AST SpaceMobile: thirteen satellites up, thirty-two to go

Haverhill Financial Research · Deep dive · Space · October 28, 2026

AST SpaceMobile builds the other satellite-phone future: instead of selling its own service, it puts very large satellites in orbit and lets existing carriers connect ordinary phones through them. The idea has more than 60 mobile operators attached, covering some three billion subscribers, with AT&T, Verizon, Vodafone and Rakuten among the names, a planned joint venture with the three big US carriers, and a preliminary selection, with Rakuten, for Japan's government-backed J-LEO program that could carry up to about $1 billion of public capital. What it does not yet have is the constellation.

Thirteen BlueBird satellites are in orbit, six of them launched inside a 50-day window this year, which settled the question of whether the company could industrialize production. Three more are ready to ship, numbers 17 through 46 are in various stages of build, and ten launches are booked at a cadence of one every month or two. The target is about 45 satellites by early 2027, the point at which the company says commercial service can begin. A beta service through seven US gateways is slated for late this year.

The financials are those of a company mid-leap. Second-quarter revenue doubled sequentially to $31.5 million, against adjusted operating expenses of $119 million and capital spending of $610 million. Liquidity was above $3.7 billion pro forma after a July convertible raise, and the backlog, commercial and government together, stands near $1.3 billion. Full-year revenue guidance is $150 to $200 million, with management's stated ambition of approaching $1 billion in the first full year of commercial service.

The obvious one is SpaceX, whose Starlink produced $5.2 billion of connectivity revenue last quarter and whose direct-to-phone ambitions rattled the carrier stocks just last week. AST's answer is positioning: it is built to be the carriers' partner rather than their replacement, and its satellites are large precisely so ordinary phones can get broadband-class service rather than emergency texting. The argument is plausible and unproven in exactly the way the whole company is plausible and unproven. It is also why the carrier joint venture converting from plan to signed definitive agreements would be worth more than any quarter's revenue.

At roughly $730 million a quarter of combined operating and capital outflow, $3.7 billion of liquidity buys about five quarters at the current pace, by our arithmetic, enough to reach the initial constellation on schedule, not enough to assume no further raises afterward. The investment case is binary in the honest sense: a dozen more successful launches and signed carrier economics make today's doubts look quaint; slippage in either makes the burn rate the only number anyone quotes. The third-quarter update, due in early November, should show launch timing, beta metrics and JV progress. Those three lines, not the revenue, are the report.

All figures are from AST SpaceMobile’s second-quarter 2026 business update filed with the SEC on August 10, 2026. Burn-rate and runway calculations are ours. SpaceX segment figures are from SpaceX’s Q3 2026 results, covered separately.

Disclosures. Haverhill Financial Research is a publisher of general financial commentary. This article is not personalized investment advice and does not consider any reader's financial situation; readers should do their own research. Nothing here is a recommendation to buy or sell any security. Company figures and guidance can change. The author of this post does not hold positions in AST SpaceMobile or the other companies named. Data as of October 28, 2026.