Did Peter Beck just torch $8B on a dying satphone company? Or pull off the smartest spectrum grab in the space race?
Lot of split takes on the $RKLB –Iridium deal right now. So I spent this morning digging in and forming my own view.
I think the bears have it backwards. And it's quietly good for $ASTS too. 🧵 2/
First thing to get straight: Rocket Lab didn't buy a phone company. They bought spectrum.
Beck basically said it himself. All the rockets in the hangar and all the satellites you want mean nothing if you don't have spectrum you can actually use.
Globally coordinated L-band is rare and takes years of regulatory grinding to get, with no guarantee you win. Iridium already holds it.

$ASTS $META : 🚨Everyone saw the Meta executive visit to $ASTS last month. Stock popped 3%.

But, nobody has done the revenue math on WHY @Meta needs this partnership.

Here it is. 🧵 The visit is confirmed. ASTS VP Luiz Abud on LinkedIn: "It was a pleasure to host you and the Meta team and I look forward to the collaboration."

Not "Vinod." THE META TEAM. Multiple people. And "collaboration" -- present tense, active.

ASTS's own 2025 annual review listed: "Collaboration with META to ensure optimisation with D2D."

Both sides confirmed. This isn't speculation. It's in progress.

$ASTS just quietly completed one of the hardest things a hardware company can do.

They built their own custom ASIC chip. From scratch. And it's about to go into production satellites.

Here's why this is a bigger deal than the market realizes. 🧵 What is an ASIC.. Simple version for non-engineers..

Think of it like this:
A regular chip (FPGA) is like a Swiss Army knife. It can do many things, but none of them perfectly.
An ASIC is like a custom-forged Japanese chef's knife. It does ONE thing -- but it does it better than anything else on earth.
AST SpaceMobile just built their own chef's knife. It's called the AST5000.