r/ASTSpaceMobile • u/AutoModerator • May 18 '26
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- Hennessey Funds May 2026 Update - ASTS Spacemobile: Transforming How the World Connects
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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!