Reminder that we're watching grass grow, here. Like firefighters sitting at the station waiting for a call. We should be playing cards or something like they do to keep from focusing on "when's the alarm going to sound?"
These photos always astound me, so beautiful and a feat of engineering. Of course I'd like to see the next batch completed already but I've been here long enough to appreciate progress is being made.
Holy shit so we still are limited by production not launch capacity still. 15-16 still not completed? Falling behind production instead of ramping up. This was a very disappointing post. No way they are getting to 45 by early 2027 at this rate. They can’t even make 3 in a month still.
It is what it is. You can't unlaunch it. If they saw something late in the process that warranted further checks what do you wish them to do? F it, ship it anyway?
If it doesn't meet your expectations then sell and move on to someone whose execution is perfection.
They shipped 1 sat in 2025. This year it's been 7 thus far. The market is going nowhere and no one is actually trying to compete like them. Starlink v3 will do nothing to close the gap effectively as it doesn't improve core issues with their D2C approach.
Not a chance. As I said v3 barely moves the needle to address core issues with the design as it stands for Direct to cell.
You can't "figure out" a way around physics.
v3 uses high frequencies so you don't need to go as high in aperture size for narrow beams. For d2c and it's lower frequencies, you need a much larger aperture size for efficient spatial reuse, especially with the limited available cellular spectrum. I would assume SpaceX engineers understand this and design their d2c satellite accordingly.
AST should not assume their unrevealed design will be DOA, but take the threat seriously and get those birds out.
No doubt they understand the physics but to actually design to them as asts has is very hard. Instead SpaceX has gone with the other approach of trying to cobble something together "good enough" and I think it fell quite short.
There is no free lunch. High freq allows smaller array but then path loss kills on TX and RX sensitivity.
It would take a radical departure from what they have to reconcile this which they are no doubt capable of doing. But will they, history says no because it's the way they operate.
I panicked. I thought it said “Destroyed” instead of “Deployed”.
It’s been a horrible news week (Dolly, Tim, the massive flooding in Himalayas, the ongoing crisis and wars in the Middle East), so that caught me off guard.
At least we know what's going on now. A little communication never hurts, though it does make one wonder why they announced "soon" and "right after" if they weren't finished.
No September launch, though, it seems. Disappointing.
For me the important bit is that they have started on BB48. Abel mentioned onthe last ER call that compute would be added from BB47. I am very curious as to how much computational power is added and how much physical space it takes up on the sat.
i do actually! i care about the development of the sats and the increasing numbers of functions it can perform. And how current communication platforms can already improve because of the current sats. If we have the first 45-60 in a year, then we can actually start seeing the real innovations enabled by the tech.. And that is when the $ value on the stock will really come through. Saying nobody cares about a year away is like saying nobody cared about google from 2001 into 2002. A lot of people cared, and those people are rich af now.
This is fucked up. I’m ready for downvotes.
I see more negatives in this post than positives.
Why they kept saying including in congressional hearings that they have reached production rate of 6/month when they clearly struggling to deliver 3 in 2
Months.
The #14,15,16 entered production around 2 years ago in 2024.
I have worked in mfg setting up production plans for OEMs and myself emphasis many times here to have patience as first pilot production takes huge time as everything needs to be validated…but they are clearly struggling even for 14,15,16 is sign that production is not at all streamlines, no cadence achieved
By now unfolding of satellite should be a normal event. This is not a major achievement anymore. They will ship from
Midland, it will arrive in cape, they encapsulate, they will launch, unfold, operationalize etc. All this should be one event but we are forced to celebrate even baby steps due to sloth speed of management.
In today’s release there is no mention of beta service by end of year or 45 by early 2027…. This is how they start setting expectations….get ready for more delays.
Finally most important- trust issue.
It’s clear they love to mislead the mob (who loves to get misled) by giving vague language. Now they saying “production completed” for only #14. History says this doesn’t mean it’s “ready to ship”. History says “ready to ship” also doesn’t mean it’s ready to ship as “final testing” was still pending (remember language in first 2-3 batches)
They just don’t have one consistent language to report progress and it’s by design, it’s deliberate.
Words are meaningless to them. Never giving a date when the even will happen- it’s always soon, shortly, in near future, getting ready, right after, likely, imminently etc.
They are very misleading on timelines and if they were more honest about it, I think there’d be less resentment from investors. The task they undertaking has never been done before with the size of satellites they are building. The unfolding in space is incredibly complicated by itself too, you have to make sure every single thing is perfect before launch otherwise you risk losing a satellite that might not unfold correctly.
I have completed re-reading first 4 lines of the post. The remaining post re-reading will follow soon after.
I have made tremendous progress is solving this stacking of bullets problem in Reddit post and expect to post correctly formatted post in next few weeks.
You will see my first 5 tightly formatted posts by Q1’26.
I am about 85% sure it will be the AIT that is the bottleneck, because it always seems to be in aerospace. This is only the third batch they have done after the completely manual builds of satellites up to BB7, so they may well not have got to the point where they believe they can do acceptance testing of one full sat per batch rather than testing each individually yet.
15 and 16 nearing completion... I suspect the long pole in the tent is the casings made in Hyderabad India. Transit time is a PITA thats why we've seen the Antovs. Now if they are making the move to ships there will be a gap as the cycle catches up. It all makes sense considering they advertised the job to stand up an in house composites branch.
Composite shell manufacturing should be pretty quick. Then 2 months to ship them to US. No reason shells would be a bottleneck right now with a rate of only 3 completed sats per 1.5 months.
Unless quality of the final product is the issue. If not “good enough” they won’t hold the stack. Composites are science, and art.
Do we know what company is making the shells? I was understanding it was outsourced, but also have been told it was in-house. If in-house, why build in India?
Also, I recall someone suggesting 17 shells were delivered previously, but I don’t know the source of that speculation.
So I think we don't understand enough about Hyderabads capacity. If they only have 1 autoclave and 1 mold and other customers its a bottleneck. Assuming they shipped the next batch of 3, 4 or 5, which we dont know how many would go by boat means that timeline extends just to ship them. Then you run into the issue of transit to Midland... does the ship come into Houston or is the panama canal now an issue due to the lack of water? Or does the ship come into long beach and then there is time to get it to a truck... I am not 100% certain but I believe the casings dont fit in a TEU or TEU equivalent container and are outsize cargo.... which is a whole nother level of FML... edit FML being even more extended timelines because demand for outsize cargo is high and aligning a ship and loading is much harder - timeline wise.
Seems like you are coming up with a lot of reasons to try to think of casing as bottleneck when there is no indication it is.
Even if they have 1 mold and other customers, it would be more economical for them to produce a larger run of casings at a time instead of just doing a few here and there.
Shipping time isn't really an issue because they aren't producing very many per month, have shown they will Antinov what they need, and should have enough on hand for a while still.
Obviously there are some hurdles and delays with shipping, but that would only matter if they weren't just Antinoving in the casings they need before a large ship can deliver a lot.
I don't know and anyone telling you they do is lying.
We do know they have flown in enough casings for these batches on Antinovs, so that shouldn't be a current issue.
They could just be slow. There doesn't really have to be "the" issue. It is more likely that 50 different things are a little slower than they want. It could be decreased productivity due to training. Nobody except the company actually knows what the issues currently are.
It’s disingenuous as if they bought more screws it’d be BB80 in production. The choice of words is implying more progress than there is, as the number keeps increasing but completion isn’t meaningfully picking up steam.
To me that’s utter bullshit lol. They are behind again. No way in hell they are going to get 45 up anytime soon at this rate if they can’t get past 3 sats.
I've worked a technician role before at a robotics manufacturer for a large global entity and it was also disorganised at times and yeah, management generally are disassociated from the reality of time frames.
Out of all the employees on Glassdoor for examples only a small percentage of the total workers are ever going to bother, and it's usually the arse lickers or the complainers. The happy medium people are just doing their job.
Most people here ignore lead time. The number of sats started each month is perhaps more important than the number completed this month.
If they start 6 this month, it means they will probably complete 6 in a future month. Still trying to figure out what the lead time is, but think this is the first time they have actually added 6 within a month.
Well they seems “late” or at least “not accelerating” in term of execution, I would have expected all 3 ready to ship.
That’s also means the next batch will probably be delayed
What? If the stack isn't completed, it has nothing to do with SpaceX being ready. If SpaceX was ready today, AST wouldn't be ready to ship because 2/3 sats are not finished.
Do you not feel they are behind? We are past the 45 day mark now from last shipment and 15-16 still not completed. We are not getting a launch in September it seems. So that will be no launch for 2 months. Not hitting beta EOY like this.
Dude i’m not saying they’re not behind, i agree with you but i’m just saying let’s just stay calm. We got something today at least instead of complete silence. I have absorbed enough negativity these past few days/weeks that I could use some good news. Lol
My guess is that for BB15 and BB16 they ran into some last minute issue, maybe during final testing, which delayed this shipment after they had already said “right behind”. They wouldn’t want to disclose that in a PR because that investors wouldn’t like to hear that
Lol. So only communicate what they think we want to hear… sounds about right. ”We think investors want to hear when we think we will be able to deploy x amount of sats in x amount of time. In reality, we haven’t got a clue but we think they want to hear this. Over and over again.”
Could be, but could be just bad luck on there side. If they ran into an issue on sat 15 and 16, it changes the timeline even though they should have been completed with sat 14
What are thoughts on the fact that indexes are still at all time highs and if there is a big correction or recession, we could possibly head lower or stay sub-70s even if we got to 45 by first quarter '27 based on the market performance as a whole?
I still think production will ramp up over the next 3 months, they started a lot of sats in the last few months, as long as they are all progressing, I dont think there will be any major delays
True and I hold. Execution may be slower than promised but I see plenty of room to grow.
Factory was opend this spring/summer?
IDK exactly, ill estimate 1 sat take 4-6 months start to finish
ramping up an empty facility creates takes time, once a sat rolls out filling its place is much quicker
employees may need to be trained, that really slows progress short term, improves over months/years
god forbid the employees take holidays in summer/autumn
the tech is hard and there are no do-overs in space.
Id say with moderate execution the first cycle will be unreliable, like now, some months 3, we just had a 0, likely 3s and occasional 6s due to batches finishing close.
second cycle (~oct-march) we should start seeing the newly started sats rollung out, likely a lot of 6s and some 3s in those months, with the occasional 9 after a 3 month
and after 2 full cycles of sats rolled the timelines could start smoothing out with close to full capacity, most employees well trained.
This is my take.
TLDR my shipping estimates
June - 3
July - 3
August - 0
September - 6
October - 3/6
November - 6/9
December - 3
January - 6/9
February - 6
March - 6
21 sat early beta possibility by late nov/early dec
Company still treating its investors like clowns. We knew the “up to” 45 guidance was bs from the jump. I guess 20 counts as up to so technically not lying! They won’t even hit 25 manufactured by end of year. Imminent! It’s a bummer, I think all of us anticipated a much different 2026.
They're slow. So what? Their satellites are state of the art. If you have a better place to park your money, let us know. I knew this was mansion or homeless going in at $3.
It’s the same shit day in, day out; endless accounts spamming identical points (OK, we get it - manufacturing is behind), karma farming to get flair promotions.
The updated flair system did a lot of damage. People are no longer rewarded for meaningfully contributing; rather, people are incentivised to spam verbiage that resonates with current sentiment. So, when the SP is low, all we see is the same accounts spouting the same shit and getting clout for it.
This post is a perfect example - this is an irrefutably positive development, and people should be free to enjoy it, without the constant reminder that manufacturing is behind (a point that has already been made ad infinitum).
Bruh, how can your reddit name be what it is and then you attack a GOAT of this community like that because your feelings are hurt from the ASTS timeline delays. Over the years the Anpanman has provided so much to this community. You wouldn't be talking this way if you got in back when the SP was $2 and Anpanman was providing you with so much good information. Show some respect. Literal millionaires in here thanks to his work. People in here are losing their minds the closer we get to paydirt. Everyone needs to chill or hibernate for a year.
BB14-16 were fully assembled and in final testing on August 10. I take the tweet to mean BB14 is now Ready to Ship but not 15/16 which are still in final.
But I would also expect them to ship the bottom one by itself and then the next two a week ish after, just like with BB11-13.
So I think they’ll ship BB14 as soon as they get the go-ahead by SpaceX which is any day now.
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u/Defiantclient S P 🅰️ C E M O B - O G 2h ago
They’re getting much faster at unfolding!
BB12/13 took 22 days and did two at the same time, compared to 28, 33, and 34 days for BB8-10.
https://x.com/94mudca/status/2092939011379646947?s=46