AST SpaceMobile’s first of its second-generation BlueBird satellites is now on its way to the India rocket launch site at India Space Organisation’s Sriharikota/Satis Dhawan facility. The spaceport is located on an island off the east coast of India, surrounded by Pulicat Lake and the Bay of Bengal. The distance of Sriharikota from Chennai is 105 km (65 miles).

Originally planned for August 2025, then pushed to November 2025, the launch is not now expected much before December (and some sources suggest Q1 2026). A combination of factors, including ISRO needing 3-4 months after the satellite’s arrival and AST missing its earlier shipment deadlines.

AST’s main aim is to beat Starlink, and establish itself with its global telco partners before Amazon’s Project Kuiper launches its rival service, expected in later 2026.

It is worth remembering that all of AST’S predecessors – other than Starlink – failed, sometimes catastrophically. Iridium, now a very successful satellite-based specialist direct-to-user operator went through a bankruptcy, as did OneWeb (before being rescued by Bharti and the UK government in a reconstruction with Eutelsat) and most notably Teledesic. Teledesic was a company founded in the 1990s by Bill Gates and Craig McCaw to build a $9 billion commercial broadband satellite internet constellation, using 288 out of a planned 840 low-Earth-orbiting small satellites.

Teledesic launched just one satellite, and the project was abandoned in 2003.

AST is well ahead financially in terms of those costly failures. It has a $2 billion+ warchest to fund satellite production, technology upgrades and subsequent launches. AST is aiming to have between 45 and 60 satellites in orbit by the end of 2026 and to start services over North America, Japan and Europe during 2026.

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Tags: AST SpaceMobile, india