Chris Quilty: Knock it out. Well, congratulations. And final question, can you elaborate what you’re seeing in the launch market? Obviously, the big 83 launch order that Amazon placed last year has put some constraint on the heavy lift market. Are you still targeting Falcon Heavy as a primary launch vehicle waiting for Starship? Or are there other alternatives?
Abel Avellan: Chris, as you probably know, we already secured our next launch with Falcon 9 for the next 5 satellites in a single launch. But we also announced that we’re leaving our all options open and we had big data significant amount of new entries into the market that start coming up in 2024, 2025. And we are evaluating and we’re working with basically all of them that has the ability to launch more than 10 tons into space with a single launch.
Chris Quilty: Very good. Thank you.
Operator: Our next questions come from the line of Mathieu Robiliard with Barclays. Please proceed with your questions.
Mathieu Robiliard: Good morning, all. And congratulations on all the progress. I had a few questions. The first one is around regulation, and there was a question about the FCC, but I was also interested to know what progress you’ve been making in terms of getting regulatory approval in other markets? And there’s also news about the German regulator reportedly asking you for cutting the signal once you cover the EC — Europe at this stage. I don’t know if there’s any comment that you want to make about that? So that would be my first question.
Scott Wisniewski: Great. Good morning, Mathieu. Scott here. On the global progress with regulatory, the U.S. has been the one that’s had the most significant movement this quarter. Of course, that’s why we’ve profiled it, and we think the U.S. is important market in the world and one that we’re very happy is taking a constructive approach. Globally, we’ve had several licenses for both 3GPP and V-band in place for some time now in about half a dozen markets globally. And we have many other regulatory conversations going on. It’s a little more traditional for markets to progress closer to service. So we expect more movement on that as the year progresses. But we’ve also been really focused on test licenses. Some of that’s not public, some of it’s done behind the scenes before it’s granted.
And so its been perfect test licenses, of course, so that we can continue our Block 3 test campaign through the course of the year. So that’s good signals there, nothing’s really changed. The receptivity we get from regulators is pretty positive based on the increased attention that non-terrestrial has got in the last couple of years. Others have kind of done that spade work for us. And then also the fact that this is just a great outcome for regulators, right? It’s using existing assets more efficiently, connecting the unconnected. It’s resolving political objective country by country by country. So I think globally, we still feel good. And in the second part of your question, Germany. So we were not contacted by the German regulator on that topic.
So I don’t think we have any other further comments that we’ve not filed for approval in Germany.
Mathieu Robiliard: Great. That’s very clear. Then I had a question about the testing, and I don’t know how much you want or can share at this stage. But to understand a bit what the next milestone in terms of what you need to test and work on testing with BlueWalker 3, it’d be up leading. And I don’t know if you can share any sense of timing in terms of how long could this take?
Scott Wisniewski: Great. I think the key thing that we tried to emphasize was the validation of the end-to-end architecture, right? And that’s key because the reason why this challenge has not been solved before and why we think others will struggle to solve it in a meaningful way because there’s a lot of components to the architecture, being able to transmit and do that initial end-to-end testing was a real key validation for us as well as flying the satellite and mechanical unfolding. So having those in our back pocket and getting the initial signal strength test that Abel pointed to on the downlink was very encouraging for us. These things that are happening in real time. This is something that’s never been done before. And pass by pass every 90 minutes, we make advancements. So we see the pieces and the testing continues for them.
Mathieu Robiliard: Thank you. And then maybe a last question in terms of the CapEx specifically, the unit cost of the BlueBird satellites. I know you said in the past that the next batch of satellites could have something more origins and more scalable in terms of the production. And so I was wondering if that was still how you thought about it and future satellites you did cost could include be a bit lower than the one of BlueBird 5 — sorry, BlueBird 1?
Abel Avellan: Do you want to take that, Scott?
Scott Wisniewski: Yes, please. So the range of our estimates for the first sets of satellites north from $15 million to $17 million to $16 million to $18 million, about a 6% increase. A lot of that increase is a function of some changes in some of our estimates of what we think our launch vehicle costs will be. Candidly, we have tried to be very conservative on what we think our material costs will be as well as our launch costs. And we have basically predicted our costs based on current costs for our materials and for launches. We agree with you that, overtime, we’re going to continue to see, hopefully, very, very rapid reductions in the cost per kilograms for launch vehicles as well as the benefits of scale in our manufacturing and purchasing capabilities to bring that number down, but we are trying to be conservative.
And so we’re just using sort of near line of sight to provide you that estimate. Hopefully, will be good news if we get better scale and better cost and launch vehicles.
Mathieu Robiliard: Great. Thank you very much.
