AST’s BlueBirds en route to Florida
May 20, 2026

By Chris Forrester



Two AST SpaceMobile BlueBirds (#8 and #10) are already making their way to Cape Canaveral, with the third (#9) close behind and expected to ship in the next few days. Launch of the three are planned for mid-June on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket.

The news coincided with a presentation by AST’s president Scott Wisniewski at JP Morgan’s conference on May 18th.


He told delegates: “I met our founder in January 2019, but over the years, telling our equity story, people always asked three questions. Does it work? Can you fund it? And how big will the market be, or will there be a market? And that’s our traditional private company questions that we still got even as a public company for a while, and we really retired those risks in 2023, 2024, and 2025.”

“I [want] to say two simple things, one is network deployment. The vast majority of the folks in the company are focused on exactly that, network deployment now for revenue in 2026 and 2027 and beyond. And then the second one is, building the market out in the right way. This is a brand-new service. It’s a service that is at the very heart of connectivity,” he stated.

“When I started my career in connectivity, there was a question, the post.com bubble, what inning are we in? When is the expansion going to end? And then, of course, AI comes along, and there’s always something every couple of years. So for us, we’re at the heart of connectivity. We can do coverage better than any terrestrial footprint by its very nature. And making connectivity work for our partners, the mobile network operators, and ultimately for the consumer mass market among other markets, is our focus. So building out that market is our second priority.”

“And let’s address the news from last week: AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile announced a proposed joint venture to extend mobile connectivity using satellite-based D2D technologies. So we really value the carrier relationship. We’ve organised the business, the technology, the go-to-market strategy. Everything we do, really, is about making connectivity better for the mobile network operators. And so you see that in where we’ve prioritised the company over the years. You see that in how we’ve built out the tech. And even the network stack is organized with the RAN on the ground, so the operators control it,” Wisniewski continued.

“That’s what’s led us to have partnerships with nearly 60 operators globally, approximately 3 billion subscribers amongst them. We count many of them as investors. 15 per cent of our cap table is strategic investors, including AT&T, Verizon, Vodafone, Google, American Tower, Bell Canada, TELUS in Canada, Rakuten out of Japan,” he said.

“We’ve prided ourselves on being the partner of choice for this market as they develop it and develop it as a growth area for them. Not a vendor-style cost center, but a growth area. And so it was two years ago that we were able to bring Verizon into our network in the United States, putting them together with our historical partner AT&T. And we see this new announcement very much in the same vein. That’s how do the operators get organised in the United States around what is a very important strategic and growth opportunity and innovation opportunity for them and for us and for the citizens of the US. And so we see it in that vein,” he added.

As to AST’s launch plans, he said: “Two years ago set up a pretty resilient plan between Blue Origin, SpaceX, and ISRO to get those 13 launches up, and in order to meet our target this year, it’s pretty simple math. We get about two to three times more satellites on Blue Origin rocket. That’s one of the reasons why we signed them up as our biggest partner. And we need about a handful of Blue Origin rockets and a handful of Falcon 9 or equivalents. And so we feel really good about that timeline, and frankly, if it slips a month or two or three, you know, that doesn’t really impact the NPV of the company. Importantly, it’s very important to our customers and it’s very important to us, and time is money, but for us, this is happening, there’s an inevitability to it, and being vertically integrated with a couple of good launch partners gives us that confidence.”