During a presentation on Nov. 12, AST SpaceMobile Founder and Chief Executive Officer Abel Avellan detailed the company’s strategy to develop an in-house heavy-lift rocket named Blacklift.
Driven by a shortage of available commercial launch capacity, the telecommunications company intends to manufacture the vehicle to ensure reliable deployment of its large Bluebird direct-to-cell satellites into low Earth orbit (LEO).
Reusable Architecture and Firefly Propulsion
Designed specifically to deploy five Bluebird satellites simultaneously to a 550-kilometer orbit, the Blacklift vehicle will feature a three-stage, all-composite tank architecture with a reusable first stage. AST SpaceMobile targets a lift capacity of 20 metric tons to LEO, with flight operations planned to launch twice a month from the former Antares pad at the Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia.
To streamline development, AST SpaceMobile is leveraging a previously announced $1.3 billion engine procurement agreement with Firefly Aerospace. The rocket will utilize Firefly’s Miranda engines for first-stage propulsion—currently undergoing qualification testing—and Vira upper-stage engines, allowing the company to bypass the lengthy internal development cycles typically required for orbital-class propulsion systems.
“We’re not doing this thing because we like rockets. We’re not doing this thing because we want to be in the launch business,” Avellan said during the Nov. 12 event. “We want this because we have so much demand of our satellites, and as you have seen it, we cannot get enough launches”.
Timeline to 2028
AST SpaceMobile has set an aggressive target to have Blacklift ready for launch by 2028, compressing a vehicle development timeline that typically spans much longer across the aerospace industry. To fund the effort, company President Scott Wisniewski indicated AST SpaceMobile plans to allocate several hundred million dollars toward Blacklift development in 2027, backed by roughly $2.8 billion in cash and cash equivalents reported at the end of September.
