AST SpaceMobile's $800 million Blacklift rocket bet faces skepticism

By Amara Osei

AST SpaceMobile will pay Firefly Aerospace about $800 million upfront for a perpetual license to manufacture Miranda and Vira engines: $400 million in cash and 10 million to 14 million shares. The satellite operator is trying to remove the launch bottleneck around its BlueBird low-Earth orbit satellites; the money is concrete, but the timetable is less so.

What is Blacklift meant to do?

AST said on Friday it had started a project to build a 20-ton reusable, custom-built rocket capable of launching five BlueBird satellites from late 2028. Firefly Aerospace will provide 27 Miranda engines for the heavy-duty first stage and nine vacuum-variant Vira engines for the second stage on the first three rockets.

AST also plans a new U.S. engine manufacturing facility. The site would turn a perpetual design license into domestic production capacity, though no state or location has been named.

What does the contract cost?

The upfront payment sits alongside $250 million for engine delivery for the first three launches and another $250 million over three years for engineering support. That makes Firefly both a supplier and a three-year engineering partner.

Firefly says the Miranda has completed more than 175 hot-fire tests for more than 4,200 seconds. It equates that with about 20 full first-stage flights, a company claim rather than an achieved-flight record. Useful test data, then; Blacklift flights remain pending.

Is late 2028 credible?

New Street Research called the late-2028 target “aspirational” and said programs typically take five years from start to successful first flight, while “AST wants to launch in 2.” The analysts added the obvious warning: “schedules slip.”

Their examples are current:

• Blue Origin’s New Glenn has suffered repeated delays. New Street cited a report that CEO Dave Limp told employees last Wednesday that the next flight would move to January 2027; a May prelaunch test explosion in Florida had badly damaged the launchpad.
• Rocket Lab’s Neutron has slipped, with its first launch now delayed until sometime in 2027.
• SpaceX’s Starship has also seen multiple delays, although it achieved orbit for the first time in September.

New Street called Blue Origin a major external launch partner and said that dependence put a lot of AST’s launch eggs in one basket. That makes the January 2027 delay more than a Blue Origin scheduling wrinkle.

What is working before Blacklift?

AT&T recently completed the first call handoff between its terrestrial cellular network and AST’s satellite network. Rakuten Mobile, AST’s partner in Japan, is nearing the launch of a commercial direct-to-device service. The announcement provides no subscriber or coverage figures, so neither result yet establishes scale.

AST stressed that Blacklift will not end its use of outside launch companies. It plans external providers to deploy more than 100 BlueBird satellites between 2027 and 2028. Blacklift supplements that pipeline; it does not replace it.

Where does the wider business case come from?

AST says Blacklift should reduce reliance on launch capacity it does not control and open markets beyond direct-to-device service. Chairman and CEO Abel Avellan said it would “significantly expand our total addressable market” and provide “regular unconstrained access to orbit” with “most favorable owners’ economics in the industry.”

Those are management’s ambitions, not disclosed orders. AST names secure communications, IoT and AI compute as possible extensions beyond direct-to-device service. None comes with a revenue figure or launch date in the announcement.

What else changed?

A separate featured development concerns Ericsson, which stopped making millimeter-wave radios at its 5G smart factory in Lewisville, Texas, and consolidated production at a manufacturing site in Estonia. The announcement gives no production volume, timing or employment figures. Its direction is clear, even if its scale is not.

The near-term tests are the 2027-2028 rollout of more than 100 externally launched BlueBirds, AT&T integration, Rakuten’s service launch and selection of a U.S. engine plant. Blacklift’s own deadline is late 2028, when New Street’s five-year norm will look either conservative or unusually optimistic.