of things. But what if those things get solved in the dear term? Meaning over the weekend, we come Monday. We hear that batch three has been shipped and is prepped for launch. Bluebird 11 may be deployed. If all those things come to fruition, batch four is close to being shipped as well. Then what does that do to the stock price, right? That causes a change in expectations and re-rating. And so that's what I was saying earlier is that we've got these ingredients, right? Where the expectations are so low. And it's not, nothing is priced in at this point. Well, what happens if those things come to fruition? And so that's the important thing, I think. You know, it's been a rough time for the space sector. And I think some people try to draw some equivalents because they look at, let's say, Rocket Lab or other stock prices. And they're like, well, those stock prices has rebounded more. And so we need to be there, too. And it's like, well, these are separate companies. Yes, they do trade together. There's some level of sector beta. But at the same time, each company is doing their own thing. And so there's no, I think people put additional pressure, psychological pressure on themselves. It's like the grocery analogy where you're in one grocery line and the other line's moving faster. And you have this sense of need to go to the other line because it's moving faster. And as soon as you do that, the line that you left moves faster. And so people feel like they've, I don't know, like psychologically, and look, I can feel this from time time, too. But I think people feel psychologically that perhaps they've squandered something or they've missed something. And there's all these people who are like, oh, we need to flip Rocket Lab or we need to go, we need to outperform all these other stocks. And it's like, no, these are all independent companies. And yes, they do trade together to a degree. But yeah, recently we've had some delays, but the opportunity set of what we're looking at, to me, is much higher. And so you just have to be patient. I do remember back in 2023 and 2024, as the stock continued to grind lower, I had a bunch of regret. I remember in early 2024 just thinking, my God, I am an invested in this company. I've lost so much money, at least on paper. And yet I could have just held S&P or I could have held some other company at the time that had rebounded and were doing well. And that was pretty painful from a psychological standpoint. Like if I had made different decisions, I would be in a much better place. But yeah, then I was proven right as long as other holders. We held and the company, it took longer than expected. But they raised painful financing. It bridged them from January. Although they had vote-of-one, AT&T and Google invest in the stock price underperformed. And it wasn't until May, when they signed the contract, the definitive commercial agreement with AT&T at the end of May, and then just what, a week or two later, Ryzen came in with a strategic investment and had joined. And there was no looking back at that point, right? So we went from $2 to $39 in a matter of two months, right? And so that is the level of violent re-rating that you can experience, right? And so I think it's important to understand that the timeline that the company executes again, this is a difficult problem that they're solving. And so some of these things do take time. But if you look at the breadcrumbs around and just see, for example, the US government's enthusiasm for AT&T, the fact that we are going to hear probably more details about Golden Dome in the near future. And then we've got 800 megahertz spectrum selection from grain coming up by early November, although my guess is we'll probably hear much sooner than that. And for those that forget, that's 7 by 14 megahertz in total. 7 megahertz by 7 megahertz up and down the 14-total nationwide coverage, that's going to be a huge boost for the company. And my guess is that that goes into this other catalyst, which is the US telco JV, which I think that's going to be inked probably before the end of this year. It might take a bit longer. But if I had to guess, given all the activity in sector and the threats that Starlink has made, I think that comes before the end of the year. We'll learn how that JV is working with AST, which I believe the company is in active discussions. Obviously, they have a great literature, but they AT&T. We saw ads running on Instagram and Facebook recently, but also with Verizon and with T-Mobile discussions are going on there. So one of the things that I've talked about is when we do announce a definitive commercial agreement with T-Mobile, what does this stock do? So if Verizon took the stock from, I think, post AT&T announcement, it was at 5, and it basically ran it up to 39, obviously, it's not going to do that this time. But what does T-Mobile do? If you have 100% of the US market, does that double the stock price? Does it triple the stock price? How long does that take? Unclear, right? But you can also add on to that Deutsche Telekom, which is currently testing that's been disclosed with AST. And so once Deutsche Telekom is added to working with AST, that's the big four in Europe. I mean, you pretty much have locked up that market. So these are some of the things that when you have folks who are just watching the day-to-day chop in the stock price, they forget. They forget some of these things. Or of course, they're focused on production and launch, which clearly are very critical, but they're going to take time. They're going to take time. And so you don't want to be in a situation where you send up satellites and they don't work. And so there's been some speculation as to maybe BBB 11 is having some difficulties in deployment. But according to Katzee and Toad and a few others who have been following the satellite closely, it does look like it has successfully deployed. So we may hear in the next few days about that. And I will note that these are all, it's not as if you can go to your local electronic store and you buy a satellite. And then it comes with the instructions, and then you go launch it, and it works, right off the shelf. The this whole program, which AST is now, let's see. So we're on the fifth or sixth design of spacecraft. These things take time, right? And there's learnings that you get from them, and you optimize the process. And so BB 11, while there has been some speculation here and there, it could also just be part of the process. Like we're going to raise the satellite. We're going to use the thrusters. We're going to see if there's other factors or variables to consider when we deploy these satellites. Because you do just like with SpaceX, right? When every time that they launch Starship or Falcon 9 at the time, you get learnings from it, even if the mission is unsuccessful. But I will note that if there was a situation where BB 11 was indeed, did indeed have problems, and is unable to be commercially viable, that's not an extension level situation, right? It's not even material to the company. If you think back to like Bluebird, sorry, if you think back to Blue Walker 3, if that satellite had failed, then that could have been almost an extension level type of event for the company, because the company didn't have a ton in terms of capital resources and time. And that was back in 2022. And obviously, the rate environment was awful. And the outlook for growth companies was really bad. Then fast forward to Block One, Bluebirds 1-5. If one had been lost, that would have been bad, but survivable. But now we're in this part of the deployment cycle where we are working on 48 satellites, of which I believe maybe there's about 17 to 20 that are in parallel process at later stages of production. And so if you do lose one satellite, which we actually have, if you guys, it seems like long, long ago, but it was only a few months ago that we lost Bluebird 7. And that was because obviously Blue Origin, the second stage on New Glenn didn't refire. And so that was put into an elliptical orbit, which then, ultimately, we had to deal with this satellite. So we haven't lost satellites in the past. And so space, as we all know, is difficult. And so you are going to have some setbacks. And so even if you did lose BB-11, you would be fine, because you're making so many, and the plans are to launch in the near term, hopefully get to 45 deployed up in space. Losing one is not something that's going to be a big negative, which I guess there's some bears that are trying to make it a maker-break type of event for the company. It's not. We lost Bluebird 7. It was no big deal. The stock recovered to all-time highs, or exceeded all-time highs, even after we lost Bluebird 7. So yeah, just keep that in mind. Things can do happen. And the company, when going through deployment of satellites, it's a process. So I think for this last batch, they unfolded too very quickly. And so that was part of their plan. And then this BB-11, there is some plan there. Whether parts of it were planned, or maybe there were some unforeseen things and they're working on it, good engineers face problems. And they go through a process, and they solve them. That's any good engineering company. So yeah. So I think, as I was saying before, you've got a number of big catalysts, which I think people with the sentiment being so low, people kind of forget. But.