India’s Space Research Organisation (ISRO) has delayed by a week its planned launch of AST SpaceMobile’s first of its powerful next-generation ‘Block 2’ BlueBird satellites (BlueBird 6). A planned launch date of December 15th has slipped to December 20th at 04.20 UTC.

AST already has five of the earlier generation BlueBirds in orbit.

Scott Wisniewski, AST’s president, told UBS bankers at a December 8th conference that AST was putting more power into orbit than anyone in history.

He added that AST estimates that some 7.5 million devices will achieve a higher margin than ordinary connections. Observers have suggested that with an ARPU of $10 per month this would equate to some $900 million of annual revenues. At an 80 per cent margin that’s around $720 million in net profit.

However, Wisniewski told delegates that he anticipated AST’s overall margin to be 90 per cent.

He added that AST was planning 13 launches from now to the end of next year. Many (indeed most) of these launches will carry multiple AST BlueBirds, up to around 8 per flight.

Wisniewski said: “So we’re building out a low-band constellation now. There are other frequencies that are relevant. There are potential government constellations. And once you’ve built out these shells, especially over time, as space gets more constellations, we think that we’ll have a really attractive position as an operator of a couple of these very valuable shells. And what you see in speculation in the market is what do you do when you have a lot of power delivered to orbit in a very low-cost fashion and big markets and demand to support that and strategic interest of governments to support that.”

“The add-on opportunities are really impressive, and you see that with all the data center conversations in the last week or so, whether it’s communication services, noncommunication services to the U.S. government or the next generation of commercialization of space. We’ll be in a great position to build that out being vertically integrated and having this fantastic ecosystem and then having an orbit architecture,” he stated.

Those comments about ‘government constellations’ saw Wisniewski add: “We can do other things with our frequencies, including RADAR, that support a lot of very strategic capabilities for the US government and its allies. So that is what’s brought us into the Golden Dome conversation as it’s evolved over the past year.”

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Tags: AST SpaceMobile, india