Iridium is famous for being the very first commercial company to provide global, hand-held satphone coverage, and supplying voice connections to anywhere on the planet is still very much part of its business. But its network has increasingly been used to feed data from remote systems, such as pipelines, ocean buoys, and mining equipment.
Iridium has become a big player in what is termed M2M, or “machine to machine” services. And the company is banking on that market getting ever bigger as more and more systems are linked together.
As well as improving the data connection speeds for those services, the new spacecraft carry additional payloads that allow Iridium to enter new markets.
These involve the tracking of ships and planes when they are out of sight of VHF radio, in the case of maritime vessels, and radar, in the case of aircraft.
One thing the new satellites will not be capable of doing, however, is producing Iridium “flares”. These are the flashes in the sky that result when sunlight glints off the antennas of the old spacecraft.
The new satellites do not have the same configuration, so once the original constellation is de-orbited the flashes will cease.
“I’m afraid those who’ve been tracking that phenomenon over the past 20 years have another year or two to see it,” Mr Desch told BBC News.
“As someone who’s seen a couple myself, you can imagine what a thrill it is to be the CEO of a company like this and watch your satellite go overhead. But we weren’t going to spend money just to make angular shiny things on our satellites, so that phenomenon will go away – but it’s been fun.”
