Building a rocket is hard. AST SpaceMobile thinks it's "simple."
"We're not doing this thing because we like rockets."
During an hour-long event on Thursday, Abel Avellan, the founder and chief executive of the telecommunications company AST SpaceMobile, laid out his vision for developing a large rocket to launch his Bluebird satellites into orbit.
Avellan emphasized, over and over again, that AST plans to build a "simple" rocket. He paraphrased SpaceX founder Elon Musk several times, saying, "the best part is no part." Avellan emphasized that AST has already procured engines for its proposed Blacklift rocket, asserting that engine development accounts for 80 percent of a typical rocket's development cycle.
"Of course rocket engineers are going to get mad with me, but you can simplify it as a big tank feeding engines," he said of the rocket. "So big tanks—we know how to do them. We know how to do them. We know how to do them in composite."
This story was first published by Ars Technica. Read the original report