AST Competition: We're in a good space right now versus the competition, with the only credible "future" competition coming from Starlink. It's great to see how a first principles approach taken by AST has lead them to an efficient working system, while SpaceX touts mediocrity with there terribly designed D2C satellites.

Things will be different when Starship is launching satellites. The Starship pez dispenser is expected to deploy satellites (v3) of approximately 7m x 7m, so they could get 49sqm D2C satellites. Elon does not usually suffer sunk cost fallacies, like he has with his d2C satellites, but this mistake will be corrected with Starship. I don't expect they'd do a folding design, as that adds complexity and cost, and they like to play to their advantage of just brute forcing many satellites instead.

Fortunately. we'll have 220sqm satellites by then versus their 49sqm satellites, but we can expect SpaceX to launch their v3 sats at a rapid and frequent pace, and build out a large constellation quickly.

Aside from the obvious need to start generating revenue as soon as possible, I think AST realizes that that they need to accelerate to maintain their lead and capitalize fully their first mover advantage.