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Rocketlab acquires Iridium

investors.rocketlabcorp.com

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Re: Rocketlab acquires Iridium

#161

Post by generuso »

phildenhoff wrote: post #9

Rocket lab used to be a New Zealand source of pride, having started there. From the press release, now it’s American. What happened?

They do not like to talk about it too much in public these days, but Rocket Lab had somewhat shady beginnings. Once they moved past the semi-amateur phase, their first real project was weapons development on a DARPA contract. They were working on a paste-like semi-solid fuel for throttleable engines for munitions, and other similar things.

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.

Re: Rocketlab acquires Iridium

#162

Post by lstodd »

Sanzig wrote: post #144
xp84 wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whatever happens to Starlink, the debris in their new lower orbit would decay within months at the worst. It’s not one of those “thousand years imprisoned on the planet by a cloud of deadly debris” that we’ve heard about. 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 exis…

VLEO addresses the risk, sure, but the new Starcloud space datacenter hype machine isn't going VLEO, it's going 600-850 km. Those altitudes are in the years to decades range for deorbit, and SpaceX has filed for 88,000 of them.

Risk is theoretical, that is; a) never demostrated, b) most probably overblown c) any methods of mitigation were never even given a chance to develop.

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.

Re: Rocketlab acquires Iridium

#163

Post by fredsmith219 »

proee wrote: post #41

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.…

Isn't iridium already in orbit? So there would be no need for new launches due to this aquisition.

Re: Rocketlab acquires Iridium

#164

Post by brookst »

xmprt wrote: post #160
brookst wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How many individual people were involved in collective dike maintenance, so we know the model scales? 100 million? 200 million?

Do you anticipate 100 million space companies vying for orbit?

I certainly anticipate a billion or more stakeholders on space companies.

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?

Re: Rocketlab acquires Iridium

#165

Post by mikepurvis »

Centigonal wrote: post #48
proee wrote: post #41

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

Lots of cynical replies here unfortunately, but that proposal is similar to other ones that seek protection for various other natural commons. John Michael Greer discusses a bunch of this in Wealth of Nature [1], basically arguing that merely taxing "externalities" like pollution is insufficient, you need to see the true primary economies that generate the fundamental value of nature as being those that operate without human involvement at all, and also incorporate awareness of the different cycle lengths: a pollinator garden can establish in just a season or two, a forest takes decades, replenishing an aquifer takes centuries to millenia, and putting minerals and oil in the ground, millions of years.

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...

Re: Rocketlab acquires Iridium

#166

Post by pnw »

xgbi wrote: post #27
pnw wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

RocketLab market cap is 57b. Iridium market cap was 5.5b and this transaction values it at 8b.

How is Rocketlab valued 57B? They made $500M of revenue in 2025. This is 100x their entire balance sheet.

The same could be said for many companies in the last three decades. Sometimes investors are right, sometimes they are wrong. Cloudflare is a good example, and they weren't even going to space. It's less about current earnings and more about whether they become key infrastructure for a new market.

Re: Rocketlab acquires Iridium

#167

Post by Scoundreller »

BrandoElFollito wrote: post #151

As an ex-Motorolan (1998-2008), I sometimes look at what remains of the big mighty company and there is not much. 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.

Our big Canadian oligopoly telecom sold their land mobile radio division to Motorola for some hundreds of millions of dollars, so I guess they still do stuff?

https://www.bnnbloomberg.ca/business/2026/03/27/bell-to-dive...

Re: Rocketlab acquires Iridium

#169

Post by panick21_ »

BrandoElFollito wrote: post #151

As an ex-Motorolan (1998-2008), I sometimes look at what remains of the big mighty company and there is not much. 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.

Just got a Motorola phone and I love it. 3.5mm audio jack and cheap.
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