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).
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.
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.
Pay what? Its a 'pure' system where nothing has to be denominated in money but instead we care about effects:
taking-up-orbits, applying-force, and danger-pollution.
The system requires the biggest player calculates the cost of non-compliance being too high either by:
- the scheme triggering a clause where other members start to apply force to their non-sanctioned orbits and trashing their satellites, add in the additional threat of earthly economic sanctions like we do with so many companies.
- the scheme breaking apart and becoming a wild west with _extreme_ danger-pollution.
Clearly, at the moment, the biggest users do not care because the danger is low enough, and they'll try to delay a bit so they get more 'grandfathered' in.
I'm not saying its going to be perfect or fair. I'm arguing its dumb to fear a mythical global government, because that's not required to create stable solutions for these kinds of issues.
Ok but that's not what I asked... You're just saying "we should have some system that benefits everyone". Ok sure that sounds nice, but you compared it to a specific framework with an off-hand "we've solved this so long ago" type of comment. Surely if it's so simple and straightforward and the Dutch "already figured it out" you'd have at least some idea of a proposal or implementation details.
How will the toll be collected? Who will collect it? How will it be fairly distributed?
You're not really good at asking anything. I did not say a system that benefits everyone.
I did not say the dutch solved this exact problem, and my previous response was a best effort after you prompting me because i assume you've just never thought through or dealt with non-mega-government solutions before.
I brought up the comparison because nba456_ 19 was already complaining about a required mythical global government - as if that's relevant for the 50y time frame we're planning for.
I also dont understand why you keep bringing up tax and tolls. I'll try to answer that again in the other comment.
Ok then the US can just ignore all this stuff and do what we want.
> I also dont understand why you keep bringing up tax and tolls.
I can tell - I think you’re having a hard time here defending an idea you now want to walk back. That’s fine. At the end of the day “collective maintenance” is typically achieved by either a tax or toll. I don’t have to keep bringing it up, but then you need to explain how your proposed system works instead of leaving one to guess. You suggested it was simple because the Dutch “figured it out an millennium ago”.
Without global governance to address what is a global space - you know, space itself, how would your proposal work? American and European companies pay for some maintenance scheme but then China, Russia, and others ignore it? So it’s not global? Who will they pay anyway? Why would they agree to this scheme?
> You're not really good at asking anything.
This is incorrect.
> i assume you've just never thought through or dealt with non-mega-government solutions before.
Based on your inability to describe or walk through your solution I think it’s likely you think you’ve thought through this and you haven’t and now as your comment is being scrutinized you are turning to discussion points that don’t make a lot of sense.
You collect waterworks taxes the same way regular taxes are collected in NL. You get a letter with an amount to pay and you pay it. The waterworks is the entity that sends you the letter and manages the application of those taxes. The system that comment described is still in place today and operates in parallel to "regular" government.
For an international resource it absolutely is. Everyone would lobby their government to ditch to make a sprint. (Well, China and America and possibly rising powers like India or the UAE would.)
I certainly anticipate a billion or more stakeholders on space companies.
Or are you doing the corporations are people thing, so if five people can agree on something in a handshake, ethos-centric deal, then surely five space companies with billions of dollars invested from millions of people should surely be able to act like those original five people?
Not to mention that this bias is a self-fulfilling prophesy. Thanks to all the ideologues that get elected to government by insiting that government can't work, surprise, surprise, government doesn't work.
But that's the problem. The debris disperse whatever heavy metals and compounds into the atmosphere. Removing the debris and taking it somewhere, even just landing them protected in a heat shield, could reduce those vaporizing particles, if those are going to be a problem.
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.
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 ITU-administered slots, getting ESA, Japan, India, NZ etc is pretty straightforward (and Russia's capacity isn't huge even if they don't want to play ball)
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.
CFCs were solved because we found new chemicals that were more profitable than CFCs. Global warming may eventually be solved because renewable electricity is (already) more profitable than fossil electricity (but only when it's working, which is the major sticking point). In neither case did thinking about the bad things that would happen if we continued along a path actually stop us continuing along that path. It was always about profit.
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.
I 100% agree but Starlink is the only profitable space division of SpaceX.
The truth is diverting money to space exploration is not that popular.
We only got the moon because we were in a battle with the Soviet Union about capitalism vs. communism. It was never about space or science. The instant the Soviet Union collapsed, we reduced NASA’s projects and budgets.
So while I’m not a fan of the circumstances, I need some way for money to go to space exploration and I’m riding this like people rode the Cold War as an excuse to build a moon rocket.
Yes, and you're 100% right, but context is needed here for others even if you know this next bit.
The original shuttle designs were much, much better. I remember reading tech specs and looking at schematics in Discover and Popular Science years before the final design. Maybe Omni too.
Then it ended up in committee, politicians got involved, and funding was cut in parallel (even before the wall came down, it was clear the Soviets were done). The design was a shadow of what it could have been.
I remeber being sad as a kid.
Also, my drive down nastologia avenue made me realise, I really miss science magazines. The publishing date of the three I mentioned seemed to be staggered a bit. So I always had a bit of science news, and I really miss the format.
Phones aren't the same, tiny, tablets are unwieldy and smaller than a magazine, they were distraction free, and I really liked it just being all in one package.
I even liked the ads! Typically for some computer peripheral, or a new calculator, or some scientific apparatus. The ad just sat there too, it didn't bounce around or scream at you or cover an article's text.
Or the worst modern scourge, popups while you're reading, I mean !'?"#+#-#/ off I'm reading here!
Odyssey was published by the same person who operated Astronomy magazine, and in my tweens and early teens I gobbled up the stories about the space shuttle and the images coming back from various missions such as Voyager.
I don’t remember if I saw it in the school library and asked my parents to subscribe or they subscribed for me, but it really helped to maintain a lifelong interest in space flight and astronomy (along with whatever science fiction I could get my hands on).
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.
Whatever happens to Starlink, the debris in their new lower orbit would decay within months at the worst. It’s not one of those “thousand years imprisoned on the planet by a cloud of deadly debris” that we’ve heard about.
Not saying it couldn’t be bad if there were such a collision as obvi a really bad collision could in the short term damage Starlink and anyone else who decides to use that orbit, but this isn’t existential risk territory anymore.
VLEO addresses the risk, sure, but the new Starcloud space datacenter hype machine isn't going VLEO, it's going 600-850 km. Those altitudes are in the years to decades range for deorbit, and SpaceX has filed for 88,000 of them.
Risk is theoretical, that is; a) never demostrated, b) most probably overblown c) any methods of mitigation were never even given a chance to develop.
All in all you people take the precautionary principle so far as to cripple your own progress in fundamental stuff like spaceflight but at the same time see no reason to apply it in social stuff like that survelliance camera affair or the net-id. And also fervently believe in modern version of snake oil that is "AI".
This is hypocrisy at the base level and a sign that we have a civilization crisis akin to one that of ~7th century AD.
Okay buddy, that was a Gish gallop if I've ever seen one.
The risk is real. The math isn't complicated, you could stand up a basic debris simulation in a few hours with numpy from first principles. And we also know it's real because it's actually happened multiple times now: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satellite_collision
This is a real thing that satellite operators worry about all the time. Conjunction analysis and risk modeling leading to a go/no-go decision is something that real satellite operations centres do daily.
I don't know if an LVT is the answer, but we do need to figure out some way to make operators consider space sustainability efforts, especially if they are launching systems with such density that they make subsequent operation in those shells significantly riskier.
That attitude is how you start building up more and more tech debt until you trap yourself into extinction. If I thought that Musk's effort could benefit from an infusion of cash I would have organized it. As it happens he's limited by other things, so I sit back and enjoy the view of our civilization slowly climbing the Kardashev scale. You can fly by.
And then he betrayed all of that when he decided to IPO SpaceX and pivoted to space datacenters. Putting aside all the other things he's done over the past few years to betray his own stated ideals or plans.
That satellite's orbit very clearly did decay, though. The problem in that instance is the descent wasn't controlled, but that's a different kind of failure than the one this thread is worried about (i.e. satellites lingering for many years without active collision avoidance).
If you don't leave junk it won't cost you much. I really don't see this as gatekeeping.
> 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.
That's not accurate at all. They could always afford to pay it, and so can other companies. What changed is that they stopped counting as "online sales tax" so they didn't care about those laws anymore.
If they could get out of sale tax, they very much would still want to. If they could get rid of sales tax for everyone, they would be for it. Sales tax isn't benefiting them by acting as a gatekeeping force.
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.
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.)
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.
The problem is regulations like these rarely "pay for externalities".
They impose compliance costs or costs to skirt the regulations.
CO2 emissions have not been solved despite all the regulations and taxes, quite the opposite they keep increasing and will continue to do so for a long time before even thinking about coming down. In large part because production was moved off shore to countries which have less regulation and higher emission intensity of production, which actually has the opposite effect.
Workers rights were not solved, the abuses were just off-shored to countries that still enslave people and abuse workers and allow child labor.
Tax evasion has not been solved, it's just permitted under complicated legal structures.
All these things are a godsend for bloated multinational corporations who can pay the compliance costs without blinking, and have little to worry about organic competition.
Space regulation and taxes won't solve anything. If the government had any kind of track record you might be a little open minded about it, but at this point the burden of proof would be on the people claiming that this time, taxes won't be used for corruption and graft. If there is money to be had in it, the government will take their cut and in exchange allow multinational corporations to offshore the problem to other countries.
Not sure who the "we" is, but many jurisdictions do regulate CO2 heavily. Not only immediate direct taxes, but subsidies to competitors, increased regulatory impositions and effective moratoriums on approvals, sovereign risk factors with many countries legislating and committing to CO2 phase out.
> If we started charging $100 per ton we'd see some massive changes.
Again not sure which we you are talking about, but lots of places have carbon taxes. They do make massive changes when they are priced to do so -- see, the EU. That was the point of my comment. I didn't argue markets don't respond to economic incentives, I clearly was agreeing they do. The effect has not been to solve climate change, it has been to move production offshore to markets that have much higher carbon emission intensity of production!
> And it's not hard to stop those loopholes.
And the fact that these not-hard-to-stop loopholes are not stopped still doesn't make you stop to think? The taxes aren't going to solve problems or pay for externalities, they are funding graft and corruption and stifling competition.
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.
How would starting earlier have stopped industries from outsourcing CO2 emissions to other/exempt countries? If you look at graphs of global emissions it's like they didn't skip a beat once legislation and treaties in the west kicked in.
> 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.
> 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.
It may be finite, but satellites are tiny and the earth is huge. We barely cover the Earth's surface where we don't even have to deal with launching it into space.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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]
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.
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.
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.
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'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.
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.
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!
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.
>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.
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.
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.
>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.
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.
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.
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
They also want to continue to use Tesla as the piggy bank to offset the (vast) losses by the other companies. Once the "dump" phase is finished on the SpaceX pump-and-dump, Tesla will swoop in and buy SpaceX (or vice versa) in some all-stock deal and arbitrarily value it at $2 trillion.
I have a really dumb prediction that at some point he’ll name one of the public companies X, presumably either SpaceX or a merged company. The dumbest people in the world would say he’s turned Twitter into a $2tn company and he’d find that hilarious.
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.
That is false. They were a purely NZ operation launching sub-orbital rockets before they got into DARPA contracts. What you meant to say is "Before they ever launched Electron", and I'm pretty sure that is false too, they weren't "primarily" American, the majority of the workforce was in NZ until years after that.
I'm 99% sure that they went to the US venture to raise money to build Electron and that's when they made the US company that primary and the NZ company the subsidiary.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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).
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.
Yes, for more than one satellite covering the same area on the ground with a spotbeam on the same frequency at the same time to make sense, you inherently need steering/beamforming.
That's why Iridium has the constellation planned out so that you never have more satellites in the sky than strictly necessary for full coverage on the equator (where satellite density is lowest), and outer spot beams get turned off progressively as the satellites approach the poles as they'd only create interference without increasing bandwidth due to the lack of terminal-side steering.
Now I wonder if they already changed that for the second generation sats, given that there are some steered terminals available that could probably make good use of the extra satellite density near the poles, which is also an area underserved by geostationary beams?
Definitely, and I think GP raises a valid point: Without beamforming, there’s no point in having more than one station covering the same area, whether terrestrial tower or satellite-based spot beam.
And while 4G and beyond use some mild device-side beamforming, it’s a whole different ballpark than parabolic antennas or phased arrays in terms of gain.
Kind of: Phones will probably need some Iridium-specific RF hardware (unless their existing baseband and amplifiers happen to cover the band it uses), but the baseband and signaling stack won’t be proprietary anymore if I understand it correctly.
Several mass-market phones already are IoT-NTN compatible, e.g. Google’s Pixel line.
I'm not sure if that kind of great replacement theories stand anymore. That happened once with iPhone, and... what else? All the direct-to-cell stuffs are limited to simple texts as well. IIUC they require the phones to be out in the wild with nobody around and patient with the rituals of sending messages, like how earliest forms of GPS receivers worked. I don't see that changing that much in coming few years.
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.
> 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.
> 1. Iridium uses frequencies fairly close to GPS (~1.6GHz).
2. Iridium uses cylindrically-polarized transmissions (like GPS), which enable compact omnidirectional helical antennas
Which part of my argument is this an objection to?
Are you saying that using circular polarization, the same would be possible in the Ku or even Ka bands? Because that’s definitely not the case due to the different aperture/gain tradeoff vs. L-band, and that’s my point.
> This is AI slop?
Did I say anything incorrect there or do you just not like my writing?
> No, the point of using an electrically-steered beam antenna is that it improves SNR, so that you are not bandwidth limited.
Sure, but my point was: At low frequencies, you can steer to become more efficient per bit, but at high frequencies you almost have to, as you’re sending energy in suboptimal directions otherwise. And then if you’re already steering, why not use a less-scarce band?
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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?
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
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
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
Starlink Direct to Cell (VoLTE) service now leverages global cellphone client infrastructure. It would be extremely foolish to compete with something proprietary. =3
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.
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.
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.
> Yes tho I'd argue that Rocket Lab has the finances to easily weather a few more years of Neutron set back...
The company won't go bankrupt if Neutron is delayed but I disagree with the "easily" part and Iridium complicates the picture. It throws off a lot of cash but comes with a $3.6 billion bridge loan that RKLB will need to deal with in the next year. If they term it out with debt, the leverage goes way up. If they term it out with equity, there's real dilution risk, especially in the scenario where the market prices in Neutron delays (because the stock almost certainly will be lower).
The reality is that Neutron is critical to the RKLB story, and that story is what supports the current valuation. Even after the recent decline from the ~$150 peak, this is a very richly valued company priced for close-to-perfection.
The biggest risk is that carbon composite approach proves not to be viable for a launch vehicle of this size and RKLB has to fundamentally change the design. While I wouldn't have invested in this company if I thought that risk was >50%, it's definitely not as close to 0% as most retail investors seem to believe.
I don't follow your math. Let's say we want to target a price to earnings ratio of 20-25. That requires 2.3-3 billion of profit. If they increased their revenue 10x, they'd have 5 billion revenue, which puts them not super far from the target.
So let's say they need to 20x or 30x revenue. That would mean their new size needs to be similar in size to the current space market as a whole. If they have a compelling price, that might require a 5x growth in the space market as a whole? Less than that if you think they're really good at pulling in the new customers? I don't understand where you got 100x.
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
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
Here is the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VLjW6zuYmos
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.
I’m interested in understanding your comparison here and how it would be applicable to space and how you envision it working based on your comparison.
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.
taking-up-orbits, applying-force, and danger-pollution.
The system requires the biggest player calculates the cost of non-compliance being too high either by:
- the scheme triggering a clause where other members start to apply force to their non-sanctioned orbits and trashing their satellites, add in the additional threat of earthly economic sanctions like we do with so many companies.
- the scheme breaking apart and becoming a wild west with _extreme_ danger-pollution.
Clearly, at the moment, the biggest users do not care because the danger is low enough, and they'll try to delay a bit so they get more 'grandfathered' in.
I'm not saying its going to be perfect or fair. I'm arguing its dumb to fear a mythical global government, because that's not required to create stable solutions for these kinds of issues.
How will the toll be collected? Who will collect it? How will it be fairly distributed?
I did not say the dutch solved this exact problem, and my previous response was a best effort after you prompting me because i assume you've just never thought through or dealt with non-mega-government solutions before.
I brought up the comparison because nba456_ 19 was already complaining about a required mythical global government - as if that's relevant for the 50y time frame we're planning for.
I also dont understand why you keep bringing up tax and tolls. I'll try to answer that again in the other comment.
Ok then the US can just ignore all this stuff and do what we want.
> I also dont understand why you keep bringing up tax and tolls.
I can tell - I think you’re having a hard time here defending an idea you now want to walk back. That’s fine. At the end of the day “collective maintenance” is typically achieved by either a tax or toll. I don’t have to keep bringing it up, but then you need to explain how your proposed system works instead of leaving one to guess. You suggested it was simple because the Dutch “figured it out an millennium ago”.
Without global governance to address what is a global space - you know, space itself, how would your proposal work? American and European companies pay for some maintenance scheme but then China, Russia, and others ignore it? So it’s not global? Who will they pay anyway? Why would they agree to this scheme?
> You're not really good at asking anything.
This is incorrect.
> i assume you've just never thought through or dealt with non-mega-government solutions before.
Based on your inability to describe or walk through your solution I think it’s likely you think you’ve thought through this and you haven’t and now as your comment is being scrutinized you are turning to discussion points that don’t make a lot of sense.
You collect waterworks taxes the same way regular taxes are collected in NL. You get a letter with an amount to pay and you pay it. The waterworks is the entity that sends you the letter and manages the application of those taxes. The system that comment described is still in place today and operates in parallel to "regular" government.
For an international resource it absolutely is. Everyone would lobby their government to ditch to make a sprint. (Well, China and America and possibly rising powers like India or the UAE would.)
Or are you doing the corporations are people thing, so if five people can agree on something in a handshake, ethos-centric deal, then surely five space companies with billions of dollars invested from millions of people should surely be able to act like those original five people?
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.
-- Ernst Blofeld
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.
Can't necessarily stop a multinational firing things to space on Russian/Chinese/ESA launch vehicles
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.
Like when Amazon finally had warehouses in all fifty states and suddenly quit campaigning against online sales tax.
The truth is diverting money to space exploration is not that popular.
We only got the moon because we were in a battle with the Soviet Union about capitalism vs. communism. It was never about space or science. The instant the Soviet Union collapsed, we reduced NASA’s projects and budgets.
So while I’m not a fan of the circumstances, I need some way for money to go to space exploration and I’m riding this like people rode the Cold War as an excuse to build a moon rocket.
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.
The original shuttle designs were much, much better. I remember reading tech specs and looking at schematics in Discover and Popular Science years before the final design. Maybe Omni too.
Then it ended up in committee, politicians got involved, and funding was cut in parallel (even before the wall came down, it was clear the Soviets were done). The design was a shadow of what it could have been.
I remeber being sad as a kid.
Also, my drive down nastologia avenue made me realise, I really miss science magazines. The publishing date of the three I mentioned seemed to be staggered a bit. So I always had a bit of science news, and I really miss the format.
Phones aren't the same, tiny, tablets are unwieldy and smaller than a magazine, they were distraction free, and I really liked it just being all in one package.
I even liked the ads! Typically for some computer peripheral, or a new calculator, or some scientific apparatus. The ad just sat there too, it didn't bounce around or scream at you or cover an article's text.
Or the worst modern scourge, popups while you're reading, I mean !'?"#+#-#/ off I'm reading here!
Odyssey was published by the same person who operated Astronomy magazine, and in my tweens and early teens I gobbled up the stories about the space shuttle and the images coming back from various missions such as Voyager.
I don’t remember if I saw it in the school library and asked my parents to subscribe or they subscribed for me, but it really helped to maintain a lifelong interest in space flight and astronomy (along with whatever science fiction I could get my hands on).
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
Not saying it couldn’t be bad if there were such a collision as obvi a really bad collision could in the short term damage Starlink and anyone else who decides to use that orbit, but this isn’t existential risk territory anymore.
All in all you people take the precautionary principle so far as to cripple your own progress in fundamental stuff like spaceflight but at the same time see no reason to apply it in social stuff like that survelliance camera affair or the net-id. And also fervently believe in modern version of snake oil that is "AI".
This is hypocrisy at the base level and a sign that we have a civilization crisis akin to one that of ~7th century AD.
The risk is real. The math isn't complicated, you could stand up a basic debris simulation in a few hours with numpy from first principles. And we also know it's real because it's actually happened multiple times now: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satellite_collision
This is a real thing that satellite operators worry about all the time. Conjunction analysis and risk modeling leading to a go/no-go decision is something that real satellite operations centres do daily.
I don't know if an LVT is the answer, but we do need to figure out some way to make operators consider space sustainability efforts, especially if they are launching systems with such density that they make subsequent operation in those shells significantly riskier.
Some old crap got shot up. Who cares, we can launch 10x or 100x.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/after-fiery-displa...
> 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.
That's not accurate at all. They could always afford to pay it, and so can other companies. What changed is that they stopped counting as "online sales tax" so they didn't care about those laws anymore.
If they could get out of sale tax, they very much would still want to. If they could get rid of sales tax for everyone, they would be for it. Sales tax isn't benefiting them by acting as a gatekeeping force.
(RCA is a bad swap-in in this example but I'm struggling to think of an apt analogy for this era.)
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.
They impose compliance costs or costs to skirt the regulations.
CO2 emissions have not been solved despite all the regulations and taxes, quite the opposite they keep increasing and will continue to do so for a long time before even thinking about coming down. In large part because production was moved off shore to countries which have less regulation and higher emission intensity of production, which actually has the opposite effect.
Workers rights were not solved, the abuses were just off-shored to countries that still enslave people and abuse workers and allow child labor.
Tax evasion has not been solved, it's just permitted under complicated legal structures.
All these things are a godsend for bloated multinational corporations who can pay the compliance costs without blinking, and have little to worry about organic competition.
Space regulation and taxes won't solve anything. If the government had any kind of track record you might be a little open minded about it, but at this point the burden of proof would be on the people claiming that this time, taxes won't be used for corruption and graft. If there is money to be had in it, the government will take their cut and in exchange allow multinational corporations to offshore the problem to other countries.
All the?
We barely regulate CO2 at all.
If we started charging $100 per ton we'd see some massive changes.
And it's not hard to stop those loopholes.
All the.
> We barely regulate CO2 at all.
Not sure who the "we" is, but many jurisdictions do regulate CO2 heavily. Not only immediate direct taxes, but subsidies to competitors, increased regulatory impositions and effective moratoriums on approvals, sovereign risk factors with many countries legislating and committing to CO2 phase out.
> If we started charging $100 per ton we'd see some massive changes.
Again not sure which we you are talking about, but lots of places have carbon taxes. They do make massive changes when they are priced to do so -- see, the EU. That was the point of my comment. I didn't argue markets don't respond to economic incentives, I clearly was agreeing they do. The effect has not been to solve climate change, it has been to move production offshore to markets that have much higher carbon emission intensity of production!
> And it's not hard to stop those loopholes.
And the fact that these not-hard-to-stop loopholes are not stopped still doesn't make you stop to think? The taxes aren't going to solve problems or pay for externalities, they are funding graft and corruption and stifling competition.
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.
This reads like a parody of libertarians.
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.
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?
[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.
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...
(This is already happening, today, for other bits of their misbehavior!)
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...
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.
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.
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.
It is very, very, very big.
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.
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.
Sure, some of the employees are team space. The money is funding a transition to autocracy though, so. I remain skeptical of their motives.
One of those ships crashes and the boys from the Dwarf find the service mechanoid, which is how they get Kryten.
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.
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!
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.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planetes
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
SpaceX is launching say ~10 tonnes of satellites per day
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.
There is a huge amount of "space" available even in low orbital shells. Which also naturally decay.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
It was created by somebody from New Zealand and a lot of early operations was in New Zealand nobody is denying that.
It's a Texas company.
ITAR. (From what I remember, Beck really tried to avoid it. But there isn’t a competitive solution for a New Zealand-based aerospace company.)
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.
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-...
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.
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.
https://rocketlabcorp.com/updates/victus-haze/
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...
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.
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...
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).
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.
That's why Iridium has the constellation planned out so that you never have more satellites in the sky than strictly necessary for full coverage on the equator (where satellite density is lowest), and outer spot beams get turned off progressively as the satellites approach the poles as they'd only create interference without increasing bandwidth due to the lack of terminal-side steering.
Now I wonder if they already changed that for the second generation sats, given that there are some steered terminals available that could probably make good use of the extra satellite density near the poles, which is also an area underserved by geostationary beams?
And while 4G and beyond use some mild device-side beamforming, it’s a whole different ballpark than parabolic antennas or phased arrays in terms of gain.
Several mass-market phones already are IoT-NTN compatible, e.g. Google’s Pixel line.
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)
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.
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.
Which part of my argument is this an objection to?
Are you saying that using circular polarization, the same would be possible in the Ku or even Ka bands? Because that’s definitely not the case due to the different aperture/gain tradeoff vs. L-band, and that’s my point.
> This is AI slop?
Did I say anything incorrect there or do you just not like my writing?
> No, the point of using an electrically-steered beam antenna is that it improves SNR, so that you are not bandwidth limited.
Sure, but my point was: At low frequencies, you can steer to become more efficient per bit, but at high frequencies you almost have to, as you’re sending energy in suboptimal directions otherwise. And then if you’re already steering, why not use a less-scarce band?
How much market is there for people that just want low speed connectivity from the middle of nowhere?
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.
Why the Satellite Race is No Longer About Satellites - https://youtube.com/shorts/hRxv4RggxLE
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.
A lot of remote IOT devices use Iridium, as well as the US government or DoD.
I guess it only has to make sense to Wallstreet types ....
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.
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.
https://www.bnnbloomberg.ca/business/2026/03/27/bell-to-dive...
Motorola Solutions, the successor of the original Motorola, does the headsets/radios and such.
I don't know how to feel about this acquisition though. Never thought IRDM would've been a bad investment.
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-...
Brother, share with us a sentence or two of why you think so
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?
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
Iridium market cap was 5.5b and this transaction values it at 8b.
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.
The company won't go bankrupt if Neutron is delayed but I disagree with the "easily" part and Iridium complicates the picture. It throws off a lot of cash but comes with a $3.6 billion bridge loan that RKLB will need to deal with in the next year. If they term it out with debt, the leverage goes way up. If they term it out with equity, there's real dilution risk, especially in the scenario where the market prices in Neutron delays (because the stock almost certainly will be lower).
The reality is that Neutron is critical to the RKLB story, and that story is what supports the current valuation. Even after the recent decline from the ~$150 peak, this is a very richly valued company priced for close-to-perfection.
The biggest risk is that carbon composite approach proves not to be viable for a launch vehicle of this size and RKLB has to fundamentally change the design. While I wouldn't have invested in this company if I thought that risk was >50%, it's definitely not as close to 0% as most retail investors seem to believe.
So let's say they need to 20x or 30x revenue. That would mean their new size needs to be similar in size to the current space market as a whole. If they have a compelling price, that might require a 5x growth in the space market as a whole? Less than that if you think they're really good at pulling in the new customers? I don't understand where you got 100x.
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.
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
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).
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)
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.
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.
I guess good for them and for the folks who just got paid.