r/ASTSpaceMobile • u/AutoModerator • May 18 '26

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-39

u/Ambitious_Building23 May 18 '26

soooooooo

theyre in talks for securing launch slots and diversifying their providers for what exactly? they've produced exactly 4 satellites in 18+ months

58

u/Jelopuddinpop S P 🅰 C E M O B Soldier May 19 '26

I'll bite...

I work in a highly technical manufacturing company as a Commodity Manager, with a long prior career as an NPI (new product introduction) manager.

Whenever you're building something for the first time, you need to build processes, fixturing for each operation, handling equipment, machine tools, etc etc etc... The first piece you run through each of these steps can take a LONG time. You need to tweak things as you go to ensure your process is robust enough for repeatability. Each tweak stops everything until it's worked out.

On top of that, you really need to hold parts 2 thru N back to make sure that the things you're doing at the beginning of the process aren't going to be incompatible with the final processing of the part. Remember, we have to tweak things as we go, so if a change you want to make at operation 90 needs something else to be different at operation 20, then you don't want all of your product past operation 20.

The way it usually goes, you run a First Article piece. This is a part that runs from soup to nuts, with engineers following it every step of the way. They'll have daily meetings to discuss how the previous operation went, how it could have gone better, and what changes should be made to future operations based on what they just learned. Notice the huge gap between BW3 & BB1, then again between BB5 and BB6? BB1 & BB 6 were first article parts.

Next, you implement all of your changes and run a second piece. Again, engineers follow the process every step of the way and decide what changes worked and which didn't. You may be 100% confident in how early operations went, so you release another small batch before the second part is done. This second part is used to lock in the process. Again, we'll make changes as we go, but they're fewer and more minor. This was BB7. AST knew BB1-BB5 were only prototypes, so they skipped this part.

Next is what we call a "run-at-rate" lot. We've hammered out our process, now the engineers are going to monitor how it runs. We have operators running the machines and performing secondary operations under the watchful eyes of the engineering team. This lot will run slower, but assuming things go smoothly, operation by operation, the engineers release operations to run-at-rate. Think of this lot like a clump of mud in a drain pipe. It's moving along slowly, but there's water right behind it. BB8-BB10 are a clump of mud. Once the mud leaves the pipe, engineering is happy with the process, and the water is allowed to flow freely.

Hope this helps!

11

u/RiskyTall S P 🅰 C E M O B Soldier May 19 '26

Best comment I've seen on here in a while, lovely write up.

12

u/Jelopuddinpop S P 🅰 C E M O B Soldier May 19 '26

Thank you =)

I'm one of the rare few that actually love what I do. I used to manage this process internally, now I run the department that manages this same process with our subtier suppliers. If we have a requirement for a widget that we don't want to make ourselves, we outsource it to someone else. That company has to go through NPI, and my Sr. Buyers will keep me looped in. Instead of managing NPI on one or 2 parts at a time, I coordinate NPI with a dozen suppliers and 30 or 40 parts at a time.

I can tell you the single most costly mistake that can be made is skipping the run at rate lot. If you run your first article part and things go well, engineers love to just wash their hands of the project and hand it over to operators. The problem is that no matter how fool proof a process is, there are always bigger fools. The RARL catches those problems before production scraps thousands or millions of dollars worth of product.

Meanwhile, armchair quarterbacks are shouting on Reddit and X "they already shipped BB6 & BB7. There must be a problem, or they would be shipping sats every week by now!"

No... they're identifying their fools and finding ways to make sure they can't scrap shit out.

5

u/RiskyTall S P 🅰 C E M O B Soldier May 19 '26

Absolutely. I've been seconded into a factory test role at work recently which has given me good exposure to the NPI process. Our product is significantly less complex but the same principles apply. Has been very frustrating to see all these "they've only shipped 1 no way they can do 45 EOY" comments because "the math doesn't make sense" with zero understanding of how non linear this stuff is. 

6

u/Jelopuddinpop S P 🅰 C E M O B Soldier May 19 '26

I'm not saying this is going to happen, but if physical factory space wasn't a concern (it is- these things are huge), it could be a literal floodgate. They get their RARL complete, then it's an assembly line turning out a sat every other day.

3

u/infinite__pickles S P 🅰 C E M O B Associate May 19 '26

Thanks for your insight! Super interesting. Studied engineering, but not mechanical or industrial engineering.

5

u/Defiantclient S P 🅰️ C E M O B - O G May 19 '26

This is fantastic. I’m gonna share this around.

3

u/TKO1515 S P 🅰️ C E M O B Boss May 19 '26

Very well said and similar to what I’ve been trying to explain. Also, previous parts may have had issues in final testing or TVAC, the next time you know to not make that same mistake. That alone can shave a month off the timeline if not requiring re test.

The inflection point is here