OFF TOPIC ;
Hi old friends, Quick recap and not F.A. just what I did..
My $37K leftover from $REFR is now $247K, closed over $80. more than enough to pay off my mortgage.
someone PM'd me 2 weeks ago that they got in but sold at $50 for a small profit, again, closed over $80 today, so 30 years of patience with REFR but none where it mattered more. ( love ya anyway )
PLEASE, just READ the LAST SENTENCE !!
good luck old friends, miss y'all . ( any bolding mine )
Tin
" Here's the AST SpaceMobile section from 10 West Advisor's Q3 letter:
AST SpaceMobile ;
Photons experience neither time nor distance2. A photon is emitted from the sun and absorbed by your eye in the same moment. How cool is that? Photons are also the fundamental carrier of the electromagnetic field and the medium through which information moves across the universe. Why mention photons? Because as investors, it is important to understand what a company actually does, not just what it is commonly perceived to do. Was Amazon (AMZN-US) an online retailer? No, Amazon sells massive datacenter and logistics capacity. Was Nvidia (NVDA-US) a gaming GPU company? No, Nvidia sells highperformance matrix multiplications. Both Amazon and Nvidia are multi-trillion-dollar enterprises because what they really sell is exceptionally rare: globally scalable key enabling technologies. Users all around the world built on Amazon’s datacenters and Nvidia’s GPUs – some of these applications were foreseeable, but many were not. No one, not even Nvidia’s leather jacket clad founder, predicted that the matrix multiplications used to render video game graphics would one day power modern artificial intelligence. Globally scalable key enabling technologies are among the most valuable assets in the world because they are the canvas on which human creativity paints the future. So what does AST actually do? Will it provide satellite-based 5G broadband directly to your phone? Yes, that is one application, but what AST really sells is photons. AST’s satellites can manipulate the electromagnetic spectrum anywhere on Earth and thus can enable the transfer of information anywhere on Earth. This sounds like a globally scalable key enabling technology to me. How much is the ability to control the electromagnetic spectrum worth? I don’t know, probably a lot3. One customer, the newly rebranded U.S. Department of War (“DoW”), is already finding new applications for AST’s photons. In fact, AST’s first material revenues have been from DoW contracts, including a $43 million Space Development Agency (“SDA”) contract and a $20 million Defense Innovation Unit (“DIU”) contract. The SDA contract is to test “non-communications” use cases with the five Bluebird Block 1 satellites currently in orbit. As expected for a DoW project, AST is secretive about what the Bluebird satellites are doing, but we can make some informed guesses. The five Bluebird Block 1 satellites currently in orbit each carry a 693 square foot phased array antenna. The Bluebird Block 2 satellites sport a 2,400 square foot phased array. To help you visualize, this is roughly the size of half a basketball court. The original application of phased arrays was radar during World War II, so what can you do with the largest phased arrays ever put into low earth orbit? As you can see in the figures above, AST has flown the Block 1 satellites spaced very far apart, except for two. These two Bluebirds were flown 20 km apart for about a year and if you use some fancy physics/engineering tricks, you can create a radar with a synthetic aperture of 20 km! A large radar aperture is important for two reasons: 1) The beamwidth of a radar is wavelength divided by aperture diameter. A larger aperture produces a narrower beam, which means smaller details can be distinguished. Using assumptions gleaned from AST’s regulatory filings, these two Bluebirds can provide 5-to-10-meter resolution of objects. Future Bluebirds could provide sub-meter resolution if required by the DoW. 2) Antenna gain scales with aperture area and the power received by a radar scales with the square of antenna gain, thus aperture size has a disproportionately large effect on the signal-to-noise ratio4. That’s just a long way of saying “larger aperture, better radar”. Beyond a large synthetic aperture radar, there are other interesting applications enabled by the paired Bluebirds. Here is one more: ground and air object motion tracking. The two Bluebird are moving along the same track, so you can obtain two synthetic aperture radar images of an area roughly 3 seconds apart. By using a little math (the interferometric phase relation), you can detect even the tiniest movements (on the order of 10 to 20 cm/s velocity). In military parlance, this functionality is referred to as air moving target indicator (“AMTI”) and ground moving target indicator (“GMTI”). Interestingly enough, Public Law 119-21, otherwise known as the “One Big Beautiful Bill”, has budget allocations for space-based communication and non-communication applications as part of the Golden Dome initiative. $2 billion for AMTI, $7.2 billion for space-based sensors, $150 million for GMTI, $3.65 billion for satellites, $125 million for space communications… the numbers get large quickly. Given the unique and differentiated capabilities enabled by the size and power of the Bluebird satellites, I expect AST to be awarded several Golden Dome-related contracts in the near future. Here is another non-communications use case for the Bluebird satellites. The Global Positioning System (“GPS”) supports an unfathomable amount of economic value around the world. Beyond the monetary aspect, even a brief GPS outage likely leads to the loss of human life. For such a critical service, the GPS signal is both extremely weak and unauthenticated. The GPS signal is approximately -160 dBW at the Earth’s surface, or many billions or trillions of times weaker than your WiFi signal. A signal that weak can easily be jammed by a hostile party. Moreover, the lack of authentication allows a hostile party to spoof the signal sent to say, a commercial airliner, with incorrect data. Prudence dictates that there should be a jam and spoof resistant supplement to GPS. Thankfully, the FCC is on the case. AST was granted a patent in November 2024 titled “Geolocation of radio frequency devices using spaceborne phased arrays”, which describes a method to provide geolocation using Bluebird satellites. As part of providing cellular service, a Bluebird lays down fixed cells on the Earth’s surface. Each cell is 12 to 40 km in diameter, depending on the frequency, and the Bluebird knows which cell the device is in, thus providing a “coarse” location. Once again, AST can use some physics/engineering magic, such as two-way timing measurements, Doppler shifts, and multi-beam geometry, to then provide a precise location. AST offers not only redundancy, but also material improvements over GPS. Any device that emits radio frequency can be located without the need for a specialized GPS receiver chip5. In addition, the signal is coming from low earth orbit (500-700 km), thus is orders of magnitude stronger and more difficult to jam than the GPS signal from medium earth orbit (20,000 km)6. Finally, AST’s signal can be encrypted and user authenticated to prevent spoofing. I suspect both governments and private enterprises would be interested in a “better GPS”. I want to emphasize that these use cases are side hustles to AST’s core business of providing ubiquitous cellular coverage to its partners’ 3 billion+ subscribers. That these side hustles may be worth billions in annual revenue illustrates the potentially immense scale of AST’s platform. From cellular service in a remote village, to secure navigation in a contested battlefield, to applications we cannot yet imagine, AST’s control of photons on a planetary scale is a humanity-changing level innovation. This is my third consecutive year writing to you about AST. In previous letters, I included pictures of the satellites, so let’s keep the tradition going. AST recently posted a picture of the first two Bluebird Block 2 satellites, and it is extremely gratifying to see how much the company has grown. One day I will write the full story of our AST investment because everything I have ever learned about investing has gone into this journey. It sounded crazy three years ago to believe a pre-revenue, cash burning science project with an audacious idea that industry experts claimed violated the law of physics might end up as a globally scalable key enabling technology. Other professional investors, likely guided by industry experts, thought AST was a slam dunk short as evidenced by various reports. However, relying on industry experts is substituting someone else’s thinking for your own, which is not a way to achieve extreme results. Extreme results require extreme behavior, and sometimes that extreme behavior is taking a few months to learn enough RF engineering to reason for yourself whether the RF link could be closed between a giant phased array in orbit and a cell phone transmitting at 200 mW7. As I mentioned earlier, AST is on the cusp of inevitability. Within the next few weeks, the company will begin a launch campaign to put 60 Bluebird satellites into orbit through the end of 2026. In the U.S., AT&T (T-US) and Verizon (VZ-US) will begin a marketing campaign with a simple compelling message: 5G connectivity all the time whenever you are, no matter what happens. Vodafone (VOD-US) will do the same in Europe, and eventually all 50+ of AST’s mobile network operator partners will roll out service to 3 billion+ subscribers. AST may end up as a 1 billion subscriber business generating recurring revenue at very high margins protected by technological, regulatory, and commercial moats. There are many Bluebirds to be built, launched, and successfully operated before we get there, but squint hard enough and you can see that AST’s end state may very well be as one of the greatest businesses in the history of capitalism. " |
