An Indian rocket is scheduled to launch the record-breaking BlueBird 6 smartphone satellite tonight (Dec. 23), and you can watch the action live.
AST SpaceMobile is building a constellation of satellites in low Earth orbit (LEO) that beam broadband service directly to standard smartphones on the ground.
The company has launched five operational satellites to date, all of them aboard a single SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket in September 2024. Those spacecraft, BlueBirds 1 through 5, feature 693-square-foot (64.4 square meters) communication arrays — the largest ever unfurled in LEO.
BlueBird 6 will break that record, and by a healthy margin. It’s the first of AST SpaceMobile’s next-generation BlueBirds, whose arrays cover nearly 2,400 square feet (223 square meters) apiece.
Tonight’s liftoff will be the ninth overall for the three-stage, 143-foot-tall (43.5 m) LVM3, which is India’s most powerful rocket. It debuted in December 2014 and has a 100% success rate to date.
BlueBird 6, which tips the scales at about 13,450 pounds (6,100 kilograms), will be the heaviest payload that the LVM3 has ever hauled to LEO, according to the Indian Space Research Organisation.
