Designed and developed by AST SpaceMobile, the expansive BlueWalker 3 satellite is intended to demonstrate the ability of standard mobile phones to directly connect to the Internet via satellite.In this emerging field of direct-to-mobile connectivity, which seeks to provide Internet service beyond the reach of terrestrial cellular towers, AST is competing with Lync, another company that also has launched demonstration satellites.For a few years, astronomers have been expressing concerns about megaconstellations, such as SpaceX's Starlink satellites.They will transmit strong radio waves at frequencies currently reserved for terrestrial cell phone communications but are not subject to the same radio quiet zone restrictions that ground-based cellular networks are.This could severely impact radio astronomy research—which was used to discover cosmic microwave background radiation, for example—as well as work in related fields."