BlueWalker 3 will hitch a ride on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket this August, if all goes well
AST SpaceMobile confirmed this week plans to launch its BlueWalker 3 satellite from Cape Canaveral, Florida the week of August 15, 2022. BlueWalker 3 is designed to test cellular broadband communications directly with standard mobile phones, AST SpaceMobile said.
The company announced in May that the U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) had cleared AST SpaceMobile to test the satellite. The FCC license grants AST SpaceMobile permission to test the satellite, though the FCC has not yet granted the company a commercial operating license as a carrier.
The experiment license will permit AST SpaceMobile to test BlueWalker 3 satellite-to-phone connectivity in the United States at sites in Texas and Hawaii. Once the satellite is operational, the team plans to conduct testing on 5 different continents. AST SpaceMobile is working with operators including Vodafone, Rakuten Mobile, and Orange, it said.
AST expects to perform software and network core testing and optimization while the satellite is in operation. The company said it’s invested about $85 million to get to this point and has conducted more than 800 ground tests with the satellite.
If things work out with BlueWalker 3, AST’s next step is to build and deploy a network of satellites it calls BlueBirds. The business says it can build up to six of them a month at its Texas manufacturing facility.
For AST SpaceMobile Abel Avellan, this is about addressing the ever-widening digital divide. He describes “digital ‘haves’ and ‘have nots.’”
“This revolutionary technology supports our mission to eliminate the connectivity gaps faced by more than 5 billion mobile subscribers today moving in and out of coverage, and bring cellular broadband to approximately half of the world’s population who remain unconnected,” he said.
AST SpaceMobile paid for a payload berth on the SpaceX-operated Falcon 9 that’s scheduled to launch from Cape Canaveral that week. Of course, the actual launch date is subject to change. And the company is careful to note that there are still factors in play over which it has no control, such as launch conditions.
AST SpaceMobile had secured an earlier berth for BlueWalker 3 on a Soyuz mission. But that got scrapped after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Russian space agency Roscosmos announced in February plans to halt all Soyuz launches due to sanctions imposed by the European Union (EU). In March, AST SpaceMobile announced a multi-launch agreement with SpaceX. That’s helped the company to secure a framework for deploying not only BlueWalker 3, but also the considerably larger production BlueBird satellites to follow.
AST SpaceMobile is one of several companies working on non-terrestrial network (NTN) telecommunications solutions. NTN solutions include satellites operating in low Earth orbit (LEO), geostationary Earth orbit (GEO) and high altitude platforms (HAPS) such as balloons or drones.
