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Iridium in talks to launch more backup satellites this year
by Jason Rainbow — April 21, 2022
TAMPA, Fla. — Iridium expects to take advantage of a rideshare opportunity this year to launch up to five of the six spare satellites it has been storing in Arizona.
The satellite operator expects to make a formal announcement about the potential $35 million launch deal in “the next couple weeks,” company spokesperson Jordan Hassin said.
Matt Desch, Iridium’s CEO, first disclosed plans to deploy ground spares in the company’s April 19 earnings call for the first quarter of 2022.
“I want to be clear that we do not have an immediate need to launch these satellites,” Desch said.
“Our constellation is very healthy and is performing well, but our ground spares have little utility just sitting in storage.”
The company had been waiting for a cost-effective opportunity to launch its remaining spares, according to Desch, who noted they have been racking up battery, solar array and other maintenance costs.
Extra in-orbit spares add more network redundancy, and effectively extend the constellation’s operational life because each satellite is designed to operate for at least 15 years.
SpaceX, which launched all 75 satellites for the operator’s $3 billion Iridium Next second-generation constellation, lofted its latest batch of 10 satellites in early 2019 from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California.
Using Falcon 9 rockets, SpaceX had typically deployed 10 Iridium Next satellites with each launch mission.
ridium reported a 15% increase in revenue to $168.2 million for the first three months of 2022, compared with the same period last year.
moar bullshit… https://spacenews.com/iridium-in-talks-to-launch-more-backup-satellites-this-year/
But Wait
The 10 Biggest Tech Failures of the Last Decade
Iridium
By 24/7 Wall St.Thursday, May 14, 2009
Iridium, the global satellite phone company backed by Motorola (MOT), filed for bankruptcy in 1999, after the company had spent $5 billion to build and launch its infrastructure of satellites to provide worldwide wireless phone service. At the time, it was one of the 20 largest bankruptcies in US history. To work properly, the system needed 66 satellites. The creation of this enormous system forced the company to default on $1.5 billion of debt. The service had been such a failure that it only had 10,000 subscribers. This was, in part, due to technical difficulties with Iridium's first handsets. According to a Dartmouth Tuck Business School case study on the history of Iridium in 1998, the company forecast that it would have 500,000 subscribers by the following year. But, the service was expensive for customers, and the cellular phone business had started to take hold as its infrastructure was built out in most of the large developed countries. An Iridium handset cost $3,000 and talk time was as much as $5 a minute. Cellular service was not as broadly available, but it was far less expensive.Technology difficulties also made the service unpopular. Because Iridium's technology depended on line-of-sight between the phone antenna and the orbiting satellite, subscribers were unable to use the phone inside moving cars, inside buildings, and in many urban areas.
https://content.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,1898610_1898625_1898640,00.html
No hope for you EM