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proee 2 hours ago [-]
We have a bright future full of endless "space-junk". As the price to orbit drops, people will inevitably send up more and more satellites that have questionable value. In 100 years will the sky at night just be a massive grid of dots moving across the sky?
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).
Centigonal 2 hours ago [-]
Hank Green did a video recently advocating for an "orbit value tax" -- like a Georgist Land Value Tax, but for orbits. This tax would, among other things, help fund orbital cleanup and internalize the externality of polluting orbital shells. It's an idea that deserves more discourse IMO.
Ugh. People already trying to find ways to gate keep space by raising the financial barrier to entry before we've even been able to capitalize on cheap space flights. I'm sure SpaceX and others will be against this until suddenly, they're not, when they realize they're 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.
nba456_ 1 hours ago [-]
And who does the tax get paid to? Some mythical Global Government that will totally work this time?
steveBK123 40 minutes ago [-]
My new startup, SPECTRE.
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.
LunaSea 57 minutes ago [-]
Any company removing space debris from orbit. Like a carbon capture price to offset your launch.
nba456_ 45 minutes ago [-]
What you're describing is a global government, otherwise that can't be enforced.
NDlurker 28 minutes ago [-]
US could sanction countries/corporations/people who don't comply.
jqbd 36 minutes ago [-]
US can enforce US satellites, no?
swiftcoder 33 minutes ago [-]
Provided they are launched in the US, on a US-owned carrier? Most likely
Can't necessarily stop a multinational firing things to space on Russian/Chinese/ESA launch vehicles
rvnx 26 minutes ago [-]
US spontaneously would go against one of their main strategic interests for the planet ?
Doesn't make sense at all.
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.
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.
pantalaimon 23 minutes ago [-]
In low earth orbit, space debris removes itself after a few years
46 minutes ago [-]
mukbangpervert 57 minutes ago [-]
The video discusses this directly.
nradov 43 minutes ago [-]
Do you think Russia will be willing to pay a tax on their new Rassvet constellation?
DarmokJalad1701 12 minutes ago [-]
> orbit value tax
How about No.
m4rtink 1 hours ago [-]
In practice the lower cost of access to space had made it viable to star requiring people to at least deorbit their upper stages, something that was long a no-go, with the excuse being that the extra fuel and redundancy would eat too much into the payload mass.
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.
s0rce 2 hours ago [-]
There is a legitimate concern with space junk hitting useful stuff or even manned spacecraft but I think space is big and the sky won't appear bright soon. Not all satellites are that reflective and they need to reflect the sun, they don't just glow visibly.
TheJoeMan 1 hours ago [-]
At present, I don't believe there are industry standards / codes mandating minimization of reflectivity. My understanding is that SpaceX has engineered for this from their own internal requirements and "goodness of their hearts" (which may be related to avoidance of public pushback). As we anticipate a major scale-up of LEO in the future, it follows that "cost pressures" may (mal)incentivize players to skip this concern.
ralfd 50 minutes ago [-]
> "goodness of their hearts" (which may be related to avoidance of public pushback)
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.
swiftcoder 46 minutes ago [-]
Nonetheless, the company didn't start the whole non-reflective paint thing until well after the complaints started streaming in, significantly less than 10 years ago (DarkSat launched in 2020)
1 hours ago [-]
nba456_ 1 hours ago [-]
Oh great the NIMBYs are coming for space now.
stuxnet79 55 minutes ago [-]
On the positive side, clearing out all this space junk could end up being a meaningful contributor to global GDP. See also Planetes [1]
I wish clearing out all the CO2 from the atmosphere became a meaningful contributor to global GNP.
wuliwong 42 minutes ago [-]
Thanks for reminding me, I started watching this and forgot about it!
Lendal 47 minutes ago [-]
It's already a massive grid of moving dots. You can see it from the ground in certain dark-enough areas, but in order to see it in space you have to get outside LEO, like Artemis did. They don't have lights but they are shiny and they catch the sun, making them easily visible from certain angles, which the Artemis photos illustrated.
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.
tonic_note 54 minutes ago [-]
Satellite broadband stonks in shambles after the inevitable Kessler syndrome
Mistletoe 25 minutes ago [-]
Dark night skies will probably be one of the main selling points for the off world colonies. I can see the Bladerunner-esque ads now.
taneq 1 hours ago [-]
It’s already starting to be like that. If you get far enough out into the bush away from light pollution and watch the stars for a bit, you can see the grid of satellites orbiting. It’s kind of cool but also kind of depressing.
bell-cot 56 minutes ago [-]
"Unobstructed view of the stars" will soon be how space tourism companies upsell their customers to higher orbits.
JanSolo 2 hours ago [-]
I think they saw how SpaceX was using Starlink as launch lever to provide SpaceX a baseline of regular launches at bare-minimum cost. As RocketLab starts to scale up, being able guarantee a minimum number of launches is a significant hedge against the dips in the global satellite market.
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.
NetMageSCW 2 hours ago [-]
What does Tesla have to do with Starlink or launch services?
"Rocket Lab acquires Iridium" sounds like a notification out of Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri or Anno 2205.
phildenhoff 3 hours ago [-]
Rocket lab used to be a New Zealand source of pride, having started there. From the press release, now it’s American. What happened?
MyelinatedT 2 hours ago [-]
It was always an American company. In order to launch rockets from countries in the US sphere of influence (even from NZ), companies must obtain an FAA license.
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.
at least it's still got a bunch of Kiwi engineers building the Rutherford engine.
bell-cot 53 minutes ago [-]
It sure doesn't help that New Zealand's housing market is one of the most unaffordable in the world.
elzbardico 2 hours ago [-]
Capital probably, market access. It is pretty hard to raise capital for high risk ventures like that everywhere in the world other than the US.
micromacrofoot 1 hours ago [-]
same thing that always happens to companies, money
everfrustrated 4 hours ago [-]
RocketLab gains spectrum + profitable satellite company
davidpapermill 2 hours ago [-]
> Rocket Lab has secured commitments for a $3.6 billion bridge loan from Deutsche Bank and Wells Fargo to fund the cash portion of the acquisition.
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.
Iridum gains 23 launches per year with 100% success rate in the past 12 months, a satellite manufacturing pipeline with 6 satellites produced and launched, and a cost-to-orbit of $25K/kg operational (with an in-development design targetting $4K/kg).
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.
panick21_ 2 hours ago [-]
You act as if 'launch' is a thing. All Rocket Lab launches ever combined don't even fill a single SpaceX rocket. Those are not the same thing.
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.
schainks 2 hours ago [-]
I think that’s the point of their niche right? They are already plenty reliable. Also let’s them do stuff like this:
And access to a customer base. A lot easier to sell them new services if they already have a big contract with you
NetMageSCW 2 hours ago [-]
A profitable satellite company with a lot of debt and satellites that target the previous model of bespoke terminals when the market is moving to satellite service on regular phones.
> the market is moving to satellite service on regular phones.
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.
piltdownman 1 hours ago [-]
//I don’t think there a unified “market” here.
You mean like the ASTS/Vodafone partnership that birthed the Satellite Connect Europe?
They didn't circumvent phone antennas being largely omnidirectional (unlike VSAT or phased arrays, which are highly directional) and as a result having much lower gain, they just work with it, just like Iridium, Globalstar, Inmarsat, Thuraya, and all the other early players in what's now called "direct to device".
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).
amluto 56 minutes ago [-]
My claim is that these are not the same market as the traditional Starlink service.
hobonation 2 hours ago [-]
Iridium terminals can be very power-efficient. Consumer ones are the size of a deck of cards and can last for days.
Scoundreller 14 minutes ago [-]
I wonder how much of the power-efficiency is due to being much slower.
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)
lxgr 2 minutes ago [-]
All of it. You can't really get around physics.
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.
Symmetry 2 hours ago [-]
The spectrum is the big thing. If they wanted a revenue stream they could just buy bonds.
pelorat 2 hours ago [-]
I like RocketLab. Looking forward to Neutron etc. But this is a bad investment, no other way to put it.
petesergeant 1 hours ago [-]
> But this is a bad investment
Brother, share with us a sentence or two of why you think so
Joel_Mckay 1 hours ago [-]
Uncertain what Iridium global RF band allocation holdings were worth.
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
wateralien 2 hours ago [-]
“Rocket Lab” not “RocketLab”. Although I think the latter is better.
khurs 2 hours ago [-]
Good to see the competition making moves, SpaceX's huge lead isn't ideal.
Joel_Mckay 1 hours ago [-]
Starlink Direct to Cell (VoLTE) service now leverages global cellphone client infrastructure. It would be extremely foolish to compete with something proprietary. =3
ryandvm 2 hours ago [-]
I dunno. I would be surprised if a 30 year old telecommunications network is going to be technically competitive with a SpaceX's LEO network that is still launching satellites as we speak.
How much market is there for people that just want low speed connectivity from the middle of nowhere?
denotes 1 hours ago [-]
Sailors may be a small and dwindling community, but this is our core use case. When you are sailing offshore you need to download weather predictions so that you can chart your course to catch favorable winds. My experience with Iridium is that you open a targeted set of ports for the modem to feed your phone via, and then you don't have to think about it again. 100+ nautical miles offshore and it just works.
ttul 1 hours ago [-]
It’s not about Iridium. It’s about Iridium’s customers and partnerships. RocketLab hopes to launch their own satellites presumably and then can sell significantly improved services to them, without having to build a customer base from scratch.
m4rtink 57 minutes ago [-]
AFAIK Iridium is part of some important airliner navigation systems and standards - while a niche, it can still be very lucrative business. and I would not be surprised if it was embedded like this into various other systems that are less cost sensitive.
cozzyd 11 minutes ago [-]
yes, for example it's used on high altitude balloons.
kilroy123 1 hours ago [-]
You realize they have a new network of satellites, right? It works much better than the old version with the 90s tech.
A lot of remote IOT devices use Iridium, as well as the US government or DoD.
gigatexal 47 minutes ago [-]
Who? is buying who?
I guess good for them and for the folks who just got paid.
moralestapia 3 hours ago [-]
Crazy. I didn't know you could acquire things worth 20x more than you.
pnw 3 hours ago [-]
RocketLab market cap is 57b.
Iridium market cap was 5.5b and this transaction values it at 8b.
xgbi 2 hours ago [-]
How is Rocketlab valued 57B? They made $500M of revenue in 2025. This is 100x their entire balance sheet.
pavon 2 hours ago [-]
Yeah, that seems grossly unrealistic. They are growing. Neutron is almost complete, and I'd expect significant growth in their launch revenue from that, and their space services are also doing well. So I could easily see their revenue increasing 5x over the next 5 years, maybe 10x. But that market cap can only be justified by the space market as a whole growing 100x, and RL maintaining a significant portion of it with strong competition from SpaceX, Blue Origin, and others.
ElProlactin 1 hours ago [-]
> Neutron is almost complete...
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.
boredatoms 1 hours ago [-]
A rocket being nearly complete just means they haven’t started the multi year testing delays when the first couple of launches inevitably fail
wateralien 2 hours ago [-]
This is a good question for SpaceX too.
saberience 2 hours ago [-]
Why was Uber valued in billions for years while making zero profit?
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.
wongarsu 2 hours ago [-]
Uber and Amazon made zero profit, but a lot of revenue. That's very different from losing money on fairly little revenue
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
moralestapia 2 hours ago [-]
Exactly my point.
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).
bmacho 14 minutes ago [-]
> But apparently you can buy things with promises
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. 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)
sspiff 2 hours ago [-]
I'm guessing they acquired it mostly exchanging stocks. Which I guess is an indication that their stock is overvalued right now if they're willing to overpay by that much.
kps 25 minutes ago [-]
Remember when NeXT acquired Apple for negative 400 million?
brookst 3 hours ago [-]
Look at GameStop’s quixotic attempt to acquire eBay. Which is actually not impossible.
zie 2 hours ago [-]
It's an interesting way to apply for the eBay CEO job for sure.
iamacyborg 2 hours ago [-]
Someone's been reading Money Stuff.
ortusdux 2 hours ago [-]
5x the market cap!
moralestapia 3 hours ago [-]
Did GameStop acquire eBay?
sspiff 3 hours ago [-]
They are trying.
PierceJoy 3 hours ago [-]
Rocket Lab's market cap is 57B and are buying Iridium for 8B. I'm assuming you're implying some other measure of worth, but it's not that crazy based on stock price.
ericmay 3 hours ago [-]
Also folks acquire things "worth" more than them all the time. That's in part why debt exists.
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.
malfist 3 hours ago [-]
Dell bought EMC for 67b when they were worth 24b
bitwize 3 hours ago [-]
This is one of those times you actually get to use "leverage" as a verb without sounding turbo cringe: a leveraged buyout is an acquisition with borrowed money; the hope is that you will be able to pay back the debt with the money you make off the acquired assets. Doesn't always pan out but sometimes it does.
elzbardico 2 hours ago [-]
That's this thing called credit.
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.
dylan604 2 hours ago [-]
being able to foreclose on the house/property is a pretty decent protection for the bank that doesn't exist for a business though
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
Like when Amazon finally had warehouses in all fifty states and suddenly quit campaigning against online sales tax.
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.
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.
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.
How about No.
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.
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.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planetes
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.
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.
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.
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-...
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...
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.
https://rocketlabcorp.com/updates/victus-haze/
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).
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.
Brother, share with us a sentence or two of why you think so
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
How much market is there for people that just want low speed connectivity from the middle of nowhere?
A lot of remote IOT devices use Iridium, as well as the US government or DoD.
I guess good for them and for the folks who just got paid.
Iridium market cap was 5.5b and this transaction values it at 8b.
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.
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
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. 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)
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.
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.