Transcript
A (0:05)
The space industry is moving at light speed. This is Motley Fool Money. Welcome to Motley Fool Money. I'm Tyler Crow and today I'm joined by longtime fool contributors, Matt Frankel and John Klost. Got a pretty full schedule here. We're going to talk about rh, what used to be restoration hardware and its struggles. Kind of following up from yesterday's discussion about Nike. We're going to get some listener questions, but we wanted to get started first with space and space investing in particular. It has been one heck of a week when we talk about space in general. Just Yesterday, the Artemis 2 launch, which, look, it happened. I don't care how many times we see rocket launches. Those things are wicked cool to watch.
B (0:58)
Yeah, and not to brag, but as a Floridian, I got to see the Artemis launch from my front yard yesterday. Me and my 9 year old ran outside right after we watched the Countdown on YouTube. Man, I'm pumped about space right now.
A (1:12)
And talk about seeing smoke. There is a lot of smoke happening in the industry of space as well. I mean, we've talked about the SpaceX IPO. We've mentioned it before in our IPO show and this week that chatter is getting louder and louder by the day. So it seems like the SpaceX IPO is coming pretty soon. And also in space news today, satellite company Global Star is up about 8% as we tape on rumors that Amazon is looking to acquire it. Now, one of the deals that we saw recently, I want to say in the past year or so was, or maybe even further back, was SpaceX acquiring Spectrum from EchoStar. SpaceX basically the ability to use broadband spectrum for communications. In doing so, it established the ability for SpaceX to use cellular data transmission via satellite. Now, I'm not saying this is precisely why SpaceX made that happen, and I'm not saying that's precisely why Amazon is making this acquisition of globalstar. But Global Star does have a very large spectrum license for the next 15 years. So, Matt, I have to imagine that was part of the deal.
C (2:24)
Simply put, Amazon needs to scale its satellite build out faster. They have grand plans. I think the latest number I saw was 3,200 satellites of its own. It wants to get into orbit to really rival Starlink, but it's not there yet. Starlink, just to put it in perspective, has over 10,000 active satellites. Amazon has about 200. Acquiring Globalstar and its spectrum licenses would speed up the timeframe because that's something no matter how much money you have, you just can't speed that up. John is going to dive into Globalstar's business a little more in a bit, but it does own valuable spectrum licenses. That Tyler said. And it's almost certainly a big reason that Amazon's interested here. Like I mentioned, these are highly regulated. They require years of navigating regulation not only in the US but all over the world. Globalstar holds licenses for valuable spectrum in more than 120 countries around the world. So it does help accelerate the timeline of what Amazon's trying to do.
