SpaceX launches fleet-leading booster on 14th flight – Spaceflight Now

“The launch of BlueWalker 3 is the culmination of years of effort by our engineers to let us test connecting the phone in your pocket, with no modifications to the phone, directly with one of our satellites in space,” said Abel Avellan, chairman and CEO of AST SpaceMobile, in a statement. “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. We want to close the gap between the digital ‘haves’ and ‘have nots’.”

BlueWalker 3 rode into orbit in the upper position inside the Falcon 9’s payload shroud. The Falcon 9’s upper stage performed two engine burns before deploying the roughly 3,300-pound (1.5-metric ton) BlueWalker 3 satellite at an altitude of around 318 miles (513 kilometers). Separation of BlueWalker 3 occurred about 50 minutes after liftoff.

Two more engine burns by the Falcon 9 upper stage maneuvered the rocket into a slightly lower orbit for deployment of 34 Starlink satellites at around T+plus 2 hours and 4 minutes. Elon Musk, SpaceX’s founder and CEO, said the launch Saturday night would be “one of our most complex missions.”

SpaceX confirmed separation of the Starlink satellites, and the Falcon 9’s upper stage completed its deorbit burn — the fifth firing on Saturday night’s mission — a few minutes later.

AST SpaceMobile confirmed late Saturday that its ground controllers established contact with the BlueWalker 3 satellite.

“BlueWalker 3 is going to be the largest commercially deployed communications array in low Earth orbit ever,” said Scott Wisniewski, AST SpaceMobile’s chief strategy officer. “It’s 693 square feet, and it’s designed to test our direct to cell phone cellular broadband architecture.

“We are a company founded on the desire to build cellular broadband direct from space,” Wisniewski said. “We’ve been at it since 2017. And this satellite is designed to connect directly with cell phones, regular cell phones, unmodified cell phones on the ground and we’ll be doing testing on that in the coming months.”

Some time in the first two months after launch, assuming BlueWalker 3 is working well, ground controllers will send the command for the spacecraft to unfurl its antenna array. The antenna consists of 148 individual sections, each with its own antenna elements, connected together with mechanical hinges, according to Wisniewski.

“The unfolding process itself is pretty straightforward,” Wisniewski said in an interview with Spaceflight Now. “Basically, we’ve compressed the satellite into a cube and it opens up into two dimensions using stored energy in hinges that have packed it together. And what opens up is an array of antenna elements pointing down toward the Earth, and solar elements pointing up at the sun.

“The key with all deployments is to keep it as simple as possible and keep it as dumb as possible,” Wisniewski said. “What the James Webb Telescope did was amazing. But that level of complexity, we believe, breeds potential errors. And if you can avoid it, you do. We’ve had, over the years, many more complex designs and in the future, there’s a lot of cool ways to do this. But ultimately, just simple mechanical hinges was the best way to de-risk it.

“For us, the unfolding … is going to be a critical milestone,” Wisniewski said. “And then after that, we’ll be doing calibration, and then start to make phone calls.”

AST SpaceMobile is backed by venture capital funds and investments from Vodafone, the cell tower operator American Tower, and the Japanese mobile telecom company Rakuten. The company has agreements with Samsung, Nokia and mobile network operators like Vodafone, AT&T, and Orange to test the space-based cell network’s compatibility with existing cell phones.

“Basically, we’ve taken the top of the cell tower, and that functionality is now on our satellite,” Wisniewski said.

BlueWalker 3 will demonstrate AST SpaceMobile’s technology with more than 10 mobile network operators across six continents. “Our objective is to calibrate their networks so we can connect with them,” Wisniewski said.

AST SpaceMobile has invested about $85 million on the BlueWalker 3 mission.

If all goes well, the company plans to launch the first five operational satellites in late 2023, likely on another SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. AST SpaceMobile plans to eventually deploy 168 satellites.

“This is all part of our plan to build 168 satellites globally,” Wisniewski said.

With the giant antenna arrays on AST’s satellites, some scientists have raised concerns about potential interference on astronomy.

The Starlink spacecraft turned out to reflect more sunlight than expected, prompting complaints from astronomers and a SpaceX effort to put visors and less reflective coatings on their internet satellites. Other companies are planning similar broadband constellations. OneWeb has launched 428 internet satellites for its constellation of 648 spacecraft, Amazon is planning to launch the first of its planned fleet of 3,236 Kuiper internet satellites in the coming months, and the first testbed for a proposed Boeing constellation of internet satellites launched earlier this month.

But AST SpaceMobile’s satellites are much larger. Astronomers are eager to observe BlueWalker 3 and measure its brightness after the antenna array opens up later this year, according to Jonathan McDowell, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, and an expert tracker of space launches and satellite activity.

“There’s a whole other set of constellations that are reaching the pad,” McDowell said in a recent interview. “We’re seeing this starting slow (with) Starlink, but now all these other companies are maturing their constellations. Amazon is finally going to launch its first satellite soon, I believe. We’re going to see more and more of this in the next couple of years. I think it’s going to get to the point where it’s dramatic just for people looking at the night sky, to the naked eye.”

Wisniewski said AST SpaceMobile’s constellation, at 168 satellites, will naturally have lower impact on astronomy than fleets numbering in the thousands of spacecraft.