Hey there, everyone. I am glad to see that people are here to hear about another company than the one currently dominating the news, which is doing some extraordinary and exciting things. I think we are all aware that we are living in a time of extraordinary technological change, and the promises out there are unbounded. They tend to focus a lot on the world that we know around the information economy, right? The software, things like that. Now, of course, artificial intelligence. I think in some ways, the revolution that is taking place, not just in the world of bits and bytes, but the world of atoms, is in some ways more transformative because it is much harder to begin with, and it will ultimately create an entirely new ecosystem for all of us.
When you think about that world of atoms, the most important area, of course, is space and space exploration. We have tended to think of it as more sci-fi than reality, but what we now have is a situation where it is becoming very real, and there are important companies doing things in it. I want to talk about this one for a second because AST is a case of what I remember my friend Lou Gerstner used to tell me about strategy being execution. He had a phrase when he ran IBM and American Express. He said, Strategy is execution, by which he meant if you have a good idea and you cannot execute it, you do not have a good idea. There is, in business, nothing other than what you can actually accomplish.
I remember when I met Abel Avellan the first time several years ago, and he outlined the vision he had. Most people thought he was nuts. Most people thought this was a pipe dream, and a very expensive pipe dream that would never happen, that it would be impossible to execute. By the way, he did not have the kind of resources that some of his competitors had. What I remember thinking, though, that this was an extraordinarily smart and dedicated engineer, somebody who understood execution, who could dream big but could also actually execute. The track record so far is pretty impressive, right? The goal has been to connect people to use these enormous satellites, roughly 200 times the capacity of a Starlink satellite, launch them, and then connect people with their cell phones. No receiver, no intermediary process, no special chips, no special software.
They have done that, and they have done the first voice call, the first 5G. I will leave it to Abel to explain just how remarkable some of this is. I do think that there is a special place in business for people who have that ability to both dream big and execute big. I remember when you would hear Steve Jobs explain his vision, initially the thought was always, Yes, but can he execute? Here you have a case where you have the dream and you have the execution. Without further ado, let me introduce the founder, the CEO, the Chairman of AST, Abel Avellan.
Well, thank you, Fareed. Great introduction. Thank you for the SpaceMob to be here. I really, really appreciate it. I want to say a lot of attention tonight, today, with what's going on in the market. I had a leather jacket. I am not resigning today. Please take it like that. As Dr. Fareed Zakaria said, and as I always say, one thing is dreaming, one thing is executing. We invented what had become a revolution in the last two years, how to connect phone that you have in your pocket to something that is moving at 17,000 miles per hour, is 1,000 miles away from you, and how you do it on a broadband. We invented that. We invented that concept. We invented how to do it.
We invented everything that was required to execute on that, from the ASICs that go into that, the antennas, the PAs, the LNAs, the structures, how to fly something that flies at two times the speed of a bullet and not go back to Earth, how to do that when you are flying and broadcasting 5G, 4G directly to the phone that you have in your pocket. We invented that. For that, we needed unprecedented engineering. People said clearly, The microns are going to blow up. The satellites are not going to deploy. The network operators are not going to understand what it is all that for. Here today we are, where we have 60 operators with us. We have over three billion people that want to access this system. We have deployed and put into operation every single satellite that we have launched.
We had the biggest thing done by humanity, really, in LEO, flying and operating. For that, we needed to reinvent how we manufacture. To put it in perspective, the whole industry today, satellites of this size maybe do two, three a year. By the way, they cannot connect directly to the cell phones. We are doing six a month. That requires a lot of work focused on a vertical integration that is in the core of what we are trying to explain that we are going to do going forward. We built an industrial base. We have over 3,000 people just manufacturing. There are very few of us that are commercial based. We are a manufacturer. We manufacture satellites, every component that goes into them, all the software that go into them, and we build them in Texas, in a little town called Midland.
Very few of you are part of land, and you probably do not know where it is. By the way, I am not a spaceman or anything like that. The ability to do this, it has been very, very hard. Starting from an idea, design, and then building it has been very, very hard. We had to spend billions of dollars to get here, but we are there. We have 28 satellites that are ready to be shipped between now and January. We have 51 in production, which I will not show you now. We have order for 100 of them, and we have contracts to launch them in the next years, between 2027 and 2028. Let me take you to Midland for a second. I never had the opportunity to show you the facility, and I want to do that today.
I want you to see what we do. To give you a little bit of an explanation before we go and see and take out Midland, we are going to see this part, we call it the tuna cans, which is this structure here, which is five meter diameter, and that is what it holds the phased array. We are going to see that first. This is the phased array, is 50 meter by 50 meter of area. You actually can see them under certain circumstances. They are built out of microns, which are these blocks that you see here. Let me take you to Midland, and let me show it to you how we build them. Can we see Midland, please, guys? Okay. This is Can you give me some water? This is site two. We have 500,000 sq ft of manufacturing. We have 12 buildings.
We do everything, 95% of every part that is used on the satellite, we build it ourselves. This is the location where we take the satellite for final stages, ship it, and take it back to the launch site. We can test, vibrate, vacuum test. We can do every step that is required to take these things to space. We can do it out of this building. We have 12 of them. A lot of people ask me, Why are you in Midland? Because in Midland, we can build buildings very, very fast. We can do it in two months, when in certain states, you need couple of years to do anything. We build these buildings, and then we ask permission later. That is how we do it. That is why we are in Midland.
Some people call us, why we are in the Wild West, and that is the reason. Again, 12 buildings, everything to build, integrate, and test. Our scientists and engineers are not in Midland. They are in D.C., they are in Seattle, they are in Dallas, they are around the country. Midland is our integration and test location. That is where we put everything, test it, and then ship it for launch. Carolina, can you walk down? Okay, we are going to work. This area, we have Well, first of all, we have 14, 15, and 16. It is in the Cape, ready to launch. Seven, this is satellite 18, ready to launch. That what you see there, stop there, Carolina, if you can. That is this tuna can here. That is where the phased arrays go. That is 19.
You can see that is what it holds, what it deploys in the space, which is the phased array, but that is also where you have all the systems to control, manage, and operate the satellites. This is satellite 20, also ready to go. You can see it from there. Those antennas, which are this little thing here, it will connect down to the ground and allow us to connect to the operator, to AT&T, to Verizon, to a new one hopefully coming very soon. To all the operators in Europe, with a new one also that I think you are going to like. Our friends from Japan, they just gave us $1 billion to build more of this. Arigato gozaimasu. That is to our U.S. government.
I mean, I think you're going to like what we're doing with them and how we're keeping this nation safer with what we're doing with these satellites. We're on satellite 20. Karina, can you keep moving? Here we have satellite 20 to 28. We're getting completed. What is in the left, it will prepare the electronics that goes into them. This is 21 to 28, and this is 28. As a reminder, we don't need thousands of satellites. We need hundreds of satellites. With satellite 28, we're in beta service in U.S., Europe, Japan, Saudi Arabia, and Canada. That's what put us into beta. That's with 25 satellites. That satellite right there is a milestone. It's getting to beta in the initial markets. You will ask, "Why those markets?" Because that's the people that invested with us at the beginning.
U.S., Europe, Japan, Saudi Arabia, and Canada. This thing here is what it take us to beta service. We're obviously not stopping there. We're on satellite 51. Let's move to this thing. It is, by the way, it's very similar to the tank of a rocket, but this is where we test, and satellite 51 to 29 are passing through this tool. We have two of these tools. This is where we compress the satellites. When you're going up, you have five satellites on top of you, then you have four satellites on top of you. Roughly, let's call it 5 tons per satellite. You have 20 tons. Then now you're going with the acceleration of the rocket at a 10 times the G. That 20 tons become 200 tons.
We need to test, and I'm sure you remember how difficult was for us to be producing this structure at rate, at a pace. Well, because this thing is very hard. You need to 20 tons, 10 times is 200 tons. That's the weight of the Statue of Liberty on top of a satellite. So it has to be light, and it has to be producible at rate. That tool right there is actually where we compress these things, we check them, we move them to make sure that they are not breaking when they ascend. We automated, I mean, this thing that you see here is all the forces that you put and the frequency to respond to them, just to make sure that these structures don't break. We're making eight of them a month. As you just saw, we have 28 ready to go.
Those Antonovs that you have been seeing arriving into Midland, they're bringing eight of them. Every time that you see an Antonov, there is another eight of these structures. We're roughly getting one a month. That's what we do in this tool. This is difficult. This is hard, and this is based in composite. This is all composite. Some of you have questioned why the rocket is all composite and all of that. That's one of the reasons for that. That, you can see another tool like that next to this one. Then if I take you to more buildings, you will keep seeing structures as we go from satellite 28 to satellite 51. In summary, we have 14, 15, and 16 in the Cape, 17, 18, 19 ready to go up, out this month.
20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, and 28, the one that I just showed, ready to go. We continue at a rate of six per month from 29 to 51. Our plan, and the demand that we have on these satellites is so large. If you start adding them up, think about the U.S. government want their own set of satellites that are reusable also. They're dual use together with the government use and the commercial use. If you add up the ones that the U.S. government want, the ones that we're putting for Japan, the ones that we will put for Europe, the ones that we put for Canada, the ones that we put for Brazil, you can keep adding that. That, by the way, that is success-based CapEx. That is infrastructure with a requirement behind it.
It's not that we are building them just waiting for somebody to say, "We want this. We want to use it." This is success-based CapEx. You add Japan, you add U.S., obviously, our largest and biggest opportunity. You add the U.S., you add Japan, you add Europe, you add Brazil. Thank you for the Brazilian market, which gave us 50 megahertz of spectrum. As you saw, we're being very prudent in buying and getting the spectrum into our network. You saw what we paid for the L-band, a fraction of what everybody else paid. Brazil, we got 50 megahertz, and we keep going in many, many other markets where we are acquiring spectrum in partnership with our partners, with the operators. Nobody have equal amount of spectrum as we have when you combine the very large asset of spectrum of the operators, combining with our own. Nobody has it.
In United States, we're targeting 100 megahertz of spectrum. Outside the U.S., between 40 and 60 megahertz, depending on the country, megahertz of spectrum, without breaking the bank to do that. That's also part of the partnership. That's why we do it together with the operators. Let me keep moving in Midland. By the way, we can spend all day walking through Midland. It's a large place. We have 3,000 people, three shifts, day and night. You go there on Sunday night, and you will see me and a lot of my team working on this extraordinary machines. That's what we do, and we're very proud of where we are with that. Hey, Will, can you take us to four and explain us what we have there?
Yes. We're here at AST SpaceMobile, site four. As part of our Texas operations, we have over 500,000 sq ft of manufacturing space. Here at site four, we're in micron production through BB51, and we've started production of the next generation ASIC micron. As you can see behind me, in this manufacturing facility, we assemble, test, and integrate the micron into the phased array.
I think the ASIC is a very, very important thing. This is a technology we spent five years to develop, a lot of money to develop, and it is there. We are producing it there. That is what is going on right there, manufacturing six satellites worth of microns using ASIC. Why the ASIC is important, it basically multiply by 10 the capacity of every satellite. When, I am sure you remember BlueWalker 3, the first satellite, the satellite that we love, still working. To the belief of everybody that it was not going to work. It is still working. BlueWalker 3 did 100 megahertz of spectrum processing. Block one, the next generation after BlueWalker 3, does one gigahertz of spectrum, 1,000 megahertz of spectrum. These ones with the ASIC do 10 gigahertz of spectrum. We keep multiplying. By the way, we are not stopping there.
We have the capacity to basically tune to every spectrum that the operators have, in low band, in mid band, in C-band. Some of you caught that we are filing all the frequencies, and that is a very, very interesting opportunity where even more spectrum become available to us. That is what is going on here. A lot of AI, a lot of automation. We basically have around 120 quality inspectors. We have come up with a process to basically inspect. If you think on a satellite, if you think on this area of the satellite, there is 3,600 antennas. You can have the best quality inspectors, but if you are not using AI, I tell my kids and everybody, now if you do not into AI, you are working, that is like being an accountant without knowing Excel. You really need to get into that.
We have the ability now to inspect every single thing here. There is millions of parts on that. You compare with the Hubble, one of those with the Hubble. Hubble costs, I do not remember, but it is tens of billions of dollars over decades. We are doing this once a month, but we are doing that with a lot of AI help. By the way, we also announced that starting in satellite 45, we had an AI capability built into them. We will talk about that in a second. That is Midland. Very proud of this team. Extremely dedicated. They are watching your money. They are making sure that every dollar that you had invested here, it will multiply many, many, many, many times. Of course, it is tough, it is space, take times, things happen, but we are really at it. We are really at it. We really make it happen there.
Thank you, Midland. Okay, let us watch a quick video on Blacklift. Can we play the video, Cecilia?
Yes.
Okay.
Extraordinary things don't begin with a promise. They begin with the ability to build. We designed the largest communication satellites ever deployed in low Earth orbit. We build them, and today, we operate them in space. Behind those satellites is an industrial capability we built to turn a vision into reality. Now, we're extending that capability from building our satellites to launching them. Introducing Blacklift. We're not beginning with a blank sheet. Blacklift builds on more than a decade of development and proven flight heritage. Existing engines, real hardware, a foundation for moving faster from development to flight. Now, we're bringing those building blocks together in a launch vehicle with one purpose, designed to do one thing extraordinarily well, launch BlueBirds. Not every payload, not every mission. Our satellites, our mission, a rocket built around both.
Blacklift is a full composite launch vehicle with three stages, nine Miranda engines on the first stage, two Vira engines on the second stage, and one Vira engine on the third stage. Completing AST SpaceMobile's end-to-end vertical integration, giving us greater control over when and how often we reach orbit. With a capability of up to two launches a month, because greater launch capacity means more than getting to space. It means the ability to expand our network faster, to serve more people, more places, more markets. Space-based broadband for phones, terminals, and machines, extending connectivity beyond terrestrial networks, and helping bring AI-enabled services wherever people live, work, and travel. One purpose behind it all, a fully connected world. We built the satellites. We built the capability behind them. Now, we're building our own path to orbit. Blacklift, built for BlueBird, built to connect Earth.
Let's talk about Blacklift. I think it's important. My team, myself, we do have a philosophy of engineering. But by the way, as I started applying in engineering, I learned to apply in business. The best part is no part. The best step is no step. It has to be simple. Of course, you have to pay by itself. You have to be because you're going to generate money with them. You're going to accelerate, you're going to get to orbit faster. That's the only reason why we're doing this thing. We're not doing this thing because we like rockets. We're not doing this thing because we want to be in the launch business. We want this because we have so much demand of our satellites. As you have seen it, we cannot get enough launches on time for our build.
With this, we want to have the ability to launch twice a month, at least 72 satellites a year, and accelerate all that demand that I mentioned earlier. U.S. government, U.S., Japan, Europe, Canada, Brazil, and all the rest of the world. That's why we're doing this. We're not doing this for any other reason. It's a 20-ton vehicle. It can put up to five of our BlueBirds, and it's planned for late 2028. That's the rocket. Here you can see the five satellites stack. I showed you the tool that is required to test that each one can stack, and that's where it goes into the fairing that we're building. I have personally never gotten in to do this if we were not starting in a third base. I mean, we just basically wouldn't have done it.
There is another company in Texas called Firefly. I mean, everybody knows, but they are the only private company that have put a rover into the moon. The other country that have done that is the Chinese. They have been working over 10 years on their space program. They had a rocket. They had an engine. We basically bought the rights to manufacture that engine and access to many hundreds of engineers, access to all the test tools, access to all the manufacturing capacity to basically accelerate our own plan. We are starting truly through a third base. A rocket, you can think about it, of course, rocket engineers are going to get mad with me, but you can simplify it as a big tank feeding engines. Big tanks, we know how to do them. We know how to do them. We know how to do them in composite.
We know how to do them in pace. We are starting with building 10 of them. By January, we will have, using the tools that we already have in Midland, by January already, we have the first set of tanks to start testing, and we are using the same material systems that we use currently in the satellites. That Firefly use on their existing rockets. That is very important. I want to leave you with that message here. We are starting this program on a third base to accelerate the humongous opportunity that is in front of us. That is the reason of all of this. We bypassed 10 years of engineering and R&D. The engines have been hot fired. Hot fire, it is basically turning them on exactly as they will do as you are ascending.
There is over 4,200 seconds of testing, which is equivalent to 10 full-first stage ascents. They have been tested with over 110% performance of what we need. We are getting 36 engines from Firefly, but we are also building very quickly our own capacity to build them, because for us, owner economics is very, very important. We are 95% vertically integrated on the satellites. We want to be 95% vertically integrated on the rocket. When you combine those two things, you basically have an industrial capacity that is not matchable. That is really what is behind all of this. The hot fires have been very, very, very important step on getting these engines ready to fly. These engines are ready to fly. Going back to this principle of engineering, best step is no step, best part is no part, simple. We start with the mission to make it simple.
This rocket do only one single thing, put BlueBirds at 550 km. This rocket doesn't go to the moon, it doesn't go to Mars, it doesn't flip over in space. Which is very impressive, by the way. I mean, that is a very, but it doesn't do any of that. It do only one thing, take BlueBirds to 550. That is why it is called Blackbird. With the analogy, yeah, Blacklift. Blacklift to lift BlueBirds. Single mission is very important because when you try to design anything, if you have many requirements to start, everything compound in complexity. This thing do one thing, lifting BlueBirds. It is all composite, A, because Firefly have been working in composite for a long time, and we have been working in composite for a long time. We can have tanks early in January with the tools that we had already, because it is composite.
The composite is around 40% lighter than metallic. One of our MVP for this rocket is minimum viable product is that need to be reusable. The first stage need to be reusable. We will talk about that. That is the reason for the three stages. The three stages kind of is opposite to the concept, the best part is no part. Why we are introducing a third stage is because we want the first stage to truly be reusable very, very easily. When you have three stage, the first stage would go up not that much and will come back down very easily, compared to going back very high and then turn to maneuver that back to Earth. That is the reason of the three stage. Then, of course, proven engines. As I said, we will not enter into this with engines that are ready.
That is what we did. We feel, by the way, there is already hundreds of engineers dedicated to this. Firefly had 300, combined with us, we are around 350. We have the material system design, we have the toolings already defined, we are already building the big tanks. Fly critical subsystems, we are piggyback on heritage. The avionics, the separation systems, the termination systems, we are using parts that had been flying for the last 10 years. We had a launch site, a site, which is Wallops, is the same place where Antares used to fly and where the Eclipse from Firefly will fly, and that we are upgrading that facility. Again, simplicity, one mission. For the next two years, we will rely in third-party launches. Our friends from SpaceX, with the help of our DoD, Blue Origin, and others.
That give us 100 satellites to be launched, for which we are already in satellite 51. We will get very quickly to satellite 100, and we will use external launch provider for that. Starting in 2028, we start with this, which allowed us to accelerate and add all the markets that we talk about. We are here. I said recently, I do not waiting for other people rocket. We will build it. We will build it fast, we will do it smartly. The next charter of this company, which is taking from where we are to 30, 50 times where we are today, it will be a charter that we built. That is a charter that you, being part of this as an investor, as part of the SpaceMob, or an engineer in AST or whatever participation you have, is a charter for us to build it ourself.
We build the satellites ourself, we are going to build this rocket ourself, and we will be the largest ever communication system in Earth. We have the opportunity to connect billions of people around the globe. That is a multi-trillion dollar opportunity. You combine that with the opportunity to connect everything that is small, everything that move, any of our phones, anytime, everywhere, no matter what the phone it is, and you add cars, drones, AI. Physical AI, this opportunity is gigantic. We are not going to wait for no one to bring this opportunity home. I thank you to be with us today, and to make this happen. As I said, this new charter is ours to build. Thank you so much.
So stick around. We are going to have a great fireside chat, me and Abel, with Fareed Zakaria. For those of you on the webcast, if you just give us a moment to set up, we will come right back to you.
Okay. All right, ladies and gentlemen, we are going to begin a brief fireside chat with Abel and Scott. Scott Wisniewski, of course, as you know, is the President of the company. Abel is the Founder and CEO. Abel, you mentioned that you are tired of waiting for other You are tired of waiting, you are doing this yourself. In general, when you take on this kind of project to do massive vertical integration that is very expensive, there is the question, why? Why spend the money? You have contracts with existing launch rocket companies. Why take on the whole expense of doing it yourself?
Well, everything start by the opportunity and the rate to executing that opportunity. That is fundamental, that one thing is waiting for others to allow you to launch, another thing is controlling your own launch. So that is fundamental. I believe when you put the largest satellites ever built with a capability like that, you have created an immense amount of value to the shareholders. But the fundamental is to go fast and to be able I mean, think about it. You are Japan, Europe, U.S., Brazil, rest of the world, U.S. government. You either launch that in 10 years or you launch it in few years. That is the reason. That is the fundamental reason, is the very big, large opportunity. Then, obviously doing it in a way where you can do it bypassing the typical design cycle of a new rocket.
That is the other reason that say, by having an agreement, by having access to the engines, I mean, a typical design cycle of a rocket, it could be over a decade. 80% of that is on the engine. I mean, that has been proven. Also, in the last few years, there have been significant amount of new interests, new companies entering into launching market. But unfortunately, about majority of them, they are not here in United States. They are in countries where we cannot touch, and we do not want to get there, as our friends from China. So, this also make our capability, if we were strategic to the U.S. government, to be the provider and the builder of the largest satellites, more powerful satellites, more capable satellites ever built in low Earth orbit.
When you combine that with the ability to launch them, you are even more strategic also for them. That's the reason, and that's what we're doing.
Scott, when you look at the agreements you have with other providers, and let's just be frank, that is Blue Origin and SpaceX, how complicated is this, particularly given that SpaceX has this other little product of its own, Starlink, which is obviously in some sense a competitor? Take us inside that. How is this going to play out now that you are launching your own rockets or on a path to launch your own rockets? Once you get there, would you ever need them again? How does this relationship go?
Sure. Well, I can give my opinion about certainly, you tell me yours. I think we've worked with some of these players well over the years, and they have good rockets. Blue Origin in particular has a very impressive large rocket, which is one of the reasons we've partnered with them. Really what we're seeing because of Ukraine conflict and the China market not being available, that a lot of launch in the world is locked out. What we've seen is we were able to find launches for small numbers of our satellites in our network, but going big is going to require a lot more. We also think that over time, it's going to be challenging to launch, and given the demands from the U.S. government and other internal demands.
For us, we'll work well with those third parties, as we always have, and it's customary for companies in the space industry to work like that. For us, this is all about the one simple thing of lifting up BlueBirds to 500 km, and that's what is going to make all this possible, is how we're just doing one thing, we're going to do it well, we're going to do it based on internal capabilities we have, and we're going to leverage these external capabilities with Firefly. For us, it's a race, and we're going to do it as fast and as simple and 24/7 until we get there.
Yeah. Let me say something very on that. Building these kind of satellites have an extraordinary barrier of entry. Very, very difficult. We have over 3,900 patents and patent pending claims to build them. That by itself, the capital, the knowledge, the IP, is an extraordinarily high level of barrier of entry. When you combine that with the ability to launch, the barrier of entry even got higher. If any of the people that called me crazy a few years back when we started this, and they're now trying to copy us, no good copies, but they're trying to copy us, good luck on building something like this and getting launch. That's just simply the reality. That's just simply the reality.
Scott said it's a kind of a race. 2028 is the date you have set. How confident are you, and what is the biggest technical risk to being able to get there on time?
On a rocket, always the most difficult is the engine, and that was so much focus and so much money going into that. The other one is, it used to be regulatory. Fortunately enough, we are, as a country, and I think it's bipartisan, we want to maintain and enhance American space superiority. We're getting permissions, paths, licenses, and speed a few years back were basically impossible. I think the commitment of the country to make sure that we don't get beat or surpassed by China is there, and that's helping us tremendously. I would say that risk is going away, and it will be independent of who is leading the country.
Scott, what are the economics of this? You're talking about a huge CapEx. Now, we've gotten used to huge CapExes these days with AI, you know. Your numbers actually sound small when compared to Anthropic or OpenAI, but for most companies in the world, this is a very large CapEx. Explain how you think it's justified.
In the space industry, you need great technology and great engineers, but the history of the space industry is one of many failures, and primarily due to lack of capital. Most space companies fail due to lack of capital. We have been extraordinarily good over the last decade to take the technology and the partnerships and translate that into real action and support that with capital. We have done that. We have over $3 billion on our balance sheet. We have raised nearly $10 billion over time. We are a public company. We have lots of support from our investors, and we have pressed that advantage over the last two years. Today, we go into this project and we say, What is it going to do for us? How much value is it going to create? Then how do we box that incremental cost, right?
That is how I thought about it. For us, there will be several hundred million more of CapEx next year to get on the path to that first launch. Ultimately, what you are unlocking is owner economics on a rocket that is 75% lower than where we might pay in the market today.
When you build a BlueBird and it is waiting on the ground for a launch, what does that cost you?
I think we were doing the math the other day, Abel, right? Every week, we might be spending $20 million in operating and building. Time, it definitely works against us. You are exactly right to point out. The most significant thing for us is the ability to recapture the schedule, recapture certainty of that schedule, and to be able to grow our company much beyond our original ambitions. That secure access to orbit, the scalable owner economics, those are the key factors. Building on the CapEx and investment we have already made and leveraging what Firefly has built, that is exactly how we think about this from an economic perspective, both to get to first launch, to get to scalable, regular, reusable launch, and then ultimately support our constellation, which as Abel walked through demand, is incredible.
Let's talk about that. Abel, you say that Blacklift, the real potential and what attracted you to this is that the total addressable market expands substantially. What do you mean by that? Can you be a little specific about what is the shape of that new, larger addressable market?
Well, let's start with our core market, which is connecting cell phones. That is directly proportional to the spectrum that you have on it and the number of satellites that you have working on them. We have signed agreements for around three billion devices. We're working on other methods of accessing people, which is another three billion. Now, one of the things that we work very hard at, and it would really make the market hard, it is, you can think about a system that is when you're in the boonies, you're hiking, you lost connectivity for the weekend. That's not what we're building. We're building something to be used every day, and to be really a complement of the terrestrial network every day. Not once a week, twice a week, and all of that.
That relates directly into how much spectrum you put into the satellites and how many you have. Remember, our strategy is not thousands of satellites, it's hundreds of satellites, but still, you need hundreds of satellites. Launching and putting into orbit around 72 per year is really what it make you to capture that market, which is in the trillions. Depends on how much or how relevant you are compared to terrestrial. This is not for the once or twice times where you don't have anything. This is when the cellular network is not working well or well enough. That's where we focus in broadband. That's what is hundreds of megabits per second, 200 Mbps, which is not any other company in the planet. Nowhere even close to that. And we have that today. That's the core market.
But then when you have that, what you build around that? You build AI. You can infer directly in your phone. You can infer directly in your car. You can infer on the drone. You can infer on anything that doesn't have access to AI. I call it AI everywhere. Then as you play forward on time, then you have physical AI becoming part of everything. And having a system like this one that can sense, can connect, and can infer on AI basically into anything, a cell phone, a small chip into a car, into a drone, into a device, into a streetlight, into a home meter, into anything. You basically are talking about a very, very, very large opportunity that is in the trillions. That's what is behind all of this.
But all that get enabled by very large satellites that can connect to things that are very small and very cheap. Because in connectivity, you either have expensive small satellites connected to large things, but those large things need to be in many hundreds of millions of things. So the cost of that device that you're connected, the smaller it is, you cannot put memory in a large antenna on something that you want to cost $5. So for that, you need to have a very large satellite that is able to connect to something very, very small. The easiest, the most obvious one is your phone in the pocket, but it's not the only one. There's hundreds of millions of things to connect. And that is a multi-trillion dollar opportunity.
One of the things that I talked about on my show a couple of weeks ago was Elon Musk's unpredictable nature has caused a lot of countries around the world to wonder whether they should rely on Starlink. In India, the conversation goes, if we were to get into a war with Pakistan, do we want Elon Musk deciding whether our troops have access to Starlink, shutting it off at the last minute? How would your system differ in that respect that would give countries a sense of confidence that they had control?
Well, first of all,
First of all, you're not Elon Musk.
First of all, I'm no Elon Musk, and I don't want to be. We're fundamentally different in many, many, many ways. We're doing things very, very differently too. The core to our relationships, starting with the operators, is a relationship of partnership. That have play out extraordinarily well. We have more operators than satellites. We have all the larger ones around the globe working with us. Some operators taking whatever they did with them and taking it out of the webpage, not working with them, a part that what they launched initially didn't actually work. We partner, we don't compete. We enhance, we multiply others. There's five billion devices around the globe. There's roughly on the hands of 60 operators. Most of them and all the large ones that are operating and working with us. Why? Because we partner with them. We don't compete with them.
We don't insult them. We partner with them. That's a fundamental difference. When you get to countries, it's the same thing. Starting with the U.S. government. U.S. government do not want to see one company controlling everything. The U.S. just don't want to, as a country, be dependent on a single entity to dominate and control the space. This is a market that is so gigantic, it touch everybody's life every single day, and it's too relevant. Foreign countries, and I think Japan is an extraordinarily good example, and I believe a formula that many other countries want to duplicate, which is partner with an American company from Texas, to basically deliver a system where the Japanese keep control of it. The data stay in Japan, the kill switch stay in Japan, but they do not have the capability to build something like this.
They don't have big spaces like we have in Texas to build big, large satellites. They don't also have the market that we have here in United States that justify building these things. That formula of partnering By the way, I'm a big believer there's no space company that had been successful in history by not partnering with governments and with their customers. With governments in particular. Japan is a formula that will be replicated many, many times over, where we partner with the government, in this case, with a long-term partner of ours, Rakuten, to basically execute on a vision of a sovereign system built and empowered by AST. That came with the investment that the Japanese government does in this system, it actually talks about what is the value of this?
I mean, $1 billion just to say and to be able to say that they can control, not only say and execute on it, that they can control access to our satellites. It's not going to be me in a black room saying, Turn that off, turn this on, do that, this. We don't do that. We let our partners to do that. We let the American government to do that, and our friendly countries to do that. That's a fundamental difference of everything that what we do.
All right, I am going to ask. We are out of time, so I am going to ask both of you, what is the one thing you want people to take out of where you are right now, what they have heard this week? Scott, why don't you start?
I think for us, it is all about the simplicity of what we are doing, because in order to keep this plan on track and do well and build on not what we have, but to build even bigger, all we want to do is lift our BlueBirds up. And it is a simple plan, and it is a speed plan, and it is one based on proven technology and proven capabilities. And that is my main focus.
Abel?
The opportunity is gigantic, and it is ours to build. And that is really what I want everybody to take home. The opportunity is very, very big. Many, many, many times the one that we initially set up to do. And this is an enabler to get there. If you are a long-term player into a space, there is no any other better home than us to go and execute on it. That is what I want to leave.
All right. Gentlemen, thank you. That was a window into the future.
Thank you.