// SPACE.COM — SPAZIO & SCIENZA
AST SpaceMobile announces new 'Blacklift' rocket, targets 2028 launch debut
"The Blacklift rocket is the springboard to significantly expand our total addressable market."
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AST SpaceMobile announced today (Nov. 6) that it's building a reusable rocket called Blacklift to launch its broadband satellites to low Earth orbit (LEO), with first flight targeted in 2028.
The news comes just 10 days after Cowboy Space unveiled Big Iron, a rocket designed to launch its constellation of 20,000 AI data centers. Cowboy Space is also targeting 2028 for its first liftoff.
"The Blacklift rocket is the springboard to significantly expand our total addressable market, providing AST SpaceMobile with regular unconstrained access to orbit and providing for most favorable owners’ economics in the industry," Abel Avellan, the company's founder, chairman and CEO, said in a statement today.
"This will accelerate our mission to build a new layer of global connectivity, extending connectivity beyond terrestrial networks and helping to bring AI-enabled services wherever people live, work and travel," Avellan added.
Texas-based AST SpaceMobile is building a LEO constellation composed of its BlueBird satellites, which beam internet service directly to cell phones. The company has launched 13 BlueBirds to date, including eight "Block 2" variants. The antennas on each of these next-gen spacecraft cover a whopping 2,400 square feet (223 square m) — the largest ever deployed in LEO by a commercial satellite.
BlueBirds have flown atop three different rockets to date — SpaceX's Falcon 9, Blue Origin's New Glenn and India's Launch Vehicle Mark-3. But AST SpaceMobile wants to get more vertically integrated, which explains the push to develop Blacklift.
The company won't be starting from scratch. It has signed a deal with another Texas-based outfit, Firefly Aerospace, to provide the engines (and associated engineering services) for the first three Blacklift launches. After that, AST SpaceMobile will build the engines itself, under a licensing agreement with Firefly.
Those engines are Miranda, which will power Blacklift's booster, and Vira, which will power the upper stage.