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Rocketlab acquires Iridium

investors.rocketlabcorp.com

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Re: Rocketlab acquires Iridium

#291

Post by cucumber3732842 »

treyd wrote: post #266
iamtheworstdev wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 onlin…

Ugh. People already trying to find ways to gate keep radio by raising the financial barrier to entry before we've even been able to capitalize on cheap communication. I'm sure RCA and the 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. (RCA is a bad swap-in in this example but I'm struggling to think of an apt analogy for this era.)

Radio was kind of the original internet. They had to restrict the crap out of it so that some jackoff couldn't just get on the airwaves and interview some random conspiracy theorist who says the government is gearing up to kick the bonus army out of DC.

Re: Rocketlab acquires Iridium

#292

Post by lxgr »

NetMageSCW wrote: post #218
denotes wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

T-Mobile has weather available off-grid now on existing phones?

Not offshore though, as they only have domestic spectrum.

Re: Rocketlab acquires Iridium

#293

Post by lxgr »

kilroy123 wrote: post #58
ryandvm wrote: post #49

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?

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.

I think Iridium SBD, which is what a lot of IoT applications are based on, already worked with the old constellation, which is actually quite impressive given that it doesn't seem easy to retrofit that onto an in-space switched network.

Re: Rocketlab acquires Iridium

#294

Post by georgeecollins »

Just came here to mention that "Eccentric Orbits" the book about the creation of the Iridium system is an amazing book. It's a business heavy book so probably more interesting to people trying to start business or do deals, as opposed to space fans.

Re: Rocketlab acquires Iridium

#295

Post by ralusek »

athrowaway3z wrote: post #126
nba456_ wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And who does the tax get paid to? Some mythical Global Government that will totally work this time?

The Dutch figured out how to do collective dike maintenance a millennium ago without inventing mythical super government. Collective rules worked just fine. 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 natur…

European statecraft has led to a massive bureaucratic blob whose best and brightest just go to America.

Re: Rocketlab acquires Iridium

#296

Post by bell-cot »

wolvoleo wrote: post #232
marcosdumay wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Apparently they don't just completely vaporize, but instead leave behind micro particles that float around for a long time. 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.

Ignoring problems until they become too big to pooh-pooh away is how we got into the climate crisis. And some countries are still pooh-poohing it away.

Ask a rocket scientist how many up-front tons of CO2 a rocket launch puts into the atmosphere, per pound of will-eventually-reenter satellite mass.

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.

Re: Rocketlab acquires Iridium

#297

Post by gadders »

athrowaway3z wrote: post #126
nba456_ wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And who does the tax get paid to? Some mythical Global Government that will totally work this time?

The Dutch figured out how to do collective dike maintenance a millennium ago without inventing mythical super government. Collective rules worked just fine. 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 natur…

Yes, that would totally work while countries like China, Russia, North Korea exist. They could all have a group hug and sing Kumbaya straight afterwards.

Re: Rocketlab acquires Iridium

#299

Post by Joel_Mckay »

Scoundreller wrote: post #257
Joel_Mckay wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The market can't be timed (by honest players), as I remember buying into Ubiquiti Networks at around $12/share thinking I might see a 8% bump after the old legal event subsided. Then just sort of forgot about that tax-sheltered holding for a few years. I also don't do the 3 month portfolio shuffle dance 95% of stock investment people try to ride. The heavy cost of putting stuff in space is still not solved, but broad…

I thought starlink would do something to grab the terrestrial market: put up a “satellite” on a tall building and everyone in the city could hammer down self-aiming CPEs as long as they had line-of-sight

RF Bandwidth is finite, and stronger broadcast transmission means fewer concurrent users are supported in wider service areas.

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

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