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.
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).
I think they saw how SpaceX was using Starlink as launch lever to provide SpaceX a baseline of regular launches at bare-minimum cost. As RocketLab starts to scale up, being able guarantee a minimum number of launches is a significant hedge against the dips in the global satellite market.
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.
What does Tesla have to do with Starlink or launch services?
Derp; I meant SpaceX.
Might be one-in-the-same soon enough
just a friendly note that the idiom is "one and the same"
Alternative take: if a SPCX-TSLA merger proposal is publicly announced, that will create market enthusiasm (quite possibly irrational) about “unlocking synergies” which will temporarily pump both stocks, thereby making Musk (and all the other insiders) richer, even if only temporarily.
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
"Rocket Lab acquires Iridium" sounds like a notification out of Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri or Anno 2205.
I have used iridium before, IIRC I paid 1 usd per KB, PER KILOBYTE (!!!), to track some stratospheric globes we launched in like 2014
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.
It was always an American company. In order to launch rockets from countries in the US sphere of influence (even from NZ), companies must obtain an FAA license.
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.
Why do people reply with this "it was always american" response? Do you feel like it is necessary to protect RocketLab or something?
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.
Before they ever launched a rocket they were a primarily American company. That literally just a fact.
It was created by somebody from New Zealand and a lot of early operations was in New Zealand nobody is denying that.
SpaceX has most staff in California.
It's a Texas company.
They still have significant NZ design, manufacturing, and launch operations.
For regulatory and capital raising reasons the parent company has been US based for quite a few years now. They've also been on a multi-year acquisitions spree and picked up quite a large US workforce through that.
Needs access to American capital markets, contracts, governance structures, and jurisdiction (applicable law).
SpaceX previously said that are not allowed to hire foreign nationals generally.
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-...
at least it's still got a bunch of Kiwi engineers building the Rutherford engine.
Capital probably, market access. It is pretty hard to raise capital for high risk ventures like that everywhere in the world other than the US.
same thing that always happens to companies, money
It sure doesn't help that New Zealand's housing market is one of the most unaffordable in the world.
Compared to LA even NZ looks cheap
RocketLab gains spectrum + profitable satellite company
Iridum gains 23 launches per year with 100% success rate in the past 12 months, a satellite manufacturing pipeline with 6 satellites produced and launched, and a cost-to-orbit of $25K/kg operational (with an in-development design targetting $4K/kg).
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.
You act as if 'launch' is a thing. All Rocket Lab launches ever combined don't even fill a single SpaceX rocket. Those are not the same thing.
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.
I think that’s the point of their niche right? They are already plenty reliable. Also let’s them do stuff like this:
We know from the graveyard of companies that reached orbit with their small rockets and ran out of funding before they got to be reliable, that reliably flying even a small rocket is pretty good.
> Rocket Lab has secured commitments for a $3.6 billion bridge loan from Deutsche Bank and Wells Fargo to fund the cash portion of the acquisition.
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...
And access to a customer base. A lot easier to sell them new services if they already have a big contract with you
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 is launching 5G standards-based direct-to-device capabilities this year: https://www.iridium.com/services/iridium-ntn-direct
Only for companies that choose to make or support phones with Iridium connectivity included, as opposed to AST and Starlink targeting existing phones.
> 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 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.
//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 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...
I suspect that the lack of ability to form nulls in the beam is as big or even a bigger limitation than the reduction in gain when going from a big array to a phone.
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.
My claim is that these are not the same market as the traditional Starlink service.
Iridium terminals can be very power-efficient. Consumer ones are the size of a deck of cards and can last for days.
I wonder how much of the power-efficiency is due to being much slower.
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)
> (antennas can be larger at lower frequencies without requiring steering than at higher frequencies).
No.
1. Iridium uses frequencies fairly close to GPS (~1.6GHz).
2. Iridium uses cylindrically-polarized transmissions (like GPS), which enable compact omnidirectional helical antennas
> 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,
This is AI slop?
No, the point of using an electrically-steered beam antenna is that it improves SNR, so that you are not bandwidth limited.
The spectrum is the big thing. If they wanted a revenue stream they could just buy bonds.
Isn't this a bit weird? Has Rocketlab launched payloads for Iridium ? Is Iridium adding to their constellation or are they just trying to make a few dollars out of their existing satellites by suppling messaging for things like Garmin SPOT etc. Iridium satellites aren't in LEO orbits - can Rocketlab satellites even deploy payloads to those orbits ? Maybe the newer bigger rocket they are working on can but i don't think the current Electron rocket can.
I guess it only has to make sense to Wallstreet types ....
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?
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?
It’s not about Iridium. It’s about Iridium’s customers and partnerships. RocketLab hopes to launch their own satellites presumably and then can sell significantly improved services to them, without having to build a customer base from scratch.
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.
Yep, it's one of only two satellite communications systems certified for both GMDSS/SOLAS and aviation operation and safety (ATC) use cases, and the only global one at that (the other one being Inmarsat/Viasat, which does not work near the poles due to being GEO based).
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.
yes, for example it's used on high altitude balloons.
There is a huge market for people to connection while doing outdoor activities, including downloading maps, sharing current location, etc. It isn't just people who live in BFE looking for a downlink.
And that market is being covered by Starlink and AST SpaceMobile without requiring special equipment.
> How much market is there for people that just want low speed connectivity from the middle of nowhere?
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.
It's competing with Starlink in that market, which is a much stronger product today.
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.
SpaceX will acquire Rocketlab.
“Rocket Lab” not “RocketLab”. Although I think the latter is better.
I highly recommend the book Eccentric Orbits: The Iridium Story by John Bloom. The story of how Iridium came to be and how difficult it was to keep Motorola from literally destroying the whole constellation (which they had originally built!) is quite fascinating.
Tidbit: Author is also the real-life person behind the comedic persona Joe Bob Briggs. If you ever lived in Texas you know that name. And yes the guy can write seriously good nonfiction.
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.
One of the best books I have read in recent years, somehow immensely relevant now: _Eccentric Orbits: The Iridium Story_ by John Bloom, that explores exactly what went wrong, the bankruptcy filing and so on. I wonder if you might find your experiences reflected there.
I just made the same recommendation before I saw yours. Great book.
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...
Just got a Motorola phone and I love it. 3.5mm audio jack and cheap.
My mobile is a Motorola as well!
I like RocketLab. Looking forward to Neutron etc. But this is a bad investment, no other way to put it.
I can't believe I bought a few shares of IRDM with a few hundred bucks in my trading account. Primarily because it was a RKLB adjacent company with decent fundamentals whos stock price wasn't scraping the sky.
I don't know how to feel about this acquisition though. Never thought IRDM would've been a bad investment.
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 broadband and space-LTE service businesses are proven cash flows. They just have to mimic the profitable parts of Starlink. =3
https://www.fool.com/investing/2026/06/29/rocket-lab-is-set-...
F9 has dropped the cost 10x. Starship will drop it another 10x. When will it be solved?
When both businesses reach a profit mode. Unlikely to happen within the next few years. =3
> But this is a bad investment
Brother, share with us a sentence or two of why you think so
One question I've tried to answer is: has Iridium ever made enough money to even pay back the cost to put the satellites up. Using Google for all these rough numbers the first constellation cost $5 billion before Iridium (the first company) went bankrupt. For the second generation constellation launched between 2017 and 2019 it says $3 billion (for sats and launch). Compared to $400 million cumulative net income for Iridium (the second company) since bankruptcy restructuring ended in 2009. So as a non-investor (I only have boring index funds, no individual stocks) it seems like Iridium is a bad investment because it's a company that has spent 21+ years to turn $8 billion into $400 million (depending on when you want to start counting).
When Amazon bought Globalstar a couple months ago I had the same question and it's pretty much the same answer. For Globalstar there was basically 0 net income so the return on investment looked like it mostly came from spectrum gambling. Maybe that's the value for Iridium as well? Iridium does have some net income of around $100 million last year, but I don't know if RocketLab's vertical integration is going to be enough to flip the script. If RocketLab could have built and launched the Iridium Next constellation for $2 billion in 2017 would $100 million of net income 10 years later be a success?
Uncertain what Iridium global RF band allocation holdings were worth.
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
Good to see the competition making moves, SpaceX's huge lead isn't ideal.
Starlink Direct to Cell (VoLTE) service now leverages global cellphone client infrastructure. It would be extremely foolish to compete with something proprietary. =3
Did they forget to read ecentric orbits first?
I enjoyed that book. But which part are you referring to?
Mostly the crazy financing and capital needed to pull it off well.
Crazy. I didn't know you could acquire things worth 20x more than you.
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.
Yeah, that seems grossly unrealistic. They are growing. Neutron is almost complete, and I'd expect significant growth in their launch revenue from that, and their space services are also doing well. So I could easily see their revenue increasing 5x over the next 5 years, maybe 10x. But that market cap can only be justified by the space market as a whole growing 100x, and RL maintaining a significant portion of it with strong competition from SpaceX, Blue Origin, and others.
Yes tho I'd argue that Rocket Lab has the finances to easily weather a few more years of Neutron set back if that ends up happening (fingers crossed it doesn't happen). They aren't going bust anytime soon. So I don't see the downside as being zero.
I'm really interested in the combination of carbon fiber and landing. Dealing with the heat seems challenging.
A rocket being nearly complete just means they haven’t started the multi year testing delays when the first couple of launches inevitably fail
This is a good question for SpaceX too.
Why was Uber valued in billions for years while making zero profit?
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.
Uber and Amazon made zero profit, but a lot of revenue. That's very different from losing money on fairly little revenue
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
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).
Hotelling’s Rule: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hotelling's_rule
How did you buy your house?
I'm guessing they acquired it mostly exchanging stocks. Which I guess is an indication that their stock is overvalued right now if they're willing to overpay by that much.
Look at GameStop’s quixotic attempt to acquire eBay. Which is actually not impossible.
It's an interesting way to apply for the eBay CEO job for sure.
Someone's been reading Money Stuff.
It's hilarious reading! :)
5x the market cap!
Did GameStop acquire eBay?
They are trying.
Remember when NeXT acquired Apple for negative 400 million?
Rocket Lab's market cap is 57B and are buying Iridium for 8B. I'm assuming you're implying some other measure of worth, but it's not that crazy based on stock price.
Also folks acquire things "worth" more than them all the time. That's in part why debt exists.
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.
Dell bought EMC for 67b when they were worth 24b
That never made sense to me, why not the other way around. Wasn't EMC the better business?
This is one of those times you actually get to use "leverage" as a verb without sounding turbo cringe: a leveraged buyout is an acquisition with borrowed money; the hope is that you will be able to pay back the debt with the money you make off the acquired assets. Doesn't always pan out but sometimes it does.
That's this thing called credit.
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.
being able to foreclose on the house/property is a pretty decent protection for the bank that doesn't exist for a business though
Higher risk, higher premium.
God I hate hate hate hate justified text. Just ridiculously stupid.
Who? is buying who?
I guess good for them and for the folks who just got paid.
They can have it, Iridium is so slow.
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
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 online sales tax.
One of the arguments Hank makes in the video is that SpaceX is (via starlink) rapidly occupying large portions of useful LEO shells, which crowds out future competitors or users of that orbit (i.e. you can't put more satellites into the orbit without risking collisions, especially satellites that aren't part of the existing constellation), and that the natural consequence of not regulating orbital space in some way would be to lock in the first movers in an orbital shell as the only organizations that have access to that orbit.
> The instant the Soviet Union collapsed, we reduced NASA’s projects and budgets.
The instant we beat the Soviet Union to the moon we reduced NASA's projects and budgets. That's why the Space Shuttle was such a ridiculous kludge.
Nobody is arguing that space isn't big. The argument is space is big but dynamic, and launching enough stuff up there means that over a sufficiently long time horizon, you will have a collision between uncontrolled objects. This is not a theoretical concern, it has already happened [1].
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.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_satellite_collision
Lead by example, my guy, I don’t know what side of the argument you’re even on
insightful like your crude, substanceless objection?
Better a financial barrier than a physical one. If satellites and spaceships are literally smashing in to each other, I have a hard time interpreting it as anything other than a regulatory failure.
I really don’t see how making people pay for their externalities is “gatekeeping”.
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.
Maybe CO2 emissions haven't been regulated successfully because attempts to regulate the came far too late, and the attempts to regulate similar issues in space are coming right on time?
It's a lot harder to stop a very, very large group of people from doing something that they've been doing for generations. It's much easier to stop a much smaller group of people from starting something new.
> 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.
This reads like a parody of libertarians.
Regulations designed to prevent the rise of negative externalities in a nascent industry is exactly the role of government.
If you don't believe in a role for government in regulating access to space despite (despite it having that role since the development of the technological means to access it) than can you suggest a solution to the negative externalities that we unfolding this very moment?
I mean, presumably, the tax would apply per-spacecraft with a price adjustment for orbit lifetime and how busy a particular orbit is, so a small constellation of 5-10 short lived microsatellites wouldn't have a huge entry barrier.
> 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.
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.
Things on earth don't move at 8 km/s so understandably less worries about collisions there.
How else are the entrenched interests who control most of what happens on Earth to guarantee their continued dominance off world? And yes, it’s exactly like the creep of taxation, copyright police[1], and censorship into the Internet when they realized people were going there in part to avoid those.
[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.
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 naturally rich, it's practically the case study how much dysfunction can be papered over with money instead of statecraft.
You wish to take up a specific space, and with the right to use it come obligations.
There was no tax or toll to consider.
People naturally self-assembled under the idea that if you benefited, then you had to contribute. The calculation was: how much land did you have, how valuable was it, how much benefit you'd get from some waterworks (it wasnt just dikes but also rerouting rivers etc). Obligations were denominated in labor.
My point is not that this was some perfect idyllic corruption-free scheme - it wasn't - but it was very transparent.
All you should need for a stable system is for the majority of interests to align. One addition you can add is to have the labor be turned against individuals/groups that decide to unalign - i.e. instead of trashing space debris your next labor is to de-orbit a satellite if 1 company decides to try their luck at tyranny over cooperation.
Things hinge on a shared understanding that its always possible to go back to the salted earth solution.
Do you anticipate 100 million space companies vying for orbit?
My new startup, SPECTRE.
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.
Extortion is my business
-- Ernst Blofeld
The video discusses this directly.
Any company removing space debris from orbit. Like a carbon capture price to offset your launch.
Eh... no, not really. At low altitudes (<500 km), sure, but much above 600 km you are starting to look at decades for a passive deorbit depending on solar cycle and ballistic coefficient.
Not at all, it can be handled via international treaty. Frequency allocations for civilian satellites are already handled this way, a UN body (the ITU Radiocommunication bureau in Geneva) acts as a neutral party that handles satellite spectrum coordination between UN member states.
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.
US can enforce US satellites, no?
US could sanction countries/corporations/people who don't comply.
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...
Do you think Russia will be willing to pay a tax on their new Rassvet constellation?
Seize a few shadow fleet tankers to pay for it.
(This is already happening, today, for other bits of their misbehavior!)
I'm not opposed to seizing shadow fleet vessels operated by Russia (or any vessel sailing without a valid flag registration). But as a practical matter Russia is now legally registering much of the shadow fleet under their own flag, and even giving them armed escorts in some cases. So this is going to make additional seizures more difficult.
> orbit value tax
How about No?
> Another note on space junk is the effect on our atmosphere with all the "burning-up" of various materials.
Is this a huge concern? According to NASA [1], about 44 metric tons of meteors and meteorites enter the atmosphere daily, or about 16,000 tons annually, or about 35 million pounds. Of which 5000 tons is estimated to reach the ground. [2]
[1] https://science.nasa.gov/solar-system/meteors-meteorites/ [2] https://www.cnrs.fr/en/press/more-5000-tons-extraterrestrial...
LEO satellites are the size of a car and are spaced apart by the size of a state. They also all are in slowly decaying orbits and will fall out of the sky on their own accord in 10 years or less (they are designed with intentional structural weak points to break apart and burn up on entry). The concerns you have are valid and very real, and shared by the people designing these things.
This is on a similar scale to complaining about there being too many tennis balls on the surface of the earth.
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.
Nah, it's more akin to complaining about the number of bullets crossing your path. They don't occupy much space, but the fact they're moving at 17,500mpg means you want to ensure you avoid them, and ideally for there to be fewer of them fired at more predictable intervals.
I feel like LEO is a convenient speed to know if you are someone who often asks "how fast is that". At Mach 23 it's a lot faster than sound, and on the slow side of "how fast space stuff moves".
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.
Except everything in orbit is also moving at those same speeds, so the relative speed difference between any two objects is orders of magnitude smaller than that. (Of course, yes, there's outlier cases where that's not as true, but those are the rare exceptions to the rule; the constellations being discussed don't fall into the outlier cases).
Well yeah, the relative velocity is what matters, but not everything is moving in perfectly circular concentric shells either. You've got many different inclinations and eccentricities (and drag profiles) within what's broadly construed as "LEO". The relative velocity of the Iridium 33 / Kosmos 2251 collision involving two satellites in LEO was over 11km/s.
Low earth orbit is actually not very big. And that’s what we’re talking about here.
LEO is about 2000km to 300km - at 50m shells, that’s about 34,000 times the surface of the Earth.
It is very, very, very big.
In practice the lower cost of access to space had made it viable to star requiring people to at least deorbit their upper stages, something that was long a no-go, with the excuse being that the extra fuel and redundancy would eat too much into the payload mass.
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.
There is a legitimate concern with space junk hitting useful stuff or even manned spacecraft but I think space is big and the sky won't appear bright soon. Not all satellites are that reflective and they need to reflect the sun, they don't just glow visibly.
Isn't that kinda how we got the plastic pollution problem in the ocean?
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.
At present, I don't believe there are industry standards / codes mandating minimization of reflectivity. My understanding is that SpaceX has engineered for this from their own internal requirements and "goodness of their hearts" (which may be related to avoidance of public pushback). As we anticipate a major scale-up of LEO in the future, it follows that "cost pressures" may (mal)incentivize players to skip this concern.
> "goodness of their hearts" (which may be related to avoidance of public pushback)
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.
Nonetheless, the company didn't start the whole non-reflective paint thing until well after the complaints started streaming in, significantly less than 10 years ago (DarkSat launched in 2020)
I think the cynicism is warranted when the CEO was instrumental in the downfall of democracy in the US.
Sure, some of the employees are team space. The money is funding a transition to autocracy though, so. I remain skeptical of their motives.
I'm not quite understanding, sorry if what I said was misconstrued. You don't think the engineering team considered reflectivity from a moral perspective? I am saying there needs to be some standards set out so that future engineers at unscrupulous companies have something to point at as a requirement.
A major plot point in the Red Dwarf books is about Coca-Cola sending a fleet of space ships out to blow up stars so they can spell "Enjoy Coca-Cola" in the sky.
One of those ships crashes and the boys from the Dwarf find the service mechanoid, which is how they get Kryten.
> 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.
evidence based alarmism.
Oh great the NIMBYs are coming for space now.
Not Above My Back Yard - NAMBY?
Space is big and still very hard to get to. A kilogram of payload in orbit costs several times as much as a kilogram of silver on earth, even after SpaceX's aggressive scaling of capacity. No one's going to be spending that kind of money and effort carelessly. I was more worried about SpaceX becoming monopolistic, so I'm encouraged to see this deal.
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!
Satellite broadband stonks in shambles after the inevitable Kessler syndrome
Gravity was not a documentary.
You are the equivalent person talking about apartment, app store, or website junk 10-20 years ago. and so, you going to invest or complain?
Aliens made first contact this week and told us to “knock it off.”
Seems pretty negative and pessimistic.
Not a grid of dots, a ring! https://earthsky.org/human-world/kessler-syndrome-colliding-...
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.
On the positive side, clearing out all this space junk could end up being a meaningful contributor to global GDP. See also Planetes [1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planetes
I wish clearing out all the CO2 from the atmosphere became a meaningful contributor to global GNP.
Thanks for reminding me, I started watching this and forgot about it!
for what it's worth it would take the equivalent of launching 60 trillion cars into low earth orbit to blot out the sky
and that's assuming they are all in the same concentric plane as each other. you could stack them at different distances from the earth
>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.
Normal satellites can already be hacked, they provide zero to no security at all.
We are already full of ADs, this will be just another hobby for people into hacking. Imagine it displaying a gigantic pe** haha
On a serious note, as everything standards, they are already interfering with observations. Wait until we can no longer tell if it is an atificial sattelite or some massive asteroid coming from the direction of the son.
Humans are dooming their own existence lmao
Isn't iridium already in orbit? So there would be no need for new launches due to this aquisition.
As long as we can launch a big trash ball to knock the other trash ball away...
It's already a massive grid of moving dots. You can see it from the ground in certain dark-enough areas, but in order to see it in space you have to get outside LEO, like Artemis did. They don't have lights but they are shiny and they catch the sun, making them easily visible from certain angles, which the Artemis photos illustrated.
Wild that we already see “Kessler syndrome is a hoax” takes. I guess that should have been expected.
Dark night skies will probably be one of the main selling points for the off world colonies. I can see the Bladerunner-esque ads now.
A gigantic amount of stuff from space hits the atmosphere. Most not made by humans.
Cosmic dust influx estimates can range from 5 to 100 tonnes daily.
SpaceX is launching say ~10 tonnes of satellites per day
https://satellitemap.space
That map makes it look extremely crowded. Actual relative satellite size is many magnitudes smaller than each of those 1-pixel representations.
Junk yes, but think of the new science and industry it will enable as well. Microgravity experiments, new space stations, space tourism, new types of manufacturing in space, asteroid mining. Any technology is a double edged sword, but the benefits surely outweigh the drawbacks here.
>but instead leave behind micro particles that float around for a long time. People are studying this and hopefully raising appropriate alarms
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.
People are not worried about the mass increase in the entire atmosphere, but very selective layers of the atmosphere (mesosphere and stratosphere). These are delicate layers that are highly affected by nano particles created from satellite burn-up.
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It’s already starting to be like that. If you get far enough out into the bush away from light pollution and watch the stars for a bit, you can see the grid of satellites orbiting. It’s kind of cool but also kind of depressing.
"Unobstructed view of the stars" will soon be how space tourism companies upsell their customers to higher orbits.
Incredible how the first instinct is just to complain about progress these days. The degrowth mindset is really taking hold.
There is a huge amount of "space" available even in low orbital shells. Which also naturally decay.
There's a reason most of the western world isn't capable of building anything these days.
Yeah. And on the other hand, Chinese culture tends to embrace and optimize progress. I blame the French for infecting western universities with the de-growth mindset.