91–100 of 318 posts
RocketLab gains spectrum + profitable satellite company
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.
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.…
Crazy. I didn't know you could acquire things worth 20x more than you.
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And who does the tax get paid to? Some mythical Global Government that will totally work this time?
Any company removing space debris from orbit. Like a carbon capture price to offset your launch.
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> 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 re…
//I don’t think there a unified “market” here. 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…
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).
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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.
Iridium terminals can be very power-efficient. Consumer ones are the size of a deck of cards and can last for days.
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)
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How is Rocketlab valued 57B? They made $500M of revenue in 2025. This is 100x their entire balance sheet.
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).
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)
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.…
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. Here is the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VLjW6zuYmos
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?
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.
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.…
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. 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.