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$ASTS: The first New Glenn return-to-flight appears to be @blueorigin’s own Blue Ring payload, with a NET launch date of November 30, 2026: reddit.com/r/BlueWire/s/evFN…

$ASTS: More Satellites, More Responsibility: The Hidden RF Bill of Mega-Large D2D Ali Esswie, PhD, Senior Director, 3GPP Standards & IP Strategy and 3GPP RAN & RAN 2 Delegate of @AST_SpaceMobile explains big satellites vs small satellites and OOBE compliance issues with large constellation sizes in his new LinkedIn post, pasted below 👇 In satellite direct-to-device, “more satellites” always sounds like an automatic advantage. To a certain level, it surely is. More satellites improve availability, raise the probability of good geometry, and reduce time spent at low elevation angles. But there is another side of the story that the industry does not talk about enough, YET. For a phone on the ground, a very large constellation does not only mean more serving opportunities. It also means more simultaneously visible interferers, more adjacent-channel energy, more coordination burden, and more mobility events for the device and network to manage. This is where satellite count stops being just a coverage/persistence metric and becomes an RF responsibility, and potentially RF protection requirements! For large and very large NGSO constellations (1-2k to 10k sats) around 550 to 600 km, the number of satellites that are simultaneously visible (above noise level) to a device can reach roughly multiple tens at a high elevation, and mutliple hudreds at a lower elevations. That is a very different coexistence problem from a single-satellite assumption. A 3GPP-compliant analysis showed that dense and ultra-dense constellations can create aggregate adjacent-channel interference roughly 9 to 20 dB above todays' protection limits. That matters because standardization and regulation bodies will increasingly look at what the victim device or victim system actually experiences, not only whether one satellite passes one clean per-satellite test. A very large constellation may therefore face more demanding out-of-band and emission requirements over time, simply because its aggregate footprint is more aggressive. This is not punishment. It is fairness. Otherwise, terrestrial networks, other NTN systems, and adjacent-band users shall absorb such cost. There is also a mobility cost! If a satellite-to-phone system has a limited RF link margin and only works at very high elevation (e.g., through lowering the constellation orbit, and/or launching aggressively); each satellite however will have a much shorter useful service window. That creates more frequent serving-satellite changes, more handover pressure, more tracking overhead, and more chances for service interruption. In that case, “many satellites” do indeed improve geometry, but the device pays through mobility churn and the network pays through control overhead. A more flexible NTN architecture is therefore the one that can provide BOTH time- and RF- stable ground coverage, strong uplink and downlink link margins, and enough spatial control to serve users while also respecting coexistence limits. This is where an ultra-large and well-designed aperture and resulting high spatial degrees of freedom matter the most. At AST SpaceMobile, this was the design center of the architecture from the outset! #D2C #ASTSpaceMobile #3GPP lnkd.in/p/gKfU8sss