$ASTS and a Question Regarding Maintenance.
I’m new to asts and I’m beginning to look into ASTS as an investment but there’s just one thing I can’t wrap my head around and I’d appreciate if you’d answer this.
If AST SpaceMobile is planning to deploy a large constellation of satellites that essentially function as telecom towers in orbit, one thing I’m struggling to understand is the long-term maintenance strategy. What happens when one of these satellites develops a hardware failure, antenna problem, power-system degradation, propulsion issue, or some other fault that can’t simply be fixed through software?
With terrestrial telecom towers, you can physically send engineers to repair, replace, or upgrade equipment. But with AST’s satellites potentially operating hundreds of kilometers above Earth, physically accessing them would obviously be far more complicated and expensive. So does AST design these satellites with enough redundancy that most failures can be isolated and the satellite can continue operating, or is the expectation that a sufficiently damaged satellite would simply be written off and replaced with a new one?
And if the strategy is primarily replacement, how economically viable is that over a 10–15+ year period as the constellation scales? Would AST need to maintain a continuous pipeline of replacement satellites and launches just to keep the network at full capacity? Also, how much does the inability to physically service these satellites affect their expected lifetime, operating costs, and ultimately the economics of the entire constellation?