Rocketlab acquires Iridium
investors.rocketlabcorp.com
investors.rocketlabcorp.com
Also, RocketLab builds their own sats and can add the Iridium constellation replacements to their order book. It's a win-win. A smart move by Peter Beck and his team.
That pushed their main NZ investor away, and they somehow hooked up with the US intelligence community, which facilitated a rather unique series of inter-government arrangements for launching US reconnaissance satellites from NZ. That was probably always the appeal -- to launch over China with very little warning. A cheap, rapidly launchable vehicle was always a dream of the US agencies -- in 2003 this was FALCON program (Force Application and Launch from CONUS) run by DARPA and the Air Force, and today it is the Space Force's "Victus".
So, although the bulk of work was done in NZ, Rocket Lab functioned rather intimately with the US spooks from the very early on, including getting some funding from In-Q-Tel. Then in 2013, for the bulk of investment they just had to become a Delaware Corporation, for all the usual reasons. Very soon they moved engine manufacturing to a facility in California. More recently, with the large rocket (Neutron), their main manufacturing operations are in LA and the launch facility in Wallops. All in all, they are an international outfit.
Rocket technology itself is so intensely regulated by US export control laws that it’s practically impossible to develop an orbital launch vehicle without being a US- or Europe-registered company.
It is a real shame. It also looks like a lot of engineering work is shifting away from NZ — Auckland seems to be focusing more on operations and space systems, and the launch stuff is moving to the US with Neutron.
It was founded by a guy in new zealand with the first launch complex and first launches coming out of new zealand.
to characterize that as "always american" is so silly it makes you seem like a non serious person.
of course they would have had american resources and connections from the start.
It was created by somebody from New Zealand and a lot of early operations was in New Zealand nobody is denying that.
Aside, Peter Beck has said (probably at a talk I was at in 2014) that they initially designed and built Electron in NZ so that they would be importing restricted technology into the USA, to minimise ITAR problems, which only covers exports.
It's a Texas company.
For regulatory and capital raising reasons the parent company has been US based for quite a few years now. They've also been on a multi-year acquisitions spree and picked up quite a large US workforce through that.
ITAR. (From what I remember, Beck really tried to avoid it. But there isn’t a competitive solution for a New Zealand-based aerospace company.)
So guess NASA told Rocket that if they want American contracts, they need to move?
https://qz.com/794101/elon-musk-explains-why-he-doesnt-hire-...
the kiwi connection was just PR, and to access local launch sites.
Tidbit: Author is also the real-life person behind the comedic persona Joe Bob Briggs. If you ever lived in Texas you know that name. And yes the guy can write seriously good nonfiction.
They are late compared to SpaceX, to be sure: 150 launches per year, 2400 satellites manufactured per year, $3K/kg operational with F9, target $200/kg in development with Starship.
Lets see their reliability when they have a bigger rocket and if they can land reliably. Because their rocket will be quite expensive to build.
Given the timing, this seems like a risky move as they'll be issuing debt in mid-2027 to refinance the bridge, at a time the market could be saturated / corrected.
https://www.reuters.com/business/media-telecom/rocket-lab-bu...
I don’t think there a unified “market” here. The fixed rooftop terminals and fixed-ish roaming terminals use high (tens of GHz) frequencies with correspondingly wide bandwidth, have excellent beamforming capabilities and some degree of MIMO to improve spectrum reuse, and consume an amount of power that would be outrageous for a phone. Phones don’t have reliably clear views of the sky and have much weaker RF capabilities.
Oh, and phones are well served by existing 4G and 5G networks in dense areas, with better spectrum reuse than seems practical for a satellite constellation.
I expect that we will actually see two separate markets that happen to share the same satellites and backhaul.
You mean like the ASTS/Vodafone partnership that birthed the Satellite Connect Europe?
https://www.vodafone.com/news/newsroom/technology/satellite-...
https://www.vodafone.com/news/newsroom/technology/vodafone-a...
Or like the US JV where they provide the infra for AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon.
https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20260513491108/en/AST...
//Phones don’t have reliably clear views of the sky and have much weaker RF capabilities.
And they appear to have circumvented that, although ease of scaling remains to be seen.
https://www.reddit.com/r/ASTSpaceMobile/comments/1k6whtf/rak...
The market is as bimodal as ever on the device side: On one side, you have small, battery-powered, (mostly) omnidirectional device antenna, portable devices that mainly operate in the L-band, which works much better in these conditions; on the other side, you have highly sophisticated, steered, high power (dozens of watts) antenna arrays operating in the Ku or Ka band.
On the satellite side, both can be served by the same satellites, as has been the case for e.g. Inmarsat's I-6 series and Starlink's direct-to-cell capable satellites (I believe these all include Ku-band coverage as well).
Traditional 5G UEs are inherently size-bound in terms of supporting device-side beamforming at any performant level, so you're limiting the Starlink style Ku-band spectrum sharing through spatial multiplexing afforded by their directional arrays. No argument there.
ASTS are tricking a NTN connection by fooling an unmodified 5G UE into thinking it's connecting to a terrestrial gNodeB, and then handing it off using bent-pipe architecture to the various terrestrial serving gateways. They claim to have flipped the dependency to allow their proprietary phased array satellites to do the heavy Tx/Rx lifting, and have some Doppler Compensation secret sauce to fix the issues on the terrestrial side.
The SNR in Shannon’s Law has a log in front of it, but spectrum reuse is more or less linear. If there are five visible satellites and I can null out four of them, then I can receive from and transmit to the fifth without substantial interference. (I’m not saying this is easy! Contemplate how many WiFi generations have had MIMO and how limited it still is.)
So I believe that it’s comparatively straightforward to demonstrate a shiny new direct-to-cell system with a single phone on a stage, but achieving usefully large aggregate bandwidth in a dense area will be more challenging.
FWIW the problem with Iridium, historically anyway, was that available bandwidth was very low, so they had to charge a silly amount for usage of that bandwidth, so very few people used it. Iridium used low-ish frequencies, with narrow bandwidth, and (I think) no MIMO whatsoever, not even polarization diversity.
That's why Iridium has the constellation planned out so that you never have more satellites in the sky than strictly necessary for full coverage on the equator (where satellite density is lowest), and outer spot beams get turned off progressively as the satellites approach the poles as they'd only create interference without increasing bandwidth due to the lack of terminal-side steering.
Now I wonder if they already changed that for the second generation sats, given that there are some steered terminals available that could probably make good use of the extra satellite density near the poles, which is also an area underserved by geostationary beams?
And while 4G and beyond use some mild device-side beamforming, it’s a whole different ballpark than parabolic antennas or phased arrays in terms of gain.
Several mass-market phones already are IoT-NTN compatible, e.g. Google’s Pixel line.
Don’t need to blast and beam-steer if you can deal with poor SNR by taking your time to differentiate the 0s and 1s?
Which is more power efficient per megabyte?
(But I get it: sometimes a few bits is all you need)
Iridium has historically targeted low-power, omnidirectional terminals (antennas can be larger at lower frequencies without requiring steering than at higher frequencies).
They recently had some forays into steered, high-bandwidth antennas with their Certus line and their second-generation satellites that now allow native packet switching (the first gen was circuit-switched at 2.4 kbps only), but that brings you into the bandwidth-limited regime, and is honestly just a waste of scarce L-band spectrum and much better served by all the Ku- and Ka-band LEO competitors.
It's going to be interesting to see if Rocketlab start also serving that market, like some of their main competitors already are.
No.
1. Iridium uses frequencies fairly close to GPS (~1.6GHz).
2. Iridium uses cylindrically-polarized transmissions (like GPS), which enable compact omnidirectional helical antennas
> They recently had some forays into steered, high-bandwidth antennas with their Certus line and their second-generation satellites that now allow native packet switching (the first gen was circuit-switched at 2.4 kbps only), but that brings you into the bandwidth-limited regime,
This is AI slop?
No, the point of using an electrically-steered beam antenna is that it improves SNR, so that you are not bandwidth limited.
Which part of my argument is this an objection to?
Are you saying that using circular polarization, the same would be possible in the Ku or even Ka bands? Because that’s definitely not the case due to the different aperture/gain tradeoff vs. L-band, and that’s my point.
> This is AI slop?
Did I say anything incorrect there or do you just not like my writing?
> No, the point of using an electrically-steered beam antenna is that it improves SNR, so that you are not bandwidth limited.
Sure, but my point was: At low frequencies, you can steer to become more efficient per bit, but at high frequencies you almost have to, as you’re sending energy in suboptimal directions otherwise. And then if you’re already steering, why not use a less-scarce band?
Here in Europe it is even less, at least in the US you see the umpires (or somebody else, not sure as I fo not know baseball) with their half-headsets with the Motorola logo.
It is a shame, I liked this company very much.
https://www.bnnbloomberg.ca/business/2026/03/27/bell-to-dive...
Motorola Solutions, the successor of the original Motorola, does the headsets/radios and such.
How much market is there for people that just want low speed connectivity from the middle of nowhere?
It took Iridium over a decade to get that certification; availability and political concerns are probably much larger in that segment than for e.g. home or passenger entertainment Internet use.
In the medium and long term, I can see the high-throughput LEO players eat Iridium's lunch for aviation, though; small antenna size (and the lower drag that goes with it) used to be their main advantage over Ku and Ka band offerings, but now most airlines want passenger connectivity anyway, and once you have that, the pressure to just get that certified for safety (with HF as backup, which you need anyway as far as I know) is going to be significant. The case for shipping is probably similar and even stronger.
Why the Satellite Race is No Longer About Satellites - https://youtube.com/shorts/hRxv4RggxLE
Militaries generally find this capability pretty relevant, among others, and they have deep pockets. They were the ones to bail out Iridium the first time around, after all.
A lot of remote IOT devices use Iridium, as well as the US government or DoD.
I guess it only has to make sense to Wallstreet types ....
Who will create the first advertisement in space using satellites as pixels to create their company logo? Maybe they can add some color and animations for kicks.
Edit: Another note on space junk is the effect on our atmosphere with all the "burning-up" of various materials. Apparently they don't just completely vaporize, but instead leave behind micro particles that float around for a long time. People are studying this and hopefully raising appropriate alarms (Making the case for wood satellites).
Here is the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VLjW6zuYmos
I encourage you to reflect on this bias. I suspect you're taking the American state as a template, and extrapolating its incompetence. The history is filled with different ideas - some of them far older than America itself.
Hell, I'd call America a place so naturally rich, it's practically the case study how much dysfunction can be papered over with money instead of statecraft.
I’m interested in understanding your comparison here and how it would be applicable to space and how you envision it working based on your comparison.
There was no tax or toll to consider.
People naturally self-assembled under the idea that if you benefited, then you had to contribute. The calculation was: how much land did you have, how valuable was it, how much benefit you'd get from some waterworks (it wasnt just dikes but also rerouting rivers etc). Obligations were denominated in labor.
My point is not that this was some perfect idyllic corruption-free scheme - it wasn't - but it was very transparent.
All you should need for a stable system is for the majority of interests to align. One addition you can add is to have the labor be turned against individuals/groups that decide to unalign - i.e. instead of trashing space debris your next labor is to de-orbit a satellite if 1 company decides to try their luck at tyranny over cooperation.
Things hinge on a shared understanding that its always possible to go back to the salted earth solution.
How will the toll be collected? Who will collect it? How will it be fairly distributed?
I did not say the dutch solved this exact problem, and my previous response was a best effort after you prompting me because i assume you've just never thought through or dealt with non-mega-government solutions before.
I brought up the comparison because nba456_ 19 was already complaining about a required mythical global government - as if that's relevant for the 50y time frame we're planning for.
I also dont understand why you keep bringing up tax and tolls. I'll try to answer that again in the other comment.
Ok then the US can just ignore all this stuff and do what we want.
> I also dont understand why you keep bringing up tax and tolls.
I can tell - I think you’re having a hard time here defending an idea you now want to walk back. That’s fine. At the end of the day “collective maintenance” is typically achieved by either a tax or toll. I don’t have to keep bringing it up, but then you need to explain how your proposed system works instead of leaving one to guess. You suggested it was simple because the Dutch “figured it out an millennium ago”.
Without global governance to address what is a global space - you know, space itself, how would your proposal work? American and European companies pay for some maintenance scheme but then China, Russia, and others ignore it? So it’s not global? Who will they pay anyway? Why would they agree to this scheme?
> You're not really good at asking anything.
This is incorrect.
> i assume you've just never thought through or dealt with non-mega-government solutions before.
Based on your inability to describe or walk through your solution I think it’s likely you think you’ve thought through this and you haven’t and now as your comment is being scrutinized you are turning to discussion points that don’t make a lot of sense.
> I did not say a system that benefits everyone.
I meant the difference between "everyone" as in Bob living on the street everyone, and "everyone" that is using it.
I thought maybe that was the thing that you were not understanding, so i keep having to go to your position and guess at what you mean. But sure take it as a moment to gloat with your superior intellect.
If you think 5 comments in and bringing up "But what if China ignores it" is scrutiny then I'm sorry to tell you you're just oblivious, not critical. You keep bringing up taxes and tolls. I've already addressed them 2.5 times in this thread.
> is typically achieved
well at least i know you couldn't be bothered to comprehend any of my comments before wasting my time.
Sorry but i'm good on trying to explain things again - this isn't going to work. Clearly i made the mistake of taking to much for granted and we set off on the wrong foot. Its not you its me. I'm sure you understand.
Maybe try again in a week.
"It'll just work" isn't convincing (if not taxes and tolls then what?), and withdrawing from the conversation because your idea was challenged is not very mature and shows you haven't really thought this through.
If it's easy and the Dutch figured it out a millennium ago, then you should be able to explain how it will work going forward. If you're unable to do that, that's fine, but be honest about it instead of wasting time trying to critique my great questions that happen to expose the various flaws in your own comment.
You collect waterworks taxes the same way regular taxes are collected in NL. You get a letter with an amount to pay and you pay it. The waterworks is the entity that sends you the letter and manages the application of those taxes. The system that comment described is still in place today and operates in parallel to "regular" government.
For an international resource it absolutely is. Everyone would lobby their government to ditch to make a sprint. (Well, China and America and possibly rising powers like India or the UAE would.)
taking-up-orbits, applying-force, and danger-pollution.
The system requires the biggest player calculates the cost of non-compliance being too high either by:
- the scheme triggering a clause where other members start to apply force to their non-sanctioned orbits and trashing their satellites, add in the additional threat of earthly economic sanctions like we do with so many companies.
- the scheme breaking apart and becoming a wild west with _extreme_ danger-pollution.
Clearly, at the moment, the biggest users do not care because the danger is low enough, and they'll try to delay a bit so they get more 'grandfathered' in.
I'm not saying its going to be perfect or fair. I'm arguing its dumb to fear a mythical global government, because that's not required to create stable solutions for these kinds of issues.
Or are you doing the corporations are people thing, so if five people can agree on something in a handshake, ethos-centric deal, then surely five space companies with billions of dollars invested from millions of people should surely be able to act like those original five people?
It's a new SaaS play - Satellites As A Service. That is, your satellite gets to stay in orbit as long as you pay me.
Otherwise my satellite killer eats them.
-- Ernst Blofeld
The ITU has no enforcement power, but fundamentally that doesn't really matter much, since enforcement is handled by the member states. Are there attempts by various member states to skirt around the rules or favour their own national interests? Of course, and sometimes these are successful - but nobody just outright ignores the rules, because they know it very quickly leads to a tragedy of the commons.
Administering an orbital LVT is exactly the kind of thing that could slot cleanly into an expanded ITU mandate. Where the money goes would be up for debate, but I think the cleanest solution would be ITU rebates most of it back to the government of the country that applied for the orbital slot provided that they demonstrate it's going into a space sustainability fund.
Is it perfect? No, but it's based on a rickety-but-mostly-works international model and it doesn't require global government conspiracy theories to come to fruition.
Can't necessarily stop a multinational firing things to space on Russian/Chinese/ESA launch vehicles
It's like this bicycle meme where the person puts a stick in its wheels.
It's for the same reason that petrol cars are encouraged in the US.
Punishing SpaceX will lead to a bigger financial crisis, an upset Elon Musk who might refuse to fund the next democratic election and dozens of thousands of lost jobs (fortunately they already became millionaire, riding the right rocket) for a problem that most of the rich population doesn't care about.
Because in the city, it's about your petrol car, big trucks, and nobody to see the stars and a bit more pollution doesn't change much at that scale from their eyes.
CFCs (these gazes destroying ozone) were a notable exception, because it would lead to death of everyone (the same way that petrol with lead), except death, universally there was no advantage to defend.
But a space filled with US satellites is a great advantage for the US, since they are the only ones with the capabilities to deploy thousands of them, and it's a big business for military intelligence.
I can imagine the main reason they are going to regulate, is so that older satellite debris don't destroy the new shiny satellites, but beauty of the sky is going to be the very least important factor.
Like when Amazon finally had warehouses in all fifty states and suddenly quit campaigning against online sales tax.
The truth is diverting money to space exploration is not that popular.
We only got the moon because we were in a battle with the Soviet Union about capitalism vs. communism. It was never about space or science. The instant the Soviet Union collapsed, we reduced NASA’s projects and budgets.
So while I’m not a fan of the circumstances, I need some way for money to go to space exploration and I’m riding this like people rode the Cold War as an excuse to build a moon rocket.
The instant we beat the Soviet Union to the moon we reduced NASA's projects and budgets. That's why the Space Shuttle was such a ridiculous kludge.
The original shuttle designs were much, much better. I remember reading tech specs and looking at schematics in Discover and Popular Science years before the final design. Maybe Omni too.
Then it ended up in committee, politicians got involved, and funding was cut in parallel (even before the wall came down, it was clear the Soviets were done). The design was a shadow of what it could have been.
I remeber being sad as a kid.
Also, my drive down nastologia avenue made me realise, I really miss science magazines. The publishing date of the three I mentioned seemed to be staggered a bit. So I always had a bit of science news, and I really miss the format.
Phones aren't the same, tiny, tablets are unwieldy and smaller than a magazine, they were distraction free, and I really liked it just being all in one package.
I even liked the ads! Typically for some computer peripheral, or a new calculator, or some scientific apparatus. The ad just sat there too, it didn't bounce around or scream at you or cover an article's text.
Or the worst modern scourge, popups while you're reading, I mean !'?"#+#-#/ off I'm reading here!
Odyssey was published by the same person who operated Astronomy magazine, and in my tweens and early teens I gobbled up the stories about the space shuttle and the images coming back from various missions such as Voyager.
I don’t remember if I saw it in the school library and asked my parents to subscribe or they subscribed for me, but it really helped to maintain a lifelong interest in space flight and astronomy (along with whatever science fiction I could get my hands on).
> one of the few that can even afford to pay it. Like when Amazon finally had warehouses in all fifty states and suddenly quit campaigning against online sales tax.
That's not accurate at all. They could always afford to pay it, and so can other companies. What changed is that they stopped counting as "online sales tax" so they didn't care about those laws anymore.
If they could get out of sale tax, they very much would still want to. If they could get rid of sales tax for everyone, they would be for it. Sales tax isn't benefiting them by acting as a gatekeeping force.
(RCA is a bad swap-in in this example but I'm struggling to think of an apt analogy for this era.)
Space flight is a typical "tragedy of the commons" scenario. Like radio waves (especially on HF), space orbits are a finite resource... and not just problematic for other satellites, because ground-based space observation gets more and more impeded by satellites.
If your business model relies on spewing litter everywhere, complaining about gatekeeping when someone makes you pay to clean it up isn’t even disingenuous, it’s transparently manipulative.
The public is tired of privatized profits, socialized costs. Space seems like a great place to draw that line: if you can’t afford to clean up your mess, you don’t get to make the mess. Sorry.
They impose compliance costs or costs to skirt the regulations.
CO2 emissions have not been solved despite all the regulations and taxes, quite the opposite they keep increasing and will continue to do so for a long time before even thinking about coming down. In large part because production was moved off shore to countries which have less regulation and higher emission intensity of production, which actually has the opposite effect.
Workers rights were not solved, the abuses were just off-shored to countries that still enslave people and abuse workers and allow child labor.
Tax evasion has not been solved, it's just permitted under complicated legal structures.
All these things are a godsend for bloated multinational corporations who can pay the compliance costs without blinking, and have little to worry about organic competition.
Space regulation and taxes won't solve anything. If the government had any kind of track record you might be a little open minded about it, but at this point the burden of proof would be on the people claiming that this time, taxes won't be used for corruption and graft. If there is money to be had in it, the government will take their cut and in exchange allow multinational corporations to offshore the problem to other countries.
It's a lot harder to stop a very, very large group of people from doing something that they've been doing for generations. It's much easier to stop a much smaller group of people from starting something new.
But because of that original sin we see exactly what you describe — a system with too much inertia to change easily.
“An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.”
All the?
We barely regulate CO2 at all.
If we started charging $100 per ton we'd see some massive changes.
And it's not hard to stop those loopholes.
All the.
> We barely regulate CO2 at all.
Not sure who the "we" is, but many jurisdictions do regulate CO2 heavily. Not only immediate direct taxes, but subsidies to competitors, increased regulatory impositions and effective moratoriums on approvals, sovereign risk factors with many countries legislating and committing to CO2 phase out.
> If we started charging $100 per ton we'd see some massive changes.
Again not sure which we you are talking about, but lots of places have carbon taxes. They do make massive changes when they are priced to do so -- see, the EU. That was the point of my comment. I didn't argue markets don't respond to economic incentives, I clearly was agreeing they do. The effect has not been to solve climate change, it has been to move production offshore to markets that have much higher carbon emission intensity of production!
> And it's not hard to stop those loopholes.
And the fact that these not-hard-to-stop loopholes are not stopped still doesn't make you stop to think? The taxes aren't going to solve problems or pay for externalities, they are funding graft and corruption and stifling competition.
If you don't believe in a role for government in regulating access to space despite (despite it having that role since the development of the technological means to access it) than can you suggest a solution to the negative externalities that we unfolding this very moment?
This reads like a parody of libertarians.
[1] I’m not really mourning the loss of Napster, but rather rolling my eyes at the way YouTube has made having more than 6 seconds of any song a death sentence for the video, killing fair use dead, since demonetization directly halts distribution of a video.
(This is already happening, today, for other bits of their misbehavior!)
Any human activity which degrades, disrupts, one of these cycles, or consumes an output from it needs to compensate the rest of us accordingly.
Now obviously governance is the tricky piece. The two obvious ones are to give the money back to the taxpayers or put it in a sovereign wealth fund to be invested on their behalf, since at the end of the day, the commons should be the equal entitlement of all citizens.
[1]: https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/11382620-the-wealth-o...
Is this a huge concern? According to NASA [1], about 44 metric tons of meteors and meteorites enter the atmosphere daily, or about 16,000 tons annually, or about 35 million pounds. Of which 5000 tons is estimated to reach the ground. [2]
[1] https://science.nasa.gov/solar-system/meteors-meteorites/ [2] https://www.cnrs.fr/en/press/more-5000-tons-extraterrestrial...
Nowadays it is generally frowned upon if you leave upper stages in orbit or if your satellite fragment spontaneously. There are of course exceptions (like some chinese launches leaving massive core stages in orbit that ten randomly fall back a couple months later) but AFAIK the situations seems to be actually improving due to the added robustness, that was only made possible by cheaper access to space.
At first, the ocean seems immense. So much so that dumping plastic and toxic chemicals makes no difference.
But then we humans are great at scaling things it seems, such that at some point ocean plastic pollution became a real problem.
I know that space is much much bigger than our oceans, but I wouldn't underestimate the ability of mankind to scale launches to the point where debris becomes a problem.
I hate this cynicism in everything. People didnt work there 10 years ago to be millionaires in a far away IPO, they worked there because they are Team Space.
Sure, some of the employees are team space. The money is funding a transition to autocracy though, so. I remain skeptical of their motives.
Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space.
Of course it's still 3 orders of magnitude slower than galaxy collisions, which themselves are colliding at roughly 1% of the speed of light.
It is very, very, very big.
One of those ships crashes and the boys from the Dwarf find the service mechanoid, which is how they get Kryten.
Don't project your worries about pollution on Earth-- which is a much bigger problem!-- onto space industry which is at a much much earlier stage. The "burning-up" thing sounds extremely speculative, like you're looking around for reasons to dislike this. Space is exciting and inspiring-- and yes, that includes commercial uses, since realistically we couldn't afford to expand science or exploration in space much otherwise!
That's not clear. There's no empirical evidence of it, and the computer models we have don't have definitive results.
Those alarms are not really proper.
This is kinda like how it's "rational" to pooh-pooh away the possible radon emissions from your rock-hoarding obsession, when your house's floor beams are starting to make loud cracking sounds.
I've actually read the paper everyone mentions
It's a tragedy of the commons situation. And given how well we are able to regulate those kind of situations globally, I'm rooting for the ring.
SpaceX is launching say ~10 tonnes of satellites per day
Normal satellites can already be hacked, they provide zero to no security at all.
We are already full of ADs, this will be just another hobby for people into hacking. Imagine it displaying a gigantic pe** haha
On a serious note, as everything standards, they are already interfering with observations. Wait until we can no longer tell if it is an atificial sattelite or some massive asteroid coming from the direction of the son.
Humans are dooming their own existence lmao
The number of satellites required to create a measurable number of particles in the planet's atmosphere would be impossibly large. How much mass to orbit do you think is required to create a 1 PPM increase in earth's atmosphere of these "micro particles"?
I find it extremely disheartening how much anti-technology, anti-science, and anti-progress sentiment I read about lately.
s/are/may be/
There is a huge amount of "space" available even in low orbital shells. Which also naturally decay.
Brother, share with us a sentence or two of why you think so
When Amazon bought Globalstar a couple months ago I had the same question and it's pretty much the same answer. For Globalstar there was basically 0 net income so the return on investment looked like it mostly came from spectrum gambling. Maybe that's the value for Iridium as well? Iridium does have some net income of around $100 million last year, but I don't know if RocketLab's vertical integration is going to be enough to flip the script. If RocketLab could have built and launched the Iridium Next constellation for $2 billion in 2017 would $100 million of net income 10 years later be a success?
I don't know how to feel about this acquisition though. Never thought IRDM would've been a bad investment.
The heavy cost of putting stuff in space is still not solved, but broadband and space-LTE service businesses are proven cash flows. They just have to mimic the profitable parts of Starlink. =3
https://www.fool.com/investing/2026/06/29/rocket-lab-is-set-...
Most older cell towers could only cover small 3km client service areas, and would max out at a few thousand users. However, as the broadcast power dropped more cells could be installed in busy city centers. The base-stations themselves were often direct fiber service for lightning strike isolation.
Modern beam forming networks with G5 and newer... greatly increased the bandwidth, mobile battery life, and total user capacity of the smaller broadcast cell areas.
Starlink offers budget telecom connectivity in areas that didn't support normal telecom infrastructure, and these sparsely populated wide areas make sense for a LEO uplink.
The terrestrial telecom infrastructure is a different business, and firms have embedded themselves politically for over a century. Starlink would need to risk a great deal for locations to get the density necessary to disrupt the entrenched market, and ultimately could just become another telecom merger in the process.
Iridium tried to enter consumer markets with emergency and industrial coverage options. However, at its core it is an antiquated technology requiring large popcan sized circularly polarized antenna modules, scheduled >5W RF message uplinks, and $3.15/kB service rates.
Part of Starlink success was correlated with how bad Iridium serviced customers. In general, buying a laggard is an opportunity, but I personally don't think Iridium can escape its entrenched business model. They are 20 years too late, burned consumer goodwill, and have competitors already in profit mode. =3
If it is still pole-to-pole global monolithic coverage, than hardware/legacy-protocols are of secondary interest. Modern SDR transceivers with proper RF beam-steering front-ends could retrofit the business while slowly phasing out legacy hardware.
But I do agree, Iridium was too pricey for most consumer product markets, and there were several other satellite broadband services.
Additionally, Starlink Direct to Cell (VoLTE) service now leverages global cellphone client infrastructure. It would be extremely foolish to compete with something proprietary. =3
There are a lot of folks out there that are overly cynical and so they'll just write things like the OP from time to time which just don't make much sense or have much to do with how the real world works. What's more interesting is looking at or trying to understand strategically why Rocket Lab is making this move, especially if you are an investor.
Iridium market cap was 5.5b and this transaction values it at 8b.
Why was Amazon valued at billions while making zero profit?
The stock market prices companies by many factors, revenue and profit are factors but so is growth.
Utilities companies make lots of profits but they are valued badly because they don’t grow at all!
Markets are forward looking and space is seen as a huge growth driver for the future, also RocketLab has been growing their top line revenue massively over the last few years.
But RocketLab did have five years of strong revenue growth. And they have a lower PS ratio than SpaceX. So at least compared to industry-rivals the valuation is justified
I've made hundreds of thousands of dollars from my early investments in RKLB but this isn't true if by "complete" you mean they have a proven launch vehicle. The company is now targeting late 2026 for Neutron's inaugural flight.
Neutron was announced in 2021. There were hopes for a 2024 first flight. Then it was mid-to-late 2025. Now it's Q4 2026 after a failure related to the stage 1 tank earlier this year.
If anyone can pull off using carbon composite for a launch vehicle of this size, it's RKLB. But nobody has done it before and I think the retail investor base is taking for granted something that is not at all guaranteed. There's much more risk than a lot of people think.
In some ways, RKLB is more like pre-clinical biotech stocks, which usually produce binary outcomes (a drug succeeds or it fails, and the company's fate is based on that). If Neutron works, RKLB gets to execute its grand vision. If it fails, it doesn't. The vision (and valuation) doesn't work without Neutron.
The company won't go bankrupt if Neutron is delayed but I disagree with the "easily" part and Iridium complicates the picture. It throws off a lot of cash but comes with a $3.6 billion bridge loan that RKLB will need to deal with in the next year. If they term it out with debt, the leverage goes way up. If they term it out with equity, there's real dilution risk, especially in the scenario where the market prices in Neutron delays (because the stock almost certainly will be lower).
The reality is that Neutron is critical to the RKLB story, and that story is what supports the current valuation. Even after the recent decline from the ~$150 peak, this is a very richly valued company priced for close-to-perfection.
The biggest risk is that carbon composite approach proves not to be viable for a launch vehicle of this size and RKLB has to fundamentally change the design. While I wouldn't have invested in this company if I thought that risk was >50%, it's definitely not as close to 0% as most retail investors seem to believe.
So let's say they need to 20x or 30x revenue. That would mean their new size needs to be similar in size to the current space market as a whole. If they have a compelling price, that might require a 5x growth in the space market as a whole? Less than that if you think they're really good at pulling in the new customers? I don't understand where you got 100x.
Iridium's revenue is larger, and I wouldn't think they'd be losing money.
But apparently you can buy things with promises (if you're in the right club, of course).
Even better: if you buy things that don't lose their value overtime (mostly anything apart from food, car, electronics, services) and you buy them at price, they're free. You give money for them but you receive equal amount of wealth. I repeat: you buy the thing and your wealth stays the same, doesn't grow or shrink. That's how companies can buy each others with promises.
(If you're a bank that can lend me $4.7T I think buying nvidia could benefit us both. Contact me at nick @ gmail . com)
His coverage of the downfall of FTX was hilariously good as well. Wrt. to the infamous Excel sheet, he wrote something like "when you're trying to calculate this, Excel shouldn't give you back a number, it should warn you about going to prison", lmao.
People do this all the time, that's how they buy their first house (or at least used to...). Your net worth is basically zero beyond what you saved for the down payment, but the bank advances you the money to buy the house because it believes your future income streams will allow you to pay the principal plus an interest.
Plus, the two firms already cooperate heavily, and Musk wants them to cooperate more, but being two separate public companies adds a lot of legal friction to that cooperation (each board has to review and sign off on things independently) and legal risks (shareholder lawsuits alleging they are cooperating in ways contrary to shareholder interests)
So I think, from Musk’s viewpoint, it is a very logical next step, which means it probably will happen sooner or later
I guess good for them and for the folks who just got paid.