AST SpaceMobile: how sparse are the connect windows?

About AST SpaceMobile

Orbit

Mid-inclination, non-polar · 53.0° inclination

Altitude

~506 km

Satellites tracked

10 · 4 orbital planes

Satellite bus

Custom flat-panel bus, not a CubeSat — ~1,500 kg with an unfolding phased-array antenna (~64 m² on BlueBird Block 1, larger on Block 2), built in-house

Standard

Standard LTE/5G on partner carriers' own licensed spectrum (not a dedicated NTN band) — a space-based cell tower, not a new protocol

Founded

2017, Midland, Texas, USA

Planned fleet

Nearest commercial milestone is 45–60 satellites, recently pushed from late 2026 to early 2027; longer-term public statements range from roughly 90 to 100+ satellites for broader global coverage. Three more BlueBirds (8–10) already appear in this report's tracking data as of its most recent run; BlueBird 6 was reported in transit to ISRO's Satish Dhawan spaceport for an LVM3 launch and BlueBird 7 toward Cape Canaveral, neither showing up in tracking data yet.

AST SpaceMobile's satellites orbit at about 53° inclination — a moderate, non-polar orbit whose ground track never reaches latitudes higher than roughly 53° north or south. That's the whole reason the ≥25° row can come up empty on this page from a high-latitude station: it's geometry, not signal strength — the satellites simply never climb far enough above the horizon to clear a stricter margin that far north, only grazing low in the sky on their closest passes (pick a city nearer the equator from the dropdown above to see it fill back in). The satellites tracked here have launched across several batches since 2022 (one test satellite, then operational batches through 2026), landing in multiple distinct orbital planes rather than one tight cluster — so passes still bunch up within each plane's window, but there are more separate windows per day than a single-launch constellation like Sateliot shows.

Company facts last checked October 2026 — orbit/altitude/plane count above are computed fresh from this run's TLEs, everything else in this box is hand-researched and can go stale faster than the orbital data does.

Summary

Over the next 4 days, a satellite is above 10° elevation 6.43% of the time (25.5 passes/day, median 4.5 min each). At a more realistic 25° link margin that drops to 0.0%, with gaps up to 96.0 h where nothing is reachable at all.