proee3 hours ago
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).
Centigonal3 hours ago
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
nba456_2 hours ago
And who does the tax get paid to? Some mythical Global Government that will totally work this time?
athrowaway3z15 minutes ago
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.
steveBK1232 hours ago
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.
glitchc32 minutes ago
Extortion is my business
-- Ernst Blofeld
LunaSea2 hours ago
Any company removing space debris from orbit. Like a carbon capture price to offset your launch.
nba456_2 hours ago
What you're describing is a global government, otherwise that can't be enforced.
Sanzig34 minutes ago
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.
notahacker10 minutes ago
Also, the number of countries with practical space launch capability is very small. US / China agreement isn't trivial, but if you can get them agreeing to a ITU-administered slots, getting ESA, Japan, India etc is pretty straightforward (and Russia's capacity isn't huge even if they don't want to play ball)
NDlurkeran hour ago
US could sanction countries/corporations/people who don't comply.
sakjuran hour ago
Could the US effectively sanction BRICS these days?
jqbd2 hours ago
US can enforce US satellites, no?
swiftcoder2 hours ago
Provided they are launched in the US, on a US-owned carrier? Most likely
Can't necessarily stop a multinational firing things to space on Russian/Chinese/ESA launch vehicles
rvnxan hour ago
Maybe but if so, it would mean that US spontaneously would go against one of their main strategic interests for the planet ? Doesn't makes too much sense.
It's like this bicycle meme where the person puts a stick in its wheels.
It's for the same reason that petrol cars are encouraged in the US.
Punishing SpaceX will lead to a bigger financial crisis, an upset Elon Musk who might refuse to fund the next democratic election and dozens of thousands of lost jobs (fortunately they already became millionaire, riding the right rocket) for a problem that most of the rich population doesn't care about.
Because in the city, it's about your petrol car, big trucks, and nobody to see the stars and a bit more pollution doesn't change much at that scale from their eyes.
CFCs (these gazes destroying ozone) were a notable exception, because it would lead to death of everyone (the same way that petrol with lead), except death, universally there was no advantage to defend.
But a space filled with US satellites is a great advantage for the US, since they are the only ones with the capabilities to deploy thousands of them, and it's a big business for military intelligence.
I can imagine the main reason they are going to regulate, is so that older satellite debris don't destroy the new shiny satellites, but beauty of the sky is going to be the very least important factor.
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pantalaimonan hour ago
In low earth orbit, space debris removes itself after a few years
Sanzigan hour ago
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.
mukbangpervert2 hours ago
The video discusses this directly.
iamtheworstdevan hour ago
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.
Centigonalan hour ago
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.
lstodd41 minutes ago
>that SpaceX is (via starlink) rapidly occupying large portions of
Which is utter bullshit. Quite painful to hear too. LEO is not your average american homeless stolen mart cart. Can we please rise to some more insighful level of discourse?
Sanzig19 minutes ago
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.
devindotcom9 minutes ago
insightful like your crude, substanceless objection?
jazzyjackson29 minutes ago
Lead by example, my guy, I don’t know what side of the argument you’re even on
xp843 minutes ago
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.
Sanzigan hour ago
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.
mschuster9140 minutes ago
> 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.
nradov2 hours ago
Do you think Russia will be willing to pay a tax on their new Rassvet constellation?
DarmokJalad1701an hour ago
> orbit value tax
How about No?
QuiEgo38 minutes ago
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.
cptaj38 minutes ago
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.
notahacker6 minutes ago
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 them to be fewer of them fired at more predictable intervals.
s0rce3 hours ago
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.
TheJoeMan2 hours ago
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.
ralfd2 hours ago
> "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.
swiftcoder2 hours ago
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)
birdsongsan hour ago
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.
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m4rtink2 hours ago
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.
nba456_2 hours ago
Oh great the NIMBYs are coming for space now.
umeshunni5 minutes ago
Not Above My Back Yard - NAMBY?
Grosvenoran hour ago
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.
Lendal2 hours ago
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.
stuxnet792 hours ago
On the positive side, clearing out all this space junk could end up being a meaningful contributor to global GDP. See also Planetes [1]
throw-the-towelan hour ago
I wish clearing out all the CO2 from the atmosphere became a meaningful contributor to global GNP.
wuliwong2 hours ago
Thanks for reminding me, I started watching this and forgot about it!
Matumio2 hours ago
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.
ck212 minutes ago
seattle_spring3 minutes ago
That map makes it look extremely crowded. Actual relative satellite size is many magnitudes smaller than each of those 1-pixel representations.
tonic_note2 hours ago
Satellite broadband stonks in shambles after the inevitable Kessler syndrome
Mistletoean hour ago
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.
Dig1tan hour ago
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.
Rover222an hour ago
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.
umeshunni4 minutes ago
There's a reason most of the western world isn't capable of building anything these days.
taneq2 hours ago
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.
bell-cot2 hours ago
"Unobstructed view of the stars" will soon be how space tourism companies upsell their customers to higher orbits.
Dig1t19 minutes ago
>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.
JanSolo3 hours ago
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.
NetMageSCW3 hours ago
What does Tesla have to do with Starlink or launch services?
JanSolo3 hours ago
Derp; I meant SpaceX.
nonethewiser2 hours ago
Might be one-in-the-same soon enough
fastball23 minutes ago
Seems unlikely now that both are separate public companies. Creative accounting acquisitions are somewhat more difficult in that context.
devindotcom7 minutes ago
just a friendly note that the idiom is "one and the same"
pulse73 hours ago
Centigonal3 hours ago
"Rocket Lab acquires Iridium" sounds like a notification out of Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri or Anno 2205.
phildenhoff4 hours ago
Rocket lab used to be a New Zealand source of pride, having started there. From the press release, now it’s American. What happened?
MyelinatedT4 hours ago
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.
jackmott4232 minutes ago
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.
ortusdux4 hours ago
khurs3 hours ago
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-...
ericmay4 hours ago
Needs access to American capital markets, contracts, governance structures, and jurisdiction (applicable law).
y0ssar1an2 hours ago
at least it's still got a bunch of Kiwi engineers building the Rutherford engine.
bell-cot2 hours ago
It sure doesn't help that New Zealand's housing market is one of the most unaffordable in the world.
rr808an hour ago
Compared to LA even NZ looks cheap
elzbardico4 hours ago
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.
micromacrofoot2 hours ago
same thing that always happens to companies, money
everfrustratedop5 hours ago
RocketLab gains spectrum + profitable satellite company
espadrine3 hours ago
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.
panick21_3 hours ago
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.
schainks3 hours ago
I think that’s the point of their niche right? They are already plenty reliable. Also let’s them do stuff like this:
davidpapermill3 hours ago
> 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...
wongarsu3 hours ago
And access to a customer base. A lot easier to sell them new services if they already have a big contract with you
NetMageSCW3 hours ago
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.
lxgran hour ago
Iridium is launching 5G standards-based direct-to-device capabilities this year: https://www.iridium.com/services/iridium-ntn-direct
amluto3 hours ago
> 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.
piltdownman2 hours ago
//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...
lxgran hour ago
They didn't circumvent phone antennas being largely omnidirectional (unlike VSAT or phased arrays, which are highly directional) and as a result having much lower gain, they just work with it, just like Iridium, Globalstar, Inmarsat, Thuraya, and all the other early players in what's now called "direct to device".
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).
amluto2 hours ago
My claim is that these are not the same market as the traditional Starlink service.
hobonation3 hours ago
Iridium terminals can be very power-efficient. Consumer ones are the size of a deck of cards and can last for days.
Scoundrelleran hour ago
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)
lxgran hour ago
All of it. You can't really get around physics.
Iridium has historically targeted low-power, omnidirectional terminals (antennas can be larger at lower frequencies without requiring steering than at higher frequencies).
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, and is honestly just a waste of scarce L-band spectrum and much better served by all the Ku- and Ka-band LEO competitors.
It's going to be interesting to see if Rocketlab start also serving that market, like some of their main competitors already are.
Symmetry3 hours ago
The spectrum is the big thing. If they wanted a revenue stream they could just buy bonds.
pelorat3 hours ago
I like RocketLab. Looking forward to Neutron etc. But this is a bad investment, no other way to put it.
written-beyond26 minutes ago
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.
petesergeant2 hours ago
> But this is a bad investment
Brother, share with us a sentence or two of why you think so
Joel_Mckay2 hours ago
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
wateralien3 hours ago
“Rocket Lab” not “RocketLab”. Although I think the latter is better.
ryandvm3 hours ago
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?
denotes2 hours ago
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.
ttul3 hours ago
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.
lxgran hour ago
> 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.
m4rtink2 hours ago
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.
lxgran hour ago
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.
cozzydan hour ago
yes, for example it's used on high altitude balloons.
kilroy1232 hours ago
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.
khurs3 hours ago
Good to see the competition making moves, SpaceX's huge lead isn't ideal.
Joel_Mckay2 hours ago
Starlink Direct to Cell (VoLTE) service now leverages global cellphone client infrastructure. It would be extremely foolish to compete with something proprietary. =3
moralestapia4 hours ago
Crazy. I didn't know you could acquire things worth 20x more than you.
pnw4 hours ago
RocketLab market cap is 57b.
Iridium market cap was 5.5b and this transaction values it at 8b.
xgbi3 hours ago
How is Rocketlab valued 57B? They made $500M of revenue in 2025. This is 100x their entire balance sheet.
pavon3 hours ago
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.
ElProlactin2 hours ago
> Neutron is almost complete...
I've made hundreds of thousands of dollars from my early investments in RKLB but this isn't true if by "complete" you mean they have a proven launch vehicle. The company is now targeting late 2026 for Neutron's inaugural flight.
Neutron was announced in 2021. There were hopes for a 2024 first flight. Then it was mid-to-late 2025. Now it's Q4 2026 after a failure related to the stage 1 tank earlier this year.
If anyone can pull off using carbon composite for a launch vehicle of this size, it's RKLB. But nobody has done it before and I think the retail investor base is taking for granted something that is not at all guaranteed. There's much more risk than a lot of people think.
In some ways, RKLB is more like pre-clinical biotech stocks, which usually produce binary outcomes (a drug succeeds or it fails, and the company's fate is based on that). If Neutron works, RKLB gets to execute its grand vision. If it fails, it doesn't. The vision (and valuation) doesn't work without Neutron.
boredatoms2 hours ago
A rocket being nearly complete just means they haven’t started the multi year testing delays when the first couple of launches inevitably fail
wateralien3 hours ago
This is a good question for SpaceX too.
saberience3 hours ago
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.
wongarsu3 hours ago
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
moralestapia3 hours ago
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).
bmachoan hour ago
> But apparently you can buy things with promises
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)
sspiff3 hours ago
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.
brookst4 hours ago
Look at GameStop’s quixotic attempt to acquire eBay. Which is actually not impossible.
zie3 hours ago
It's an interesting way to apply for the eBay CEO job for sure.
iamacyborg3 hours ago
Someone's been reading Money Stuff.
ortusdux4 hours ago
5x the market cap!
moralestapia4 hours ago
Did GameStop acquire eBay?
sspiff4 hours ago
They are trying.
kpsan hour ago
Remember when NeXT acquired Apple for negative 400 million?
PierceJoy4 hours ago
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.
ericmay4 hours ago
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.
malfist4 hours ago
Dell bought EMC for 67b when they were worth 24b
bitwize4 hours ago
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.
elzbardico3 hours ago
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.
dylan6043 hours ago
being able to foreclose on the house/property is a pretty decent protection for the bank that doesn't exist for a business though
gigatexal2 hours ago
Who? is buying who?
I guess good for them and for the folks who just got paid.