“Success will come from those who can bring new innovations to space quickly and sustain them over time as efficiently as possible,” Desch said in a statement. “We’re excited about being able to accelerate the next generation of IoT, aviation, maritime, PNT, and national security capabilities, and pursue new innovative applications as part of Rocket Lab.”
Competing with SpaceX
This is a bold move by Rocket Lab, which has been on a buying spree as it seeks to scale up its operations to compete with SpaceX and Blue Origin, both of which also have launch capabilities and seek to operate large constellations. In the last two years, Rocket Lab has acquired both Geost and Mynaric to improve its spacecraft-building capabilities. But both of these acquisitions, valued in the low hundreds of millions of dollars, were dwarfed by the Iridium deal.
Iridium is a company with a long history. First founded in 1998, it had to be rescued from bankruptcy only a couple of years later by the US government due to the difficulty of building and launching a commercial satellite communications network. Arriving as CEO in 2006, Desch developed a plan for a next-generation constellation and worked with SpaceX and its Falcon 9 rocket to get it launched in the 2010s. For a time, Iridium was SpaceX’s most important commercial launch customer. Those satellites generate the bulk of Iridium’s revenue today.
To become, in Beck’s words, a “self-launching space superpower,” Rocket Lab will need to complete the development of its Neutron launch vehicle. The company’s existing workhorse rocket, Electron, is simply too small to deliver most of the kinds of communications satellites that Rocket Lab envisions developing.
The company originally targeted 2024 as the debut date for the medium-lift Neutron rocket, which will feature a reusable first stage and a novel fairing design. There have been teething pains with Neutron, however, including engine failures and structural test anomalies. Nominally, the company is still planning to launch during the fourth quarter of this year. But given the testing issues, it’s not even certain that Neutron will make its debut in 2027.
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