Watch Indian rocket launch record-breaking BlueBird 6 smartphone satellite to orbit tonight

Webcast: AST SpaceMobile BlueBird 6 Mission Live Launch – YouTube

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An Indian rocket is scheduled to launch the record-breaking BlueBird 6 smartphone satellite tonight (Dec. 23), and you can watch the action live.

BlueBird 6, built by Texas company AST SpaceMobile, will lift off atop an LVM3 rocket from India’s Satish Dhawan Space Centre tonight at 10:24 p.m. EST (0334 GMT and 8:54 a.m. India Standard Time on Dec. 24), if all goes according to plan.

You can watch it live here at Space.com courtesy of AST SpaceMobile or directly via the company. Coverage will begin about 30 minutes before launch.

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.