Iridium

Iridium provides unlimited voice and data satellite communications services to the U.S. Department of Defense through a five-year EMSS contract awarded in late 2013.

Iridium disclosed to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission that it received the Hawaii ground station contract at least a month before 2019-04-22.

The International Telecommunication Union deployed 50 satellite phones from Iridium and broadband terminals from Inmarsat to the Bahamas after Hurricane Dorian.

Iridium Next is a completed 66-satellite constellation that uses L-band frequencies.

In 2018 U.S. government customers generated $105,700,000 of Iridium’s $523,000,000 in revenue, about 20% of the company’s total revenue for the year.

The new Enhanced Mobile Satellite Services contract is two years longer and $238,500,000 higher than Iridium’s five-year contract signed in 2013.

Iridium plans to invest around $10–12 million over the next three years to upgrade a gateway station in Hawaii dedicated to U.S. government services.

Iridium and OneWeb signed a memorandum of understanding at Iridium’s annual partner conference in Coronado, California on 2019-09-17.

The Gateway Evolution IDIQ follows an $8,570,000 task order Iridium received in 2016 to ready the gateway for Iridium Next.

Iridium completed a $1,450,000,000 refinancing to pay off loans it acquired to purchase its second-generation constellation, which is now in orbit.

Iridium borrowed $1,450,000,000 on 2019-11-04 and used that funding, along with cash, to repay $1,550,000,000 in export credit loans from Bpifrance Assurance Export.

SpaceX used the same Falcon 9 booster to launch 60 Starlink satellites in May 2019, 10 Iridium Next satellites for Iridium in January 2019, and Telesat Canada’s Telstar 18 Vantage in September 2018.

Ninety-five Iridium satellites were launched between 1997 and 2002, of which 30 malfunctioned and remain in low Earth orbit.

Iridium’s government revenue is anchored by a seven-year, $738,500,000 contract with the U.S. Defense Department signed in September.

Iridium no longer expects its Certus broadband service to reach $100,000,000 in annual revenue in 2021 because of the coronavirus pandemic.

Iridium completed its second-generation constellation in January 2019 with 66 operational satellites and 9 in-orbit spares.

Marine vessels commonly host Iridium satellite communication antennas operating at 1616–1626.5 MHz and Inmarsat satellite communication antennas with uplinks in the 1626.5–1660.5 MHz band.

Iridium will develop a concept based on the Iridium Burst service that can transmit data to thousands of enabled devices via Iridium’s 66-satellite low Earth orbit network.

Satelles raised $26,000,000 in its latest funding round in 2019 with participation from Iridium to expand marketing efforts and accelerate product development.

Collins Aerospace completed multiple tests in 2020 and 2021 in which its ALGA and HGA successfully connected to and transmitted data to an orbiting Iridium satellite.