Main Engine Cut Off - T+336: Rocket Lab Buys Iridium, New Glenn’s Pad Rebuild, and NASA Awards 4 CLPS Missions

Episode Date: July 2, 2026

Rocket Lab is buying Iridium for $8 billion, Blue Origin has a new plan to get New Glenn flying again without rebuilding the same pad architecture, and NASA just awarded four new CLPS missions. This episode of Main Engine Cut Off is brought to you by 32 executive producers—Warren, Matt from Built, Theo and Violet, Tim Dodd (the Everyday Astronaut!), Natasha Tsakos, Lee, Donald, David, Matt, Joonas, Russell, Steve, Frank, Will and Lars from Agile, The Astrogators at SEE, Josh from Impulse, Fred, Joel, Kris, Pat, Joakim, Miles O’Brien, Stealth Julian, Jan, Ryan, and four anonymous—and hundreds of supporters. Topics Rocket Lab to acquire Iridium - SpaceNews Rocket Lab to Acquire Iridium in Historic Deal, Creating A New Glenn Return to Flight - Blue Origin NASA Awards More Moon Base Science, Previews New Opportunities NextSTEP-3 B: Moon Base Demonstrations - NASA Episode 154 - They Ran Into Us (with Matt Desch, CEO of Iridium) - Off-Nominal The Show Like the show? Support the show on Patreon or Substack! Email your thoughts, comments, and questions to [e-mail] Follow @WeHaveMECO Follow @[e-mail] on Mastodon Listen to MECO Headlines Listen to Off-Nominal Join the Off-Nominal Discord Subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Pocket Casts, Spotify, Google Play, Stitcher, TuneIn or elsewhere Subscribe to the Main Engine Cut Off Newsletter Artwork photo by SpaceX Work with me and my design and development agency: Pine Works

Hello and welcome to Made Engine Cutoff. I am Anthony Colangelo. Three stories going on lately that I have some quick thoughts on. Rocket Lab, big announcement, buying Eridium communications for about $8 billion. Blue Origin released some more information about their pad rebuild going on after the New Glenn incident back in May. And just this week, NASA announced four new Clips missions. I feel like there's at least one interesting thing to unpack there about how they're handling these new awards. So some quick thoughts on each.

Let's definitely start, though, with Rocket Lab. This is huge news. This is something that I didn't quite expect, but I feel like I should have when you're looking at what Rocket Lab's been doing lately, what they've been talking about, what Eridium's been up to. And Rocket Lab is at a very interesting point in their history. You know, if they were going,

a lot of times people are like, is Amazon going to sweep up Rocket Lab? Is Blue Origin going to sweep up Rocket Lab? I think if Rocket Lab was going to sell, they would have a couple of years ago to something that was probably not new spacey. Maybe they would become, you know, the theory that I had about Firefly trying to get consumed into Northrop Grumman as their partnership gets bigger and bigger. Kind of felt that about Rocket Lab a couple years ago as well. But obviously in the era as they've accumulated more and more acquisitions, they have a different vision for what they're doing here. And rightly so, I think, you know, we talk a lot about SpaceX being an outlier.

the nearest outlier is Rocket Lab. They're able to deliver a lot of missions very successfully. They've had upper stage issues over the years, but who hasn't? They've got spacecraft buses out in all sorts of different missions. The moon, they send some things out. Obviously, they're involved with things going to Mars with some of the suppliers they've bought. They have a whole suite of satellite buses that they're offering for defense missions, commercial missions.

It's been a very impressive run for them. But the one thing they kept talking about was that they're going to be their own constellation operator at some point. Peter Beck has not shied away from that. There's a lot of thoughts about what would that be. Is that something in Golden Dome? Is that a Starlink competitor? And, uh, but the weird part was they never had been filing for spectrum. They never had been putting these plans in place to actually build out a constellation. So as time went on, the only option left was, oh, they must be going to buy someone. And who they bought, Eridium, I find very interesting, a very rocket lab decision, because Eridium is a company that's

been around for a long time. They've had several near-death experiences, I'm sure. They operate a very unique constellation, and the applications that they provide are different than Starlink. There are differences between the technical solution of Starlink and Eridium that make them complementary systems in a lot of ways, but not necessarily competitive. And what Eridium does provide is, sounds a lot more like the kinds of people that end up buying electron launches. Arridium has a narrow band constellation that can handle harsh weather better. You know, you can get your, if you've got a Garmin device like I do that runs on Arridium, you can get access to that connectivity through clouds or storms in the way that is not possible

when it rains, and Starlink has problems when I'm talking to Jake on off-nominal. So there are differences in the actual performance of these things, but there's also drawbacks of that, right? That means it's a low data rate application. So it's not broadband like Starlink. It's not something that you're going to be doing a podcast from New Jersey to Mexico on this service. It is short messages, text messages, status updates. So for these kind of emergency applications, like I've got this Garmin in-reach device, you know, when you're out somewhere without connectivity, you can hit a button and a helicopter come pick you up, whatever, something like that, sensors that are out in fields for agriculture purposes, for weather reporting.

A big one that Eridium bought the stake that they didn't already own in a company called ARION. Not that ARION, a different one, A-I-R-E-O-N. They do tracking of aircraft. So, again, something that you need low data rate for because you're not sending huge videos and images. You're sending packets of data. These kind of applications are really well-fit. for the spectrum that Arridium has. But what Rocket Lab jumped right too

is they sort of short-circuited the whole process that they would have had to do, which was apply for Spectrum, get it approved, figure out what your constellation is, build out that hardware, start deploying it. You have to meet the FCC guidelines of deploying half your consolation in six years, the rest in another three years for a nine total.

Then you have to build a subscriber base, then you get to revenue, you pay off all the money that you spent, developing that. They are using this acquisition to jump to a point where they already have a couple million subscribers, a huge amount of revenue

compared to what Rocket Lab had on their own balance sheet before, actual income, profit, and they become one of the very few in the industry self-launching space powers, right? This is the way that they phrase it, but I can't disagree with that phrase.

Something that we've seen as Amazon deploys out, Amazon Leo, as one web obviously went through, a host of different issues, and then the constellations that are still coming online, like Telesat and everyone else that's working on something, when you don't own your own launch vehicle, it gets really expensive to buy all those launch vehicles, and it gets really hard to actually control your own schedule. So the magic that SpaceX has achieved in many different ways, but just the relationship between Starlink and Falcon 9 is obviously hugely advantageous

to them. Now, on SpaceX's front, it's hugely advantageous because it is so cheap, comparatively, When they launch a Falcon 9, their internal cost is like $15 million or whatever has been reported. So they're able to launch a slew of Starlink satellites for that amount of money, whereas Amazon Leo has to go out and buy $100 million launch vehicles from other providers. So there's a massive capital expenditure difference there. I don't know necessarily that Rocket Lab right now is at that same point. I don't know what it costs to launch an electron. Obviously, the capability is significantly less than Falcon 9,

but this is more about neutron. That has been their constellation target all these times. So how's neutron doing on costs? We don't know yet because neutron's still not flying. How far away are they from flying? It feels pretty far because they've had some testing issues of late. But when they do get to that point, and they are launching their own satellites to provide these systems,

are they going to be similarly competitive? I think so, because they're targeting being competitive with the Falcon 9 on the neutron side of things. so there are those benefits to gain. But more so, I think, you know, jumping to the point, again, where they have subscribers, they have a big history of their constellation actually providing services to governments, which is a key market for Rocket Lab. And one of the new things that Eridium has been focused on, not only just aircraft tracking,

but position, navigation, and timing. So something we've heard a lot about in the last couple of years, especially in this wartime era that we're in, where we have, you know, GPS being jammed in different wars. zones, there's been a lot of talk about resiliency around PNT. That's how you'll see it reported. Position, navigation and timing. This is GPS-like applications. Eridium last year announced a small chip, basically, that they're going to be providing to customers to build into their own devices that would give them position navigation and timing signals off of the 66 Arridium satellites

that are in operation today. They have a couple on orbit spares, I think 14 or something like that, but 66 is the core constellation. They're going to be providing that position, navigation, and timing. So not only is that a service that they're talking about commercially for people that want to bundle this chip into their own devices, but that's been something that the government here in the U.S. has been talking a lot about being important for resiliency across the world, really, when they're talking about these different contested areas where GPS is having problems or they're being jammed. You want to have alternatives. You know, you think about this in terms of spy satellite usage. You've got a couple of spy

satellites that are really high resolution. Your adversaries know when they're coming overhead. So historically, you can be able to, you know, hide something that you don't want them to see because you know the keyhole satellites coming overhead at this time. Well, like, it's a lot harder when there's, you know, 200 planet satellites up there, and however many Maxar satellites up there, and however many Black Sky satellites are up there, and you can get imagery from any of them at any moment, and you're kind of spreading your capability so much that it's harder to actually affect or to deteriorate your capability in that area. So GPS has been talked about in similar ways that, you know, GPS satellites work in a very

particular way. If we can have other things that are different, this differential equation is important because then it's harder to disrupt your capability. So that's something that I do find could be a nice area to focus on because, again, it sounds very rocket lab, right? We are not the mass market commercial provider here. The people that are buying electron launches are buying them for particular reasons. It's a lot of defense organizations that want that one ride.

It's inspected out of Japan who is very happy with the service that they're getting. People are buying electrons knowing what they want. Will that continue in neutron or will they become much more of a competitor with the Falcon 9? Hard to say. I've talked about a lot, but Falcon 9, you know, the commercial segment of Falcon 9 is decreasingly important as SpaceX grows and changes. I think I'm less worried about the commercial competitiveness in that market than I was 10 years ago when I started the podcast because that was more vibrant of a time.

If SpaceX lost all the commercial launches on their manifest, SpaceX would still look a lot like SpaceX. And it's kind of an interesting thing to consider when you look at every other launch provider in the world. If they lost all the commercial launches on their manifest, would they look like the same company? So I'm worried less about direct competitiveness with Falcon 9 on a wide scale for SpaceX's purposes. But when you do think about these other applications, if you're launching your own consolation, if you are starting to do economics more like SpaceX, where you're providing communications, you're launching satellites, you're doing both of them in tandem, you do have to look at what are the actual numbers here?

How does it shake out? And what kind of market are you going for? Is it something that, you know, one of the shakiest parts of the market in the last couple of years has been doing something that SpaceX then decides, that seems like our area. I don't think the stuff that Oridium is doing just because of Spectrum, you know, they are different. These are different applications. And there are strengths that Arridium has that Starlink in its current iteration and any future ones, because we haven't seen the Spectrum filings, will always be better at. Certainly things that Starlink will always be better at as well. But finding those different niches is something.

thing that RocketLab has been really good at. So I really like this decision, hoping to talk to some of the team members about it over the next couple of weeks. But I really am intrigued by this. I think it's a good fit. I mean, looking at the numbers, too, it's kind of crazy, right? Rocket Lab had something like, let me pull up the figures here. Rocket Lab had $600 million in revenue in 2025 and net loss of just about $200 million. Erridium reported $871 million in revenue, $114 million in net income. So when you look at the relative numbers there, this is more revenue than Rocket Lab does today. It is almost enough income to make up for the loss that Rocket Lab reported last fiscal year. So it's a really interesting combo when you're just looking at it from a financial

sense as well, which Rockout being public. Everybody has to. So I'm loving the story. I think it's a really good decision. It feels like a natural fit. I think didn't I have Matt Dash on the show? see, when was that? Can hear me typing. Or maybe he was on off-nominal? Was he on Miko, too, or just off-nominal? I think just off-nominal. I'll link that in the show notes, because it was a good episode if you did not listen to that.

We talked about Aridium's history, what they've been up to, how he saw the way, this was, wow, almost two years ago, June 6, 20-24. How they fit into the industry was a really interesting conversation. I thought it was great insight. It made me quite a fan of Aridium. what they're up to. So it might be good to go back and listen to if you have not, or even if you did, go back and listen again because it'll frame some of the Rocket Lab decision here in an interesting way. All right, I've got a couple of quick thoughts on the Blue Origin

Pad rebuild and some Clips missions. But before I do that, I want to say thank you to everyone out there who supports Main Engine Cutoff over at Main Engine Cutoff.com slash support. There are over 900 of you supporting every single month. I am so thankful for it, including the 32 executive producers who made this episode possible. Thanks to Warren, Matt from Built, Theo and Violet, Tim Dodd, the Everday Ashinot, Natasha Saccoz, Lee, Donald, David, Matt, Eunice, Russell, Steve, Frank, Will & Lars, from Agile, the Astrogator's SEE, Josh from Impulse, Fred, Joel, Chris, Pat, Joe Kim, Miles O'Brien, Stealth Julian, Jan, Ryan, and four anonymous executive producers.

Thank you all so much for the support for making this possible. Could not do it without you, and really appreciate it all times of the year. All right, in the wake of the New Glenn incident, there's been reporting around what happened exactly, not necessarily the cause. That's one thing that we have still not heard from Blue Origin. We've still not heard if it did, in fact, start down near the engines or in an engine or what. Does that have any effects on Vulcan? Amazon Leo and ULA, it seems like they're expecting a Q3 return to flight for Vulcan, so it doesn't seem like they're worried about engine issues. haven't been alerted about something that would delay them past that, so they're just being

optimistic, especially given Amazon Leo's strange situation that they find themselves in, where all of a sudden, Ariane 6 is the champion of launching Amazon Leo. So I am surprised that we haven't heard more on that, but there's been a lot of reporting around the what's the path back look like. Blue Origin's been optimistic and saying, we're going to do this before the end of the year on about a seven-month, six-month timeline to get back flying. I've heard, differing reports around the hardware that was in the hangar at the launch site for Blue Origin that Blue Origin initially reported it all looks fine. I've heard other things that make it sound like they're not going to fly that stuff again. But one of the big things has been the state of the pad.

What are they going to do here? How long is this actually going to take to rebuild? Six months sounds crazy. You know, I think when I talked about it, I was like a year to year and a half felt much more appropriate. And they did announce some more plans this week. around what they're actually going to do in terms of their concept of operations with the new pad, and they're not going to rebuild the thing that they had previously. They put out renders of what they're planning, and this has a heavy overlap with what they were planning for the bigger New Glen, New Glen 9x4, where they're going to be doing horizontal integration of the vehicle and then vertical integration of the payload.

So that means they roll the vehicle out of the hangar horizontally, they get it to the pad, they stand it upright on the launch mount, and then they use a crane to mate the payload on top of vehicle. It's something that historically fancy payloads wanted this because they didn't have to be prepared for horizontal and vertical loads. They could just integrate their payload on the, you know, inside the fairing the way that it would launch. And that was better for sensitive payloads that didn't need to handle all these different loading moments. So that was something that still, I think, I don't know, I think, can anyone remember if Falcon 9 and Heavy are required to do this at some point. I thought at some point they had gotten money for it. They were going to do this.

They were going to add it at 39A. Probably turned out that none of the payloads that they're launching are going to need that. So maybe they've bailed on it entirely. But obviously, historically, something that ULA has done a lot of for the Delta and Atlas vehicles and Vulcan. So this was the plan for New Glen 9 before. They're going to do that for the return to flight for New Glen 7 by 2 as well. So you can see the video of this. They roll this thing out. They stand it upright with kind of a basic-looking crane. I mean, it's a huge crane, but it's a regular crane. It's not something that is totally custom-built or like a transport erector that they had previously, which I had seen some comments about how complex and hard that was to get right. So they're going to be

avoiding that. And they did mention that this process they're going to do, this breakover, as they call it, is the reverse of what they do to get New Glen off of the recovery ship. So if there's overlap there, then that makes sense to standardize down to. And then they're going to be building a new launch table or refurbishing a launch table. And then one of the most interesting aspects is that they have this kind of platform at the top of the vehicle where the payload gets integrated that folds over around the vehicle and is a sort of access level for people to work at as they integrate the payloads. To me, looked a lot like where you'd also put a white room for crew purposes, that this facility would be the right spot for putting crew on top of New Glenn. That's something

that I know has kind of always been, I feel like I talk to people and they're like, well, I know someone at Blue Origin working on the crew vehicles. I've never talked to one of those people that I know of, maybe I have, but I always hear people that I know saying I've talked to somebody working on the crew vehicle at New Glen. There was, you know, renderings from years ago when they were part of commercial crew development programs and they had some proposals in for that. How far along is that? I don't know, but it does seem like this would be a nice moment to, at least get them down that path a little bit for a more crew-ready version of New Glenn. The one thing I really took away from all this is that it does look a lot different from what Blue Origin of Your

would have put out. It looks a lot more like something that we would see down in Starbase. You know, using a more standard-looking crane, doing as little as possible to get this thing back up on the launch mount. Now, Blue Origin frames that as not just a near-term. fix, but something that, again, is overlapping with what they were going to do with New Glenn 9x4. I hope that's true, but I also hope the other thing is true that they're trying to streamline this because they want to do the bare minimum they get this thing flying again. I think that's the right call. Don't build something that takes so long and is so complex that it does take you 18 months to get back flying. Build just enough to get this thing stood up on the launch

mount again, fueled up, and fly. That is the right call. So if this is an indication that the momentum and the changes that we've seen at Blue Origin from the outside in the Dave Limp era, you know, we were feeling so good about Blue Origin because of all the momentum and they were doing things differently and they seemed like they had it. If this is an indication that that stuff is sticking and that they're making decisions differently than they would have before, then I'm really supportive of that. I'm really excited by that. I still feel like flying again this year is an unbelievable statement. It feels more like saying a crazy timeline that people know isn't possible, but it motivates you to work faster, so you fly in

12 months, not 18. That feels more like that to me. But I would be happy to be wrong about that. All right. Last note on this Clips Award. There's not a lot to talk about on here, but I kind of want to admit, that's sort of my point. NASA did a moon-based update this week where they're saying they're going to do these monthly. They talked about a handful of things like flying the perseverance and curiosity development unit that's out at JPL, flying that as a lunar rover. That's something they're looking into. They talk about they're going to be putting out some broad area announcements for technology demonstrations. regarding the lunar base in the next month or two, so we'll talk about that when it comes out.

But they announced that they awarded four late 2028 moon missions. Two of them to Astrobotic for $297, $298 million total, one to Firefly for $144 million, and one to intuitive machines for $148 million. That one split up interestingly into two options. What I find really interesting about this is that I can't even really track, was this tied to a particular task order, or is this moon-based changes instigating more clips missions? And I feel like it's the latter, because nobody's talked about what task order this is tied to, and I don't know, I haven't seen the documents around this, but the thing that's made me kind of scrunch my face at this,

is that NASA is saying all four of these deliveries carrying the same three basic payloads, the plume imaging cameras that they've flown on previous missions, a laser retro reflector, retroreflector array, which is on like anything that ever lands on the moon, and then our radiation spectrometer. Sounds like they might put another payload or something on each mission, or they're leaving it open that they could put more payloads on these missions. Maybe the commercial companies themselves can manifest some things on board as well. But they're just assigning these missions with three basic payloads

that they've flown before on the moon. I don't really think any of them have been on landers that went well, which is kind of interesting. So this feels a lot more like trying to institute some sort of a block by to give these companies a little bit of operating space on their production capability, to have more in the pipeline

that NASA can take advantage of, specifically around Astrobotic, who was flying two Peregrine landers. Before this, I thought Peregrine was done and dusted, that they had no plans to fly one again. When I had asked the company, it was like, well, you know, we might, but it was never,

there was never any plans for it in the same way that the other companies talk up, even when they don't have task orders yet, they're talking up, you know, intuitive machines is always like, intuitive machines, four and five and six and whatever, even before they have task orders. And Firefly had done similar things about how many blue ghosts they're going to fly. Astrobotic never talked about Peregrine again.

They were on to Griffin. They hadn't won a task order since 2020. It's had problems. Now they got acquired by Voyagers, so things might be a little more stable. And here all of a sudden they've got two Peregrins to build out and fly. So the combination of flying a very basic set of payloads and then providing production space, you know, one lander each for the companies that have others in the pipeline and two landers for the one that has none others in the pipeline, it kind of leans more towards, let's just

get a bunch of landers on contract in whatever way we can to then potentially add payloads later, but also more just to like stabilize this supplier base. So it feels more like what we have talked about in the past, that commercial cargo and crew did right, which is you award some development money. Once you confirm that, you're going to provide a baseline number of flights. and then continue to add more to the task orders over time, but at least SpaceX and Boeing, how much does this help for them? You know, orbital sciences at the time, was it them at the time?

What was the name at the time when they won all the sickness awards? Probably was Orbital sciences, right? Orbital. Orbital sciences, not ATK, and then now North of Grumman, whatever. They knew going in, I'm going to at least fly six of these. I'm going to at least fly 12 of these. I'm going to, okay, now I've added more to the task order. I've got 14 of these in front of me.

that made it a lot easier to make decisions around how to build these things, what kind of production you needed, what level of production capability you did need to scale up to, or did not need to scale up to. So if that's the intention here, I am intrigued. I really would like to know exactly how this shakes out with the way that the task orders have been constructed prior. But it does seem like, you know, we're consolidating here around the company that has landed a bunch lander sideways on the moon, the one that had a successful landing, and the one that is indeterminate but has talked a big game. Let's put it that way. All right, that's a good catch-up after I was on vacation for a little bit there, so thanks for hanging in. We've got a show,

interview coming up next week. That should be interesting as well, and otherwise, I just want to thank you all for supporting Managing Cutoff over at Managing Cutoff.com slash support. Thanks for hanging out with me. If you've got any questions or thoughts, hit me up on email, Anthony at Managing Cutoff.com. And until next time, I'll talk to you soon. Thank you.