Communications

BLUEWALKER-3

Direct-to-Cell Broadband Prototype (Largest Commercial Antenna in Orbit) · AST SpaceMobile

For one night in November 2022, astronomers watched a satellite suddenly become one of the ten brightest objects in the entire sky — brighter than nearly every star, rivaling Betelgeuse and Vega. BlueWalker 3 had just unfurled a phased-array antenna the size of a badminton court, the largest commercial antenna ever flown, built to let an ordinary unmodified smartphone connect directly to a satellite with no special hardware at all. It worked: months later, AST SpaceMobile placed history's first 5G call from a literal dead zone in Maui to a phone in Madrid. Astronomers are furious. Everyone else is fascinated.