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.
Which is utter bullshit. Quite painful to hear too. LEO is not your average american homeless stolen mart cart. Can we please rise to some more insighful level of discourse?
Collision risk is significantly reduced by having maneuverable spacecraft with good conjunction prediction systems in place. But fundamentally, nothing is perfect and accidents can and do happen - you set a maneuver threshold based on an expected collision probability, but it's an engineering tradeoff: "spend the fuel to maneuver out of the way of everything, no matter how remote, or accept a small collision risk?"
And of course, when you are launching thousands of satellites, you will have a few failures that will become unmaneuverable hazards. Just the way it goes, you can't realistically engineer your way to perfect reliability.
So sorry, I have to reject your claims that it's "utter bullshit." Space debris risk is a well studied field, so much so that satellite insurance companies are starting to fold those calculations into insurance premiums. So yeah, it's real, and it deserves more than a pithy dismissal.
Not saying it couldn’t be bad if there were such a collision as obvi a really bad collision could in the short term damage Starlink and anyone else who decides to use that orbit, but this isn’t existential risk territory anymore.
All in all you people take the precautionary principle so far as to cripple your own progress in fundamental stuff like spaceflight but at the same time see no reason to apply it in social stuff like that survelliance camera affair or the net-id. And also fervently believe in modern version of snake oil that is "AI".
This is hypocrisy at the base level and a sign that we have a civilization crisis akin to one that of ~7th century AD.
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.
[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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
(This is already happening, today, for other bits of their misbehavior!)
How about No?
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.
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.
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!
One of those ships crashes and the boys from the Dwarf find the service mechanoid, which is how they get Kryten.
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.
There is a huge amount of "space" available even in low orbital shells. Which also naturally decay.
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.
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.
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
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.
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-...
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).
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?
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.
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.
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.
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...
I don't know how to feel about this acquisition though. Never thought IRDM would've been a bad investment.
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
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. 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)
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.
I guess good for them and for the folks who just got paid.