juliensimon/ast-spacemobile-fleet-data

AST SpaceMobile BlueBird Fleet Data

Credit: NASA

Part of a dataset collection on Hugging Face.

Dataset description

Daily health snapshots of the AST SpaceMobile BlueBird direct-to-cell satellite constellation, derived from CelesTrak GP (General Perturbations) data. Tracks the BlueWalker 3 prototype and all production BlueBird satellites as the constellation is built out.

AST SpaceMobile is developing a unique LEO constellation designed to provide broadband connectivity directly to ordinary unmodified smartphones, without special satellite-phone hardware. The BlueBird satellites use unusually large phased-array antennas (up to 700 m2) to close the link budget with handset-sized antennas on the ground. The BlueWalker 3 prototype launched in 2022, the first five production BlueBirds flew on a Falcon 9 in September 2024, and SpaceMobile-006 followed in 2025.

AST is notable in the Bezos-vs-Musk launch race because the company is a customer of both providers: the initial BlueBird batch flew on SpaceX Falcon 9, and Blue Origin's April 2026 New Glenn mission is launching additional BlueBird satellites. This dataset pairs naturally with juliensimon/blue-origin-launches and juliensimon/spacex-launches to track how AST's deployment splits between the two launch providers, and with juliensimon/starlink-fleet-data to compare direct-to-cell approaches (Starlink DTC vs BlueBird) as that market develops.

This dataset is suitable for time-series forecasting, tabular classification tasks.

Schema

Column	Type	Description	Sample	Null %
date	datetime64[ns]	UTC date of the daily snapshot; one row per date	2026-04-15 00:00:00	0.0%
total_count	int64	Total AST SpaceMobile objects tracked on this date (BlueWalker + BlueBird); expected range 1-250 as the constellation grows toward its ~243-satellite FCC-authorized Block-1/2 deployment	7	0.0%
bluewalker_count	int64	Number of BlueWalker prototype satellites on orbit (always 0 or 1; only BlueWalker-3 was launched, in Sept 2022)	1	0.0%
bluebird_count	int64	Number of production BlueBird satellites (SpaceMobile-001..00N); expected range 0-243 per FCC Block-1+Block-2 authorization, first five launched Sept 2024	6	0.0%
operational_count	int64	Satellites within 100 km of the 700 km target operational altitude; expected to approach bluebird_count once each satellite finishes LEOP and orbit raising	0	0.0%
mean_altitude_km	float64	Mean altitude of the fleet above Earth's surface (km); typical range 500-720 — mix of parked/transfer (500 km) and operational (700 km) altitudes	499.37	0.0%
mean_inclination_deg	float64	Mean orbital inclination of the fleet (degrees); nominal 53° inclination per FCC filing	53.0131	0.0%

Quick stats

• 10 AST SpaceMobile satellites (1 BlueWalker + 9 BlueBird)
• 0 near 700 km target operational altitude
• 89 daily snapshot rows (2026-04-15 to 2026-07-13)
• Customer of both SpaceX and Blue Origin — pair with blue-origin-launches and spacex-launches

Usage

from datasets import load_dataset

ds = load_dataset("juliensimon/ast-spacemobile-fleet-data", split="train")
df = ds.to_pandas()

from datasets import load_dataset

ast = load_dataset("juliensimon/ast-spacemobile-fleet-data", split="train").to_pandas()

# Fleet growth over time
print(ast[["date", "bluewalker_count", "bluebird_count"]].tail(10))

Data source

https://celestrak.org/

Update schedule

Daily at 09:15 UTC via GitHub Actions

Related datasets

• juliensimon/blue-origin-launches

• juliensimon/spacex-launches

• juliensimon/starlink-fleet-data

• juliensimon/kuiper-fleet-data

• juliensimon/constellation-census

If you find this dataset useful, please consider giving it a like on Hugging Face. It helps others discover it.

About the author

Created by Julien Simon — AI Operating Partner at Fortino Capital. Part of the Space Datasets collection.

Citation

@dataset{ast_spacemobile_fleet_data,
  title = {AST SpaceMobile BlueBird Fleet Data},
  author = {juliensimon},
  year = {2026},
  url = {https://huggingface.co/datasets/juliensimon/ast-spacemobile-fleet-data},
  publisher = {Hugging Face}
}

License

celestrak-usage-policy