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AST Space Mobile announcing a successful launch of its first five Bluebird commercial satellites,

lifting off early Thursday morning via a SpaceX rocket,

with a spacecraft successfully transmitting from orbit.

The launch representing not only a milestone for

AST but also for one of its longest standing investors and partners, AT&T.

AT&T is head of network Chris Sambar who joined AST Space Mobile's Board earlier this year,

says this is the moment the Telecom Giant has been waiting for when the promise of space-based

service begins to scale.

What we're going to do with AST in partnership with them is we're going to bring satellite

connectivity and not just voice, not just text, but full data connectivity to your regular cell phone that's sitting in

your pocket today and that's pretty exciting so really we're bringing satellite

connectivity to the masses and it's never been that way before and AST is the first

company to do this at scale at data speeds over 20 megabits per second to a

regular unmodified cell phone like you and I carry around all day.

No time yet on when service launches.

Sambar is hopeful that happens within the next two years.

But on a day when the Polaris Dawn private astronauts made history stepping into space and

are now setting sites on testing SpaceX's star link, the growing role of space when it

comes to connectivity is in focus, bolstering the big bets by AT&T and others.

What we're really doing at its simplest form is we're taking the cell sites that are, you

know, we have tens of thousands of cell sites across America, AT&T does.

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