---
title: "AST SpaceMobile Bets $1.3 Billion on a Rocket It Has Never Built"
description: "Blacklift must fly by late 2028 to fix a launch bottleneck that got worse after a New Glenn failure and a pad explosion"
author: "Luis Goa"
published: 2026-11-06T18:20:47Z
modified: 2026-11-07T10:04:25Z
url: https://rews.cc/a/ast-spacemobile-bets-1-3-billion-on-a-rocket-it-has-never-bu-b759d2
language: en
tags: ["space", "spacex", "rockets", "ast-spacemobile", "firefly", "tech"]
publisher: "Rews (https://rews.cc)"
---

# AST SpaceMobile Bets $1.3 Billion on a Rocket It Has Never Built

*Blacklift must fly by late 2028 to fix a launch bottleneck that got worse after a New Glenn failure and a pad explosion*

By Luis Goa · November 6, 2026 · https://rews.cc/a/ast-spacemobile-bets-1-3-billion-on-a-rocket-it-has-never-bu-b759d2

## In brief

- AST SpaceMobile unveiled Blacklift, a 20-ton reusable rocket, targeting first flight in late 2028
- Firefly Aerospace will supply 36 engines (27 Miranda, 9 Vira) and a manufacturing license for $1.3 billion
- New Glenn lost AST’s BlueBird 7 in April 2026 and a booster exploded on the pad in May 2026, idling AST’s higher-capacity launch option
- Only ULA’s Vulcan among five rockets announced since 2015 has reached orbit, after 8.7 years and ~$2bn in federal support
- Firefly shares closed up 36.8% and AST SpaceMobile 7.05% on the deal’s announcement, November 6, 2026

AST SpaceMobile, a Midland, Texas satellite-broadband company that has never built a rocket engine, a tank, or a fairing, says it will fly its own orbital rocket in just over two years. The company announced the vehicle, called Blacklift, and a $1.3 billion engine-supply deal with Firefly Aerospace on November 6, in a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Two years and one month is roughly a quarter of the fastest development time any US commercial rocket has ever managed: SpaceX took 4.7 years to get Falcon 9 from announcement to orbit, the fastest on record, and United Launch Alliance took 8.7 years to do the same with Vulcan Centaur, as Ars Technica’s Eric Berger has tallied.

Blacklift is described in AST’s filing as a 20-ton-class, three-stage rocket with two reusable lower stages, built to carry up to five of AST’s BlueBird satellites per launch. The company plans to unveil hardware on November 12 in New York. Firefly will supply the engines: 27 Miranda engines for the booster stage and nine vacuum-optimized Vira engines for the upper stage, enough for AST’s first three rockets, plus three years of engineering support and a perpetual license letting AST manufacture both engines itself at a new US plant once Firefly’s supply runs out.

**How the $1.3 billion moves** The Firefly–AST SpaceMobile engine and license deal, announced November 6, 2026

| From | To | How |
| --- | --- | --- |
| AST SpaceMobile | $800M license fee *($400M cash + 10–14M shares)* | pays |
| AST SpaceMobile | $500M supply deal *($250M engines + $250M engineering, 3 yrs)* | pays |
| $800M license fee *($400M cash + 10–14M shares)* | Firefly Aerospace |  |
| $500M supply deal *($250M engines + $250M engineering, 3 yrs)* | Firefly Aerospace |  |
| Firefly Aerospace | 36 engines delivered *(27 Miranda + 9 Vira)* | first 3 rockets |
| Firefly Aerospace | AST's own engine plant *(new US facility, built under license)* | grants license |
| 36 engines delivered *(27 Miranda + 9 Vira)* | Blacklift rocket *(20-ton class, target late 2028)* | power early flights |
| AST's own engine plant *(new US facility, built under license)* | Blacklift rocket *(20-ton class, target late 2028)* | supplies engines after yr 3 |

![How the $1.3 billion moves. The Firefly–AST SpaceMobile engine and license deal, announced November 6, 2026](https://rews.cc/img/4206a198a62955b04e41f8e62f1b7394d45fbdcb.webp)

Based on [AST SpaceMobile 8-K filing; Firefly Aerospace](https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/0001780312/000149315226050513/ex99-1.htm)

The deal looks less like a bet on rocketry for its own sake than a fix for a supply-chain problem that got worse this year. AST’s own target is to go from 13 satellites in orbit today to roughly 243 by the end of 2028, the threshold it says it needs for full global coverage under its FCC authorization covering up to 248 satellites. A Falcon 9 fairing fits at most three of AST’s current Block 2 BlueBirds per launch; adding 200-plus satellites at that rate means on the order of 70 Falcon 9 launches. Blue Origin’s New Glenn, with its 7-meter fairing, could carry up to eight BlueBirds per flight, more than double Falcon 9’s rate, and AST’s chairman and CEO Abel Avellan had called that capacity central to hitting the coverage targets.

That second option is mostly gone for now. On April 19, 2026, New Glenn’s third flight put AST’s BlueBird 7 satellite into too low an orbit to use its own thrusters after one of the upper stage’s two BE-3U engines underperformed during a critical burn, according to Blue Origin chief executive Dave Limp, as [Via Satellite reported](https://www.satellitetoday.com/launch/2026/04/20/new-glenn-grounded-and-ast-spacemobile-satellite-lost-after-launch-anomaly/). AST’s own [quarterly filing](https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/0001780312/000119312526342550/asts-20260630.htm) later put the net loss on that satellite, after $32.5 million in insurance recoveries against a roughly $155-160 million carrying value, at $125.9 million — insurance covered about a fifth of it, not the whole loss the company had first implied. Then, on May 28, a fourth New Glenn booster [exploded during a ground hot-fire test](https://www.space.com/space-exploration/launches-spacecraft/blue-origins-new-glenn-rocket-explodes-in-massive-fireball-during-prelaunch-test) at Cape Canaveral’s Launch Complex 36, destroying the booster and the fueled upper stage attached to it and damaging Blue Origin’s only operational New Glenn pad, an explosion Wikipedia’s catalog of the event ranks as the most powerful since the Soviet N1’s in 1969. New Glenn has flown twice since its January 2025 debut, as a [rews story on Blue Origin’s Florida launch plans](https://rews.cc/a/blue-origin-plans-100-florida-launches-a-year-for-a-rocket-t-4441ba) noted in October, well short of the cadence AST needs. Since the explosion, AST has been down to three BlueBirds per Falcon 9 launch, which is, by the company’s own math, the bottleneck of its entire business model.

![A cream funnel filled with dark blue satellites narrows toward a rocket with an orange flame against a teal background.](https://rews.cc/img/e7ba8ed92d6c519e339e9d31b36ff1288c1f1256.webp)

Miranda is Firefly’s answer to that bottleneck, and it is not a flown engine. It runs liquid oxygen and kerosene through the same tap-off cycle and injector design as Firefly’s smaller Reaver (45,000 lbf) and Lightning (15,759 lbf) engines, which do fly, on the company’s operational Alpha rocket. Miranda itself is rated at 230,000 lbf and has logged more than 175 hot-fire tests totaling over 4,200 seconds — about 20 full first-stage burns, by Firefly’s count — including one run at 110 percent of rated power that lasted 20 seconds past the 206-second nominal flight duration, according to [Firefly’s announcement](https://fireflyspace.com/news/firefly-aerospace-signs-rocket-engine-deal-valued-at-more-than-1-3-billion-with-ast-spacemobile/). None of that is flight time. “The Miranda engine will allow us to leapfrog the traditional five-to-10-year development cycle as we build Blacklift,” AST president Scott Wisniewski said in the announcement. Firefly’s chief executive Jason Kim called the engine choice “the hardest, highest-stakes decision” a company building its own rocket makes, and said AST “chose to partner with Firefly for its most powerful rocket engines.”

The chart is the scoreboard Blacklift has to beat. Since 2015, five US companies have announced new medium- or heavy-lift commercial rockets in the 7-to-27-metric-ton payload range: ULA’s Vulcan, Rocket Lab’s Neutron, Relativity’s Terran R, the Firefly/Northrop Grumman vehicle now called Eclipse, and Stoke Space’s Nova. Only Vulcan has reached orbit, after 8.7 years and roughly $2 billion in aggregate federal support spread across its suppliers, per Ars Technica’s reporting. Neutron, [first shown by Rocket Lab in 2021](https://www.theregister.com/science/2026/10/15/rocket-lab-pushes-back-first-neutron-launch-to-2027/5303224), has slipped again, most recently to no earlier than 2027, after manufacturing defects turned up in a propellant dome. Terran R, [unveiled by Relativity in June 2021](https://www.nasaspaceflight.com/2021/06/relativity-reveals-terran-r/), has reached the test-firing-a-stage stage, as a [rews story in October](https://rews.cc/a/relativity-test-fires-rocket-stage-as-firms-race-to-replace--75ba9c) covered, with no launch date. Eclipse, first revealed as a Firefly-Northrop partnership in 2022, hasn’t flown either — and Firefly is the same company now promising AST an engine fast enough to beat all three of them to orbit from a later start.

![A stylized stopwatch on a bright blue background has a cream face, navy hands and border, and a rocket with a curved yellow trail.](https://rews.cc/img/4390f48ba39572f45cd699da3a62756dbba93aac.webp)

The announcement moved both companies’ stock. Firefly shares closed up 36.8 percent on November 6, to $20.76, while AST SpaceMobile rose 7.05 percent, according to [the Motley Fool’s reporting](https://www.fool.com/investing/2026/11/06/why-firefly-aerospace-stock-went-to-the-moon-today/). The rally mattered more to Firefly: its stock had been trading as low as roughly 75 percent below its 52-week high of $62.17 after a crash in late October, and the $800 million license payment — $400 million of it in cash — is working capital for a company that is itself still waiting on Eclipse to fly. Firefly discusses the deal in more detail on its third-quarter earnings call on November 10.

None of this replaces AST’s existing launch contracts. The company says it still has agreements covering more than 100 BlueBird satellites across 2027 and 2028 with outside providers, and frames Blacklift as added capacity rather than a substitute. That capacity is arriving into a market that [a rews story this month](https://rews.cc/a/the-west-runs-short-of-rockets-as-china-sets-a-timetable-for-f9b5e2) described as short of rockets generally, with SpaceX’s commercial Falcon 9 rideshare slots expected to tighten further as the company shifts manifest toward Starship.

AST gets to show hardware on November 12. What it can’t show yet is a flight. Falcon 9 had the advantage of a company three years into operations, a flown smaller rocket, and a scaled-down 10-ton payload target when SpaceX announced it in 2005; Blacklift has an engine with zero flight hours, a 20-ton payload target, and a company that has spent its history building satellites, not boosters. The number to watch is not November’s stock pop. It’s late 2028, and whether Blacklift’s two-year clock survives contact with the five-to-nine-year record set by everyone who has tried this before.

## See also

- [AST SpaceMobile 8-K: Blacklift and Firefly engine agreement](https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/0001780312/000149315226050513/ex99-1.htm) — sec.gov · The primary filing with deal terms, engine specs and executive quotes
- [2026 New Glenn rocket explosion](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2026_New_Glenn_rocket_explosion) — en.wikipedia.org · Background on the May 28 pad explosion and its scale
- [Rocket Lab Neutron development update, October 2026](https://investors.rocketlabcorp.com/news-releases/news-release-details/rocket-lab-provides-update-neutron-development-and-adjusts) — investors.rocketlabcorp.com · Rocket Lab's own account of Neutron's latest delay