Off-Nominal - 154 - They Ran Into Us (with Matt Desch, CEO of Iridium)

Episode Date: June 6, 2024

Jake and Anthony are joined by Matt Desch, CEO of Iridium, to talk about what they’ve been up to lately, the state of the satellite communications industry, and to tell some stories from his career.TopicsOff-Nominal - YouTubeEpisode 154 - They Ran Into Us (with Matt Desch) - YouTubeIridium Satellite Communications | Your World. Our Network.Iridium adds five years to constellation lifetime estimate - SpaceNewsAmazon.com: Eccentric Orbits: The Iridium Story: 9780802126788: Bloom, John: BooksFollow MattMatt Desch (@IridiumBoss) / XIridium (@IridiumComm) / XFollow Off-NominalSubscribe to the show! - Off-NominalSupport the show, join the DiscordOff-Nominal (@offnom) / TwitterOff-Nominal (@[e-mail]) - Spacey SpaceFollow JakeWeMartians Podcast - Follow Humanity's Journey to MarsWeMartians Podcast (@We_Martians) | TwitterJake Robins (@JakeOnOrbit) | TwitterJake Robins (@[e-mail]) - Spacey SpaceFollow AnthonyMain Engine Cut OffMain Engine Cut Off (@WeHaveMECO) | TwitterMain Engine Cut Off (@[e-mail]) - Spacey SpaceAnthony Colangelo (@acolangelo) | TwitterAnthony Colangelo (@[e-mail]) - jawns.club 🐘Off-Nominal MerchandiseOff-Nominal Logo TeeWeMartians Shop | MECO Shop

DLS and go for main engine, start. Hello, Jake, on a very, very slow news week. I'm glad that we're not at all going to cover a sample return mission from the far side of the moon, an epic heat shield reentry today, and a first crude launch of a new spaceship. It's been a light week, yeah. Matt of Arridium, welcome, the Arridium boss, as referred to on Twitter. Let's talk about satellite networks. Let's do it.

I'm glad to talk about the moon or anything else here. Maybe we need to bring back a tunnel. I don't know. I don't like to put a network there. Should we do it? Can we get like the five-minute Matt Dash take on the news this week? What are you excited about and what are you surprised by? Well, I watched the launch this morning of Starship.

That was pretty cool. I mean, that was very successful. But yeah, there's a little bit. everything going on this week, isn't there? A sample return mission from the far side of the moon was basically forgotten about by the news threads this week. That's how much stuff is going on. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, Starliner, finally getting up there.

I didn't get a chance to watch that, but I saw that made it up yesterday. I heard there was a helium leak or something. I don't know. Has that been resolved? I've been able to follow. No, they didn't resolve it, but they did add two more. So it's a lot of helium leaks. There you go.

No, space is happening right now. It is, it is, yeah. Cool. Drinks, we started off the show a little bit here, our normal thing. Matt, were you able to bring something fun to drink? Well, I follow directions, so you've got to call me too. I'm in the office, which you would think would be dry, but after 18 years, being a Ridian boss,

every partner, employee, friend has sent me, this place is a variable alcohol. I have gin, I have sake from Japan, I have stuff from Air Force, Jeremiah Weed, I got wine back here, but I decided, in honor of the Starship launch this morning,

I would pick one of the beers that SpaceX gave me. Wow, that is. It's a chocolate milk stout. It says beer idiom. I think they customize this for me here. So this is beeridium. Happy holidays from your CFO, ho-ho.

So it must be from Brent. I don't know. But anyway, it's actually pretty good. I think it's been there a couple years. But I think I did make it cold and it's actually quite good. That's pretty dark for a summertime drink. I like it. Yeah, chocolate beer stuff.

out. Isn't that dark? That looks like engine oil. It does. It totally does. I love it. It tastes a little bit harder than engine oil, but not much. I'm, uh, I'm very boring today. I'm keeping it real simple. Look at this. Wow, Corona extra. Yeah. In a can, though, was a mistake. I will not buy Corona in a can. Didn't even know you can get that that way. Yeah, I don't know why I thought, yeah, can's fine. They're, they're only okay, but I'll put it in a glass. Usually a tecate out of the can. Yeah, usually I'll only do tecate. I'm not used to that.

I'm still rocking this de vernacha still from San Jiminyano. Look at that little. This is a great little label. This one's very delicious. So it's a nice white wine for the summer. All right. Cheers, everybody. Yeah.

Who knows what I'll say now. This is going to be great. Now you've uncovered the point of the show. Yeah, yeah. We wait until like 30 minutes in. we start asking the really hard-hitting questions after. We should start with what is up in the world of Arridium lately, because this is a topic I was going to bring up later in the show,

but I joke to Jake that you have done the full life cycle. If you were to go on like R-slash-Spacex on Reddit, right, you were like, hero of the SpaceX story in the early days as the Aridium Next launches were going, and now you've cycled over to like a SpaceX competitor in the era of Starlink, right? And you've completed the hero's journey in that essence. I didn't, I don't think we've gone to Villan or anything at this point. Not quite, but you know, there's room for the journey still.

Yeah, that's, I mean, when you said what's up, it's not our stock price right now. And that's not because of anything we did. We're still growing and successful. But absolutely every time Starlink launch, launches, everybody figures Leo is Leo, and so it must be hurting everybody else. And so, you know, it's hurting us. And it really isn't, you know, but it'll take a few more quarters or another year or so before people realize what we do is very different than Starlink. You know, our businesses have never been alike. They, they focused on, you know, supplying big broadband to, you know,

dishes and customers. We've focused on portability, mobility, small things, small satellite, small devices, even as they move into what's called direct advice, you know, and we're doing that too, but we're doing it a very different way. In fact, in many ways, I think we're going to be viewed as a companion to what they do, which is called supplemental communications from space or using terrestrial spectrum. So, you know, they're covering four to five percent of the planet, you know, with their service and we cover the other 100 percent. We're not doing the same thing. We're offering sort of more of a safety backup SMS kind of solution so that phones can work well anywhere on the planet. And that's what we've always done. We've been sort of a

companion to other capabilities, and we're going to be that way to Starlink. So I don't still see as anything but friends. I am thankful for the incredible launches that put my network into space, and I'm looking forward to someday using Starship and other things to launch the next generation one. We could make a big, big Arridium satellite to fit in a Starship. That's exciting.

We could get Arridium flares back. They'll probably be smaller next time around, but yes. I actually have an Aridium flare beer. I should have got that one cold here. I have an eridium flare story. Can I tell you this story? Absolutely. It's a six-year anniversary of the iridium I saw.

So we honor our flare community here every year and thank them for. But yes, we don't do that anymore. Yeah, yeah. Well, I'm asking permission because this is a story about how I was very disappointed by one. So I don't know what's the other go. He told me you. And I had no preference. what this is. I cannot wait. I don't know. I've ever heard this story. So I was, I was at a, like,

an event, like a barbecue outside backyard kind of thing, you know, beers and beers and hot dogs kind of the story. And it was like in the evening. And I was with a whole bunch of space people, like people who would totally appreciate Enridium Flair. And I had my, my little app that was telling me like, you know, you put in your coordinates and it's like, you're going to get one at 742 or whatever when it just hits the light, right? And I was like, oh, this is going to be so great. We're here. We're going to see it where we are. So I'll like gather all my friends up. And we're all like standing on one side of the yard to look like over the house in the direction that's going to be and waiting and waiting and it never came. It just did not happen.

I don't know what it was. And then and so I had all these people just standing up for nothing and I lost so much credit that day. Oh, man. That happened to me to be honest with you. I actually had a board member. I was out at this thing and I told everybody they marched out of the out of the lodge and out there. And I go, it'll go there. oh no, it's not happening.

But the first time I saw one, I mean, I know today it's not a big deal. We see satellites all the time. There's, you know, 6,000 of them up there. But, I mean, the first time after a couple years, and given the life and death situation it was for our company for a long time there, whether we were going to survive and stuff, you can imagine it was life changing the first time I saw one. I mean, it was so, you know, I knew my team. had worked like hell to keep that thing alive. You know, it was supposed to only last six to seven to eight years.

And here I'm in year 14 and how many more years could it give us? Turned out we got almost 20 plus years out of those satellites. And so every time we saw one in space, we celebrated it. And frankly, I do miss the Flair community. I made some great friends. You guys saw the people online who had tweet, great pictures of them from locations and I

have some dear friends that I've developed from just meeting people who cared about the same thing we did. So, yeah, so I missed them too. They were cool. I got a good one. I don't remember where I was or when it was, but I know I saw one and it was like

there were two satellite or spacecraft viewings that I've been blown away by. One was the radium flare. The other one was when Tian Gong One was on this way back in and I got a good viewing of it and the relative speed was so blisteringly fast because of how low it was that I was blown away by that. But those are the two that stood out to me for sure. But it does. It connects you to space. It connects, it connected people to something that was, you know, man-made, put up there. Fortunately, there's a lot of them still up there, you know.

I mean, that's the thing, you know, concerning we could get a debris and stuff like that. But at our altitude, which is only 485 miles or 785 kilometers, it's 120 years for those things to naturally deorbit. And that's really low. Imagine it's over 1,000 years if you're up a little higher. And so those things, you know, got to get them out of space. We were able to get all the previous generation stuff out of space that we could and got them out quickly. I mean, that was important so that they didn't. other mayhem in the future, but it is, they were cool to see.

Yeah. I don't mind that they don't see them anymore because they got plenty of star links that they have to look through now. I always just love that, like, anytime you see a satellite from space, it has such a, has such a different feel because like normally you're used to either like fix things, you know, stars that aren't moving or like we have airplanes. But airplanes are doing all this kind of like atmospheric stuff. So they're kind of like, they're kind of jittery and the lights are always flashing.

So it's very like animated, right? And I always feel like the satellites are just very graceful, like whether it's the ISS or a flare. It's kind of just like a nice constant speed always, you know, just so smooth. And even with a flare, the lights always like slowly on and then slowly on. You know, like it's very, very smooth and grat. Like it's just like a really high resolution smooth experience. I thought I always love about the. the satellite.

Something clock-like about the rate that comes across the sky. I was, I mean, when they launched the satellites in 1997, it was a surprise that they flared. I mean, there was nothing in low Earth orbit at the time when we first launched, right? So other than some spy satellites, nobody knew about them and talked about them. So when we launched it, it was like some people were kind of freaked out by the whole thing, you know,

and they had to kind of compute what that was. And then they suddenly realized it was the, you know, the main mission antenna is off of our satellites, and then they could compute them, and then everybody got kind of excited about what that is. But that was the first time we really ever kind of connected in some way to something in space, and I thought that was kind of cool. When you look at the, like, eras of history that Arridium has spanned, where, you know, you're talking about the near-death experiences first time around, the whole deployment of Iridium

next, when you were deploying what at the time felt like an absolutely massive concept, to deploy in, I forget what the original launch campaign was. It was like a year and a half or something. It was pretty quick, right? Yeah, it was actually about a year. Just a year, okay. It was even less than a year, I think. And it was now my numbers are going.

It was like 80 something, right? 80. Yeah, there were. 88? There were more than that. I mean, it was 66 operational satellites. I know when I got here in 2006, there were still like 15 in space, but I think they must have launched 85 to 90 or something like that. And at the time, it was like, wow, this is a lot of satellites to go up in just a year, right?

And then here we are, and we've got, there were 2,000 active satellites then, and we're at 6 or whatever now. So there's been just these eras that Eridium has lived through. What do you kind of like draw out of that storyline from the late 90s to now as notable things that have happened in the industry? Well, it has been kind of a roller coaster. It's, you know, a story of survival and eventual success. I, you know, I've told the story before, but I used to say we were, you know, everybody was amazed how successful we are now, but it was like, no, no, we're like a, like that starlet that finally comes on and gets the, you know, Oscar and they call her an overnight, that story.

He's only been, you know, toiling for 30 years, you know, and then suddenly people realize who she is. And that's a little bit the way it's been. I mean, the first time around, we were the, we were the starlink of our area, right? I mean, we were unprecedented to put satellites in lower Earth orbit. And during the 90s, it was the early days of wireless communications, and there wasn't, you know, global roaming. And it was, you know, it was the amount of money they threw at advertising and stuff like that. This was our predecessors at Motorola and the like.

But it was really a, it was the first time anybody, like, focused on something that would really bring the whole world together. It was a globalization kind of thing. which obviously you want to talk about another era that's passed, you know, we're now very nationalized and stuff. But at the time, I mean, we were the poacher child for globalization, right? I mean, this was going to be one phone for humanity, one area code for the planet, you know, that kind of stuff. And it was pretty exciting.

And then it wasn't. And then it was the biggest bankruptcy in history, you know, followed fortunately by Enron a week later, which took him out of the press, I guess, you know, a couple of it. And then it was sort of a slow period. And, you know, frankly, there were a bunch of other bankruptcies. And, you know, satellite systems and frankly space systems have not been all that successful. There was almost 10 years where it was like the nuclear winner in the industry.

I marked the next phase sort of with skybox imaging. Not a normal one people think about, but that was one the first time, you know, people put small. satellites in space to do something that they didn't know could be done with small satellites. And with Google bought them for like six times the amount they invested, suddenly there was money pouring in. And of course, you know, the common theme through all that's been SpaceX. And a lot of people, you know, think the whole industry is, in some ways it is. SpaceX is sort of an anomaly in our industry. But there hasn't been lots of other successes.

So, you know, quite certainly not like that and unlikely to be quite like that. So, you know, there was a lot of investment poured in. Suddenly all these constellations, lots of Leo's being launched, but still not a lot of success, not financial success. You can't really point to anybody in the industry, frankly, except us. And it took us over 30 years to get here, you know, that is growing and generating cash and has, you know, We've got, you know, returning money to shareholders, all that kind of stuff. And, you know, so things in space take like 30 years to be successful. And yet everybody's hoping for an overnight success story, you know.

And it's just not, it doesn't work that way. So I do think there have been cycles. We've been part of a lot of them. We just celebrate our 25th anniversary and, you know, in service, you know. But a lot of that's just, it's been survival until we finally got to where we are today. I think there's like an interesting kind of tidbit that I can pull from that too because even some of the like newer, I'll say quote unquote newer successes, you know, companies that haven't been around that long as compared to you guys. Like they're successful. But if you look at the balance sheets and stuff, like it's still a financial struggle.

Like a lot of them are still running, you know, deficits to innovate and grow and all that kind of thing. You know, we did like a show. I feel like this like a year ago now. But it wasn't that long ago. where we were just pulling up like random public companies and seeing like, how are they doing? Like let's look at the dollars, right? And like there was a bunch of surprises for us because all these companies that we

thought were like doing really well were still like losing money every quarter because they were, you know, they were trying to get, you know, things to invest. And that sort of, you can't quite be that a long term rock that's like stable that quickly in space. I don't think. I don't think it's possible yet, you know? No. And the timelines are very long.

space. You know, I'm amazed at everything that you get excited about. You know, if there's a new, you can think of a couple companies right now today, which are sort of seem hot, and they're all talking about being in service in 2026, and you know it's going to be 2030, you know, before you can really use service for 2031. And yet you can't blame them because who would be interested if you, you know, if it didn't turn around. So things still take a long time. They cost a lot more. We still use things like first cost. You know, we always talk about a consolation costing X million dollars, but that's only what it costs for the first three to five years, you know, you have to spend that same amount every five years, you know. I mean, one of the things

we did was built a network that can last 15 to 20 years. So at least, you know, but the numbers don't look good because it was three billion dollars, but we didn't, you know, could have been a billion dollar network done three times by that time by others. So, yeah, it's a, things are, things are hard in space, but once you finally get there, you know, they can be, they can be quite lucrative, you know. You just, you just got to survive to get there. One of the ways that SpaceX is the outlier of the industry is the one, you know, the one competitor in the space that also can launch their own stuff.

And that's always talked about, and we compare it to the way. that Amazon has to roll out Kuiper and buy every available launch vehicle from here to the ends of Earth over the next three years to do it. As someone that was in that boat, you know, going out and buying a whole bunch of Falcon 9s back in the day before everyone else is buying Falcon 9s, how does that, how do you do that math internally to figure out, you know, obviously you have a longer replacement cycle like you're talking about? But is that part of that equation that, hey, we don't have our own rockets, so we have to, budget these things differently so we need things to last longer so we don't have to buy launches every couple years or do you kind of just see it as like yet another expense that goes into the business you know the business line items that you need so when we were you know i i joined a company in

2006 so you know it was a few years old at the time and and and really it was to rebuild the network that i knew at age and you know figure out how to get it financed and all that sort of thing and we were constrained. I mean, we, we had a fast-growing business, but it was not going to generate enough cash to replace the network, you know. And, and so we were on a budget. And I would have loved to have built a rocket in the meantime there to watch my network. That was impractical. So when we went out and said, what's available, and it was, you know, Arian and it was Atlas, and it was still a few deltas around, et cetera. And, and then this, and then this, you know, this SpaceX company, which had still was playing around with the Falcon 1 at the time.

Falcon 9 was only on the drawing board. And I know the team kind of came and said, we really think these guys are going to be successful. Let's take a look at it. I'll get to the answer to the question. But it was kind of, you know, I said, you know, we have to finance this thing. You know, I mean, who's going to put money against this? But, you know, in the end, we kind of took a chance. I'm glad we did.

It wasn't as big a chance as you might think it was, because I often remind people, you know, the deal with SpaceX was about, you know, like $450 million, a little bit more for eight rockets at a time turned out. We ended up getting nine. But the next best deal I had was, you know, like $1.2 billion, you know. It was kind of a, okay, as long as we had some off ramps. but we believed and we worked together.

Remember, our first launch was the first launch right after the, you know, the launch pad, the last failure they had on the launch pad. Yeah. The name is the sixth one, right? Yeah. Yeah, it gives you an idea what my state of mind was in our first launch. You're dialing up to get the extra 800 million that you needed. A lot more than these.

I think at that time, I know at the time. Yeah. But we didn't really have the alternative to kind of go do it. In fact, my head of operations when I came to the company, and I wasn't a satellite space guy, I came from a telecom industry, long technology background in telecom, and while I loved aerospace and everything, this was sort of new. But he said, he said, we're going to do it just like we did before. We'll contract it all out and build it ourselves.

And I knew there was no way our size. scope at that point we could do it. So we needed to buy satellites, we needed to buy rockets. SpaceX was one of the first companies to kind of completely vertically integrate, you know, end to end. And I think I think everybody has tried to follow them. I mean, if you look at everybody else now, almost, you know, whether it's Rocket Lab or relativity or, you know, on the satellite side, you saw one web do it and build their own satellites. Everybody's doing that. I think it almost has maybe gone a little too far the other direction because you have people doing things that they'll not be able to scale and, you know, for the next 20, 30 years

necessarily, especially if you're launched in a constellation. I mean, can you really build something that will stay going? So I don't know. Next time around, like, did we pick 15, 20 years? No, that was what the life cycle of geostationary satellites were. And so if you're going to build a Leo, why wouldn't you kind of pick the same kind of timeline? It was after we launch or after we design next, this small set craze kind of started, where people started saying I could use commercially off-the-shelf parts really cheaply. The satellites won't last long, but we can make them so much cheaper that, you know, so what if they last four to five years?

I think that's gone too far that way too. And I wouldn't be surprised of even Starlink and other people, Kuiper, don't start eventually building into their next generation's longer lasting satellites. Because technology, you know, the services aren't changing that dramatically over that period of time. At least not if you're just doing broadband or not if you're taking pictures from space or not if you're just doing space situational awareness. That's not changing that rapidly. And you really want to, you know, if you're not generating cash, you know, this is a basic business concept, you have to eventually generate cash. You're so old school, Matt. I know.

I know it's crazy. It's not how we do with these guys. We'll do that our generation. We just VC our way to death. Yeah. I'm an anomaly. I know that's big here on this station here, you know. I guess that's, I am.

It was you tweeting. We were wondering who is inside, who we have on the inside. there. No, they just have my personality. No, so yeah, you've got to eventually generate cash, and so you've got to figure out how to these systems have to pay back, and very few people seem to want to talk about that, but it's really, really critical. That's the way to stay in business for a long time.

The interesting thing you're talking about with, like, you know, if satellite costs come down, okay, we can build them cheaper and replace them more often, but that is not tied to launch costs at all. So even if you can make the satellites cheaper, you still have to do the math, to like, how can I get these up there? And, you know, there was a hot minute when one web was going to buy a bajillion virgin, uh, no, I was going to say Virgin 1. That's not even the name company, Virgin Orbit. It was Launcher 1, Launcherone, as I would call it occasionally. They were

going to buy 37 of those or something to launch, you know, onesy-to-sie satellites up. And I never understood that. I'm like, I don't think that math works. Like, make the satellite as cheap as you want. You want to buy 37 of these to fly, you know, single-digit satellites for a constellation. I don't really understand that. But there's that aspect too. And is it is ride sharing the way to get there where you're going to take the star ship bus up when you've got a whole slew of small stats? All right, that starts to make sense as well. But it is a lot more complicated than just, you know, purely how long can my satellite last at the orbit that I'm at and I'll replace it so often. I'm interested in how starship will work too. I mean, it's

perfectly built for, you know, maybe going to the moon and beyond. And perhaps it's a great for Starlink if you're launching that many satellites. But it'll be interesting to see if you've got to, that's such a big rocket, if you're aggregating lots and lots of small satellites for lots of people. Remember, I mean, we have six orbits. You know, is this thing going to drop us off into different orbits? So you really don't want to be dropping all your satellites at one place in space and then trying to space them out using fuel and all kinds of other stuff.

So there's a lot of tradeoffs, you know. There will need to be different kinds of rocket types that fit different, kinds of missions. And, you know, it's good for the industry. I'm, I'm, I'm fortunate we're not spending a lot of money right now on space. So we're able to generate a lot of money, and that's why we're valuable. But eventually we'll get back around to it. And I know the next time we do this in the 2030s, you know, we're not going to need to do this until 2031 or 2032, probably. But we will probably use smaller satellites. We'll probably have more of them. That will give us a lot more capacity. We know that we think about seven, eight years from now, a lot of the constellation

effort will have generated very low-cost buses that will generate a lot of technology, things like optical cross-links and optical downlinks and things that will be a lot less expensive and reliable than they are today. There'll be whatever in the launch industry, and there's a lot of people still in there, you know, it will be cost-effective and competitive. So I think it could mean that, you know, our next generation system could be less expensive, more powerful than even the one way of the day, which is quite flexible and powerful. Do you ever think about like, it's interesting to hear you say that you want to go smaller because, you know, if you think about something like Starship coming online, like do you ever

consider just we joke about it we call it the big dumb satellite here? Like just make it bigger because you're using cheap, cheap, really heavy parts because it doesn't matter anymore. Hold on, Matt. I got to check where my check from K2 is. I didn't get mine in the mail, Jake. Yeah, I know. We keep talking about K2 and what they're doing.

The big dumb satellites. But I don't know. I'm curious as another satellite operator. Like, do you ever, have you think about that. Like, if you'll, you don't have to do it until the 2030s, like you say, like this is an opportunity to think differently about the different landscape of rockets than your first constellation, right?

Like, you ever think about what you. you could do to take advantage of that? Oh, yeah, we're spending a lot of time still thinking about it. It's still a number of years away, but that doesn't mean we're not kind of starting the architecture work and the system engineering and work to think about what we could do. And also, you know, what other kind of services we can offer, who we might partner with, very interested in seeing like what kind of buses are out there. If people have built 15,000 satellites, I think the 15,000 and one satellite isn't going to be

very expensive to build. we can build off at the top of it. And there may be a couple, you know, that have done that. Again, we're not competitive to most of those people, so they probably would work with us on that. And so you may be restricted to the kinds of the quality of buses, et cetera, that might be available that time. And hopefully they're moving from five-year to eight-to-ten-year kind of cycles,

I would hope, as they kind of harden themselves up a bit for, you know, our next generation. But, you know, if you were starting over again, would you make something for 20 or 30 years? I don't know. You know, things do change in space. And so there is some sweet spot there between longevity and flexibility. And I think that's what we'll all be looking to try to pick the right spot there that would work for our network in some ways. It's more likely we'll have more satellites next time.

You know, 66, obviously, was our, was, we have a highly engineered. network. It's one of the reasons why, you know, we're able to be used for all these safety services and why we're able to be put on airliners for that stuff and why we're, it's just why we're so reliable. And that's what our kind of the hallmark has been. What we need to do then in the next generation is probably have a multiple of that in some way that will have smaller, smaller footprints per satellite. That way we can kind of reuse our spectrum even more efficiently and get a lot more capacity out of the network for the next generation. So that's going to be, there's just so many tradeoffs we're looking at right now.

How do we evolve one network to the next? We've got a lot of time to work on that, but how do we, you know, the last time when we went from a first generation, a second generation, not one customer knew it. They were talking to an old satellite versus a new satellite. There wasn't a call dropped. There wasn't a snippet of speech that somebody. wasn't on the phone and they'd just handed from one satellite to the next. We got some work to do if you're changing architectures from 66 to 66 to 66 going to a multiple of that to do that.

So we got some things to work on anyway in terms of some interesting design challenges for the next generation. You got to bring us in when you're going to do the naming though, because you're saying the word next a lot and you already painted yourself into that quarter once. Yeah. What are you going to do with that? You know? I could have gotten royalties or something there. I don't know. We don't have a name for it, but people, you know, engineers always name stuff.

So they made next and they put a little three in it, you know, reverse E. Yeah, I like that. I'll support that. If somebody patents that, I guess we'll use that. A little bit leit. I like that. A little leet speak, yeah. In the one of the most common things that people bring up with,

deciding where their satellites are going to go is latency for sure, right? You know, you want to be closer for these very low latency applications. Where you're at, do you feel like latency is not a concern, both in use case but also altitude that you're at? Well, we've always been lower latency than the alternatives in LBAN, the spectrum that we use and the kind of applications we provide. So we are very low latency for IoT applications, which is the biggest thing we do. So if you're a piece of heavy equipment and there's something like 170,000 of them

that have our system on there, you know, we deliver data very quickly. Clearly from a voice perspective, if you're talking through our network, it's almost like a cellular system. I don't think it's as much. You know, we're not a primary broadband supplier. We're more of a backup, you know, safety supplier,

but it's important, but not everything. But, you know, where it really paid off, was in like air traffic air, you know, we created a venture called Arian which tracks every airplane in the world. So every aircraft that is broadcasting its position twice a second,

which is almost every airplane now in the world, we're picking up in space 485 miles up and putting it into a massive database or we're selling that to air traffic controllers. Arian is and we're a joint owner of that. And their latency is really, really important. I mean, if you're going to put an airplane on a radar scope and you're going to control it and keep them close together, you need that in a fraction of a second, not even a second later. So, you know, certain applications really require low latency and a Leo network like ours is really good for that.

How do you look at the real estate market that is Leo at the moment, though, when you're thinking about constellations and architectures and stuff, right? It feels like a real estate game at this point where people are either trying to buy up spectrum or buy up certain orbits or certain altitudes or, you know, like you can't really slot in at 535 kilometers right now because there's quite a lot of satellites there. So from the planning perspective, how's that work? Well, there's no spectrum left. You know, I mean, spectrum's all been allocated. The good stuff. I mean, we were able to get art 30 years ago. But everything in that sweet spot of what's called L or S-Ban spectrum is, um,

is kind of in someone's hands. So how that gets kind of reallocated and reused, you know, because not everybody's successful in that space. Up in the KUK, A band, you know, there's still a lot. People are moving to V-Band and even higher microwave kind of frequency. So there's room to grow up there. I found out about E-Band recently. And Caleb Henry did not know about E-Band either,

so I feel like I was validated in that. You still have to explain that to me as well because I don't think I know about E-Band either. but no, I think, so Spectrum is always going to be a challenge for people who want to do what the applications are today, which today is getting into cell phones and really small devices, getting through rain, which K and KU don't do very well, you know, being able to be a safety services like we are. So that's kind of locked down. The altitudes, I'm not sure as big a deal. right now, people are going lower, mostly because there's just so many satellites, and, you know,

hundreds of them have failed already. I mean, Starlink, hundreds of those have failed already, but it's not a big deal because they're so low, they're deorbiting themselves, you know, for the most part. And that's healthy. I'd rather put a little bit more reliable satellite a little higher, and there's a lot of space there. I do get the people go, isn't space all crowded? Didn't you see the picture? Didn't you see the pictures. I love how satellites they make them the size of Rhode Island. It looked really crowded. But I just even did the math myself from like, because I had to do it for a presentation. I thought I went from like a hundred miles up to like a thousand miles up, which is pretty generous for Leo. And you know, you just do the math and run run the math.

And it's like a quadrillion square kilometers up there. It's a lot of space. And so when people, think that like, oh my God, these things are, we're, banging in there, it's bumper cars. We're flying through the worst of it because some of it's our satellite, you know, that, ran in. Don't lift the Feng Young off the hook there. You're up in the weather satellite debris range, for sure. Yeah, well, we had a SV33 ran into a cosmos. Well, Cosmos ran into SV33, like in 2007, I guess it was.

And you got the dash cam on that? I well no compensation for it anyway but but you know when that happened but even so our satellites we're flying through all that stuff but we only move a satellite once a week you know so it's not like and that's bumping a satellite so it's not like this is oh my god you know stuff is flying by us starlings making a lot of movements but they're they're even lower and there's a lot more of their their own satellites, but they're using, you know, AI and other, you know, or programs to kind of do it automatically. I'm not sure we're, we're real comfortable with that right now. So we're probably, we probably don't make as many movements because we don't need to,

you know, because we think unnecessary movements are as big a problem, you know, for potentially other things, too. But there's a lot, there's a lot of space up there, is what I'm saying. Yeah. It doesn't mean it's not a problem, but it's more of a problem. for the future, not a problem for today. Yeah. That's the fact that is like, it's a truism, but it needs to be said a lot. It's like space is really big.

It's just really, really big. If you take all the debris, I think I figured out, you could take all the debris. If you could cram it all together, it would fit in like an ocean liner. And just, I mean, one of those big cargo ships. So it's pretty, but you can imagine if it was all in one cargo ship, and you send it randomly around the world, you would never see it ever, right? You know, because it would never go near you where you could see it. But unfortunately, it's all speeding around the world like bullets.

And everybody knows that part. And by the way, I just want to make clear, debris is a concern. It is one we are concerned about. We're just more about we can deal with it through communication, you know, propulsion and movement, coordination, et cetera. and continue good practices going forward. It's not something, I worry sometimes, and the only reason I sort of have a little bit of a talk track on that,

is that some people have objectives, typically when they cry that everything's going to run into each other, and they're usually selling something, and that's okay, and I'm glad they're developing the technologies. I just want clear-eyed decisions to be, made around new regulations, around things that people have to design to, and people follow all the rules, you know, but... Yeah, yeah.

The funny aspect there, too, is in those discussions, I feel like it can often, maybe just an internet comment threads, I don't know, it can often come off like, well, these people that are launching thousands of satellites, like, they don't care at all about debris. I'm like, they care the most. They just launched thousands of satellites. If anyone is concerned about satellites falling apart in the sky, it's the people that just launched thousands of satellites. It's a bit of a self-explanatory situation.

People are allowed us about it, as you know, our geostationary operators, you know, who are not in that belt, but prefer that they're not used. Their stuff moves a lot slower. So if the debris gets there, you know, it's like a really slow motion catastrophe up there. I think you don't know how physics works.

They are moving pretty fast. Well, you know, it's relativity. Do you not know? Maybe you don't know how relativity works, Matt. know, that's what I'm saying. I'm moving pretty fast right now, too, but I'm also drinking this nice white wine. You're actually moving faster. You were at the beginning of this podcast.

I don't know what that is. So good. Oh, yeah. Now that's, that's an interesting thought. Yeah, I, debris is interesting. It is one of those, every once in a while, there's like one of those topics where, like, for some reason we can't have a level-headed conversation about with a lot of people. It's one of those hot button ones, I guess.

But yeah, it was interesting to say, to think about the, like the, I want to say like the impact of it, because obviously you're right, like the impact is important, but like trying to decide where it crosses the line of like emergency to like just got to pay attention to it. Like there's, you know, there's, sometimes I think about like, you know, comparing it to like the health of my own body. Like sometimes there's an emergency. Like if I fall and break my arm, I have to go right now to the hospital.

And sometimes there's just like, I should drink fewer of these. And that's a smarter decision for my health long term, you know? And it's like one is very like, you know, urgent and in your face and one is less so, but maybe more important. Well, you know,

there's a lot of parallels to climate change, you know, and people who are talking about, you know, warming in 60s and 70s. And we're like, what's the big deal? You know, I mean, and of course it started out by being, how hard can it be to be a little bit more careful and start designing around.

And then some people, then it became a political issue. And then now, and then nobody did anything about it. And then suddenly, well, we didn't do enough about it because, you know, now we're getting tornadoes left and right. And yes, that's not climate. But overall, we have to admit there's something going on there. And I wish we could have done practical, low-cost things back in, you know, 50 years ago. And I think that's the same way it is right now with space. We can do practical things today.

Like don't send up satellites that don't have, you know, thrusters on them. You know, actively move. Coordinate your moves with everybody else. You know, we unfortunately have two major space powers who don't communicate with anyone about what they're doing in space. That is one of our biggest problems right now. I mean, can't we solve that right now?

that's more important than anything. Yeah. I mean, you're the one sitting closest to the NRO office, you know? I think you can probably see it from your window where you're sitting, Matt. I didn't want to block the conversation here by, you know, going into world peace and everything here. You know, I mean, we're bringing that serious here. We're all about tangents, so this is good, yeah, especially when they get serious real fast. Yeah, yeah.

We've got to attack hard the other direction, you know. Exactly. Oh, yeah. Hmm, okay. Thinking that one through it. That's a heavier one. I'm still reeling from the accusation that I didn't know how fast geosatellites flying. They're not really slow.

They just look slow, okay? They're just far away. That's what I say too, okay, about myself out there. Just about relativity, you know. I'm pretty small. So it takes a lot of work to make me look like I'm going fast. Yeah, yeah. Well, if large means you look like you're going fast,

I must look like I'm just speeding everywhere. Because I'm the other end of that. All right, so I did like, I want to go back a couple minutes because I found it, I was very intrigued by your stated timing of Arridium and where it sits in the life cycle of space. I had not considered the way that you phrased it. And it's, is this a survivorship bias kind of situation? But like where the moments, you know, 90s were the 90s.

Let's leave the 90s out of it. But Arridium Next hit at the right moment to get a really great deal to fly on what became the most reliable commercial rocket on the earth, which at the time you were an outlier for like going, yeah, yeah, we're going to go in on this and buy a bunch of them in a single digit year. And now you're going to be on the other. end where things have churned. There's going to be a bunch of companies that start up and die before the next time an Arridium satellite is needing to be deployed. So you will presumably kind of ride out this teething phase of gigantic launch vehicles or the crop of small satellite

launchers who are growing into big satellite launchers. And, you know, if you're thinking, you were saying like early 2030s is when deployment would happen. So you're probably signing some launch contracts in the late 2020s. What are the... It's important to say our timeline, we wouldn't start spending any money until the early 2030s, which means that our launch really probably would be the late 2030s. So it's... Even better for this hypothetical.

15 years from now before we'd even be probably launching and maybe longer because our constellation is working really, really well and continues to outperform. our expectations and everything because we built, you know, well, we didn't build it, but we bought, we helped design really, really reliable satellites. I mean, a good example was the recent solar storm, you know, there were a lot of small satellites which were heavily challenged in that, you know, pressured was term and others. We weren't pressured, in fact. I mean, our systems were built to really, we did have to kind of maneuver our satellites

because it's amazing how all that solar just dropped all our satellites, you know, a number of tens or hundreds of meters, you know. But, you know, we just popped them right back into orbit over the weekend and stuff. But there was no issues or anything or concerns about that. And that's one of the things of building a more reliable satellite. But, I mean, to the previous thing, yeah, we are, I think we're going to be fortunate. not everyone didn't design this or anything, but I am so happy we got our network up in 2019.

You know, can you imagine trying to launch a network in the middle of, you know, a pandemic and all that sort of thing? We went into extended capital phase where we could kind of more exploit our network during the time that we were there. So we were really in a good, so, you know, despite the earlier challenges of the company, I'm glad to take a break every now and then here. I get a break every now and then. And another one might be just the windows we're in.

We're growing nicely. We've already sort of told we've given long-term guidance. I mean, as a public company, it's unusual. But we've described how we're going to go from the current state up to like a billion dollars in service revenue by 2030. And we feel confident with all the things we're doing right now. the activities, you know, we just made an acquisition, et cetera. All those things are, but, and then we might start some spending some money on the next generation network.

And that's going to work out, I think, really well in terms of the timing of the industry right now, I think. I think we're going through cycles and we're just hitting the, we'll hit the next cycle just right, I think. Yeah. That sounds right to me because this is a terrible time to try to buy launch vehicles. It's like, number one, none left because Amazon bought all the big. big ones. There's a bunch of little ones that have decided they should be big ones. None of those

are flying yet and don't look to be in the next, I don't know, two or three years. So you're going to be at a time where like presumably Neutron has a couple flights under its belt. Newgeland, I assume we'll have a bunch of launches under its belt. Who knows what's going to happen relativity? I'm less up on their plans than others may be. But there's just so much chaos right now that seems like it will shake out by that time. And I feel like we get stuck, you know, when we talk about things on this show or other shows that we get stuck on looking at this like two to five year range. But when you cast your mind forward as if I'm somebody who, like, I've never put myself in your brain space of I'm going to be, I'm watching now so I can

buy in five years or six years or seven years. That's a different way to think about of like where you might apply your interest and which things seem the most likely to be flourishing by then or be, you know, fit for the architecture by then. It's just a different way to look at what everyone's working on these days. And that's focused on launch, but one thing to, I don't think people appreciate is, and I tip my hat to Motorola at the time, and maybe it was because of their telecom experience and other things, but when they designed the first generation system with Lockheed Martin buses and Raytheon panels and all that kind of stuff, they built at this heart a software-defined system, a software programmable system.

That is not how geostationary satellites were at the time. Things were pre-programmed, put up in space, and then 15 to 20 years later, through an evolution of time, you would launch another every year or something like that, and you would constantly be going through generations over time of these hardware-defined satellites. When we launched our second generation system, it was even more programmable.

So we're not sitting doing nothing during that time waiting until 2030s. I mean, we're designing, we're reprogramming a whole standard system into our satellites through something we call Stardust, this Narraban IoT standard, which will allow us to connect to low-cost IoT devices and maybe, you know, smartphones and watches and things like that. that couldn't have been done, you know, 10, 15 years ago because nobody built a satellite to do that. But we have people now reprogramming our system. So that's why you don't have to build something every five years. You know, you can build something longer lasting that's very flexible and that's what we have. It turns your satellites into assets with APIs rather than services themselves, right?

And then you build the service down the ground and you can change that whenever you want, as long as you're as long as you're sending the bits up and down in the same format, then you're good, right? No, exactly. And, you know, we're changing the satellites in space in real time, and we're changing the ground infrastructure that talks to them. I mean, we do still have a very unique network, and it's all interconnected in space.

And so, you know, we have a lot of flexibility to manage these satellites remotely, et cetera. The current moment in time in the satellite industry is a lot of consolidation from people that were working in different orbits before buying people in different orbits, and having these like multi-orbit setups and all that. And you've talked about how you feel like Arridium fits in alongside Starlink and Kuiper and some of the other competitors. But are there things going on in the consolidation end that you're watching as like, this could be a threat to us?

Or do you kind of file it all the way and feel like you are unique enough that that stuff doesn't really bother you? Well, when you're CEO of any company, much less a satellite company, you stay paranoid all the time. So you're always looking at everybody and trying to think about what it could do. But really, you know, knowing sort of where things are going and everything, we're in a very unique space, you know, no unintended. We're, you know, we often call it our lane. And nobody seems to want to get in our lane. It's too nichey. It's too small, perhaps, or whatever.

So people don't seem to be coming more into things to do what we do really well as effectively. And to the extent that they have, we've kind of responded. in kind with something that's better, you know, than what they're able to do. So I think we, I can't look out 20 years and say for sure that it won't be that way, but I can certainly look out, you know, with a lot of confidence over this next seven or eight years to 2030, and a few companies are able to do that. I mean, that is the one good thing about space. It's very expensive.

It's capital intensive. It takes a while to get your network in, but nothing comes at you very fast. It's like that, you know, I remember that old comedy routine where the, you know, oh, look, you know, the old guy with a knife, but he's traveling so slowly. Look out for me. I'm coming, you know, any day now. I'm going to get there. I mean, and so you really see things from far off and you really know what's going to where things are going. And people can't move that fast. You know, they have either certain kind of spectrum assets. They have certain kind of technical abilities. they have, you know, assets in space or whatever it might be.

And so we kind of know where things are going. So I do see the consolidation, almost all the consolidation right now is focused on that commodity broadband space, KUK suppliers. I think that's smart. They all need to do that because Starlink is eating their lunch and they got to get bigger and have more flexibility, whether it was Viassat by an NMARSS by an Intel sat. you know, there's still probably some more to go, you know, because that's still a tough space with the disruption that Starlink has caused all of them. But in our area, there's not many people kind of left. We out-survived everybody with a better product and a better service that was,

you know, more global and, you know, smaller and all that sort of thing. And nobody went and acquired and went to build to kind of compete with us. There will be, as I said, there will be some competition in the distant future around the edges of us, like in this whole area of directed device where people, but right now, no one sort of has the money and ability to build a global system in space. There's people who aspire to it, and that would be a bit more competitive, but it's going to take a long time to build that and it would be a very expensive thing to do. The solutions today are pretty much regional. It's a T-Mobile Starlink system or something or an AT&T Verizon AST space

mobile. And to the extent those things work well and they eventually probably will, they're going to be very, very regional. And that's not again what we do. People don't buy one of our devices, as I said in Wyoming to use in rural Colorado. That just isn't, you know, we're more something you buy in the U.S. to go take with you when the hurricane hits, you know, in the Caribbean or in South America or, you know, first responders, or it's an aviation thing that has to be across the whole planet or it's a ship that travels the whole world. And, you know, there's, I don't know, there's what, you know, 250,000 ships with our system

on it. It's D-to-D isn't going to help those things. There's 70,000 aircraft systems. That's not going to be those sort of systems. Two million IoT devices that's going to grow dramatically over that time. So it's a very different thing. It's hard to explain that publicly. Most people don't have the knowledge that you guys do or your listeners probably do about space

and can appreciate how spectrum is different and regulations different, all that kind of stuff. But, you know, so as a public company, kind of suffer a little bit because we're sort of nichey well they see our success and growth and cash flow and all that stuff they don't quite appreciate why Leo doesn't

mean everything in Leo just competes with itself you know right right so you're saying that the iridium stocks on sale then we can get a good deal I think it's a good deal but I think I can say that maybe that's the beer talking my general counsel isn't near here i don't know

that's what we'd like to do in the show wait for the last two minutes and then ask a you have to do the whole clause safe harbor forward-looking statements blah blah when you talk anything i've said forward-looking is please take that with a grain of salt yeah you did talk about the 2030s so i feel like that if if that's already out there, then you're good. Well, I don't know where I'll be in the 2035 time frame, too. You know, you can catch me. Distant Island using some Arridium phone to call into this show.

Exactly. Exactly. Near where Jake lives, I guess. Near where, yeah. I heard a question you wanted to ask me. You can't get away without, you know, and that's about X-wing fighters. in the Air and Space Museum. I don't think you talked about that.

Oh, man. Okay. Wow. Someone did their homework, so that's really good. Yeah. Well, I wanted to see what this show was all about, and so I scrolled right to the end, and I see there.

I got to talk to them about this X-Wing fighter across from my One World Connected exhibit. All I say is I've put out some comments about this, and I received at least one email from somebody who works in and around the National Air and Space Museum, and they were also not thrilled with the existence of the X-Wing fighter hanging in the main area. And so I feel validated, and I will be even more staunch. If we moved it somewhere else in the museum, because, I mean, I will say as somebody who's been a big fan of the Air and Space Museum, you know, for a long, long time.

And I think you guys are, too, because it is a national treasure. I can't wait for the grand opening of all the rest of the exhibits because it's still, you know, not completed yet. But that'll happen by the end of next year. And I'll tell you, that is one of the most six-year-old kids, absolutely love that exhibit. And I think they're the future aerospace engineers. And if they kind of can make a connection in some ways and be inspired by it, I mean, what museums really are is about, you know, imagination and inspiration. And so, I mean, I think that's what it's all about. I know you old guys like us can get real old school and say it has to be something that flew exactly, but...

No, listen, all I'm saying is... You know, for sure that didn't fly. I saw a guy flying it. I don't know what you're talking about. I do love Joe Dameron. He is one of my favorites. My almost four-year-old does love the shit out of X-Wings. He absolutely loves X-wings and wants everything to be an X-wing, so I'm not going to fight that.

But the reasoning I find to be bullshit, to be frank, I think the reasoning I saw was that, well, these are this and there's the enterprise model that's like near where the door you come in right now is that these are the things that were like the spark for the people that went and built the spaceships and I'm like I don't know man like most of this stuff in this museum like the X-wing was downstream of most of the stuff in this museum that that there were an X-15 and Apollo capsule and like am I weird or did the Star Wars come out in the 70s and that was downstream of the entire goddamn space race so like I just found that that This is an inverse relationship.

I don't know that. I don't know in the pantheon of nine Star Wars movies where that was. That could have been a thousand years ago because I don't see Earth there. Fair enough. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I'm sure. All right. I'll have to come back down and we'll argue about this in person sometime. And I can, yeah. I would appreciate it. I'd give you a personal tour anyway here. I'm coming back when the rest is open for sure because my son is pretty mad that he didn't.

He's been in Skylab before when he was a base. but he wanted to go back in it and he was sad that that part was not open yet so he was mad at me personally that that part was not open yet and so now i need to go write that wrong so there's an awful lot of stuff that needs to get displayed and get out to udra hazi too because it's it's an awesome oh yeah as well i mean it's and uh i've even been to the the back lot it looks like uh the that movie you know Indiana Jones and stuff because there's so much stuff in boxes that they can't even put out there, which is pretty cool. I mean, we got to get a tour of that, Jake.

All the stuff is not on display. I remember looking, when we were at Havarhazi last time, I remember there was one part of the tour where there was a window into the back room, and you're right. The restoration hangar. Palettes and pallets of crates of stuff. And it's like, oh, yeah, there's like a Mars rover back here and like, you know, a bunch of stuff. So, yeah.

Our block one satellite, you know, our first generation satellite is hanging in the one world connected and, you know, got to see it back there being restored. as they were, I would say when I joined Arridium in 2006, it was still, it wasn't where it is today, let's just say. And, you know, I went downtown. My wife hadn't moved to D.C. yet. And I'm standing there looking at the exhibit. And I just remember it said, Aridium, you know, Aridium was the first low earth orbiting satellite system and it went bankrupt. Oh, I just joined this company. That's all it said. I mean, that's all it said. And, you know, and I, it took us a few years to convince them to say, and it lives today,

you know, I mean, they back that on the bottom. But I'm glad to see that we've evolved now and we, you know, they put us more as a historical reference anyway for, you know, the first Leo satellite. But it, and I was happy now people know what we are and everything and not the guy in front of me who goes. Because I remember Arridium. Yeah, my brother-in-law worked on, and then they walked on, and I thought, I'm CEO of this company. I hope to make it something that you might recognize in a few years from now. So it's been 18 years from that. We're a little different place.

Love it. All right. Well, we got a date then, Offenom meetup in 2026 to a tour guy, Matt Dash. We'll hire you. That'll be awesome. Yeah. Love it. Okay.

Awesome. Matt has been great. We're going on a tour of space executives, Jake. We are. Yeah. Next week, Peter Beck is going to be on the show. I think for real this time because they already announced their earnings. So I think that we're not going to get screwed up by announcement cycles or something.

Maybe that was the problem last time. You go to a fine New Zealand Pilsner, I'm sure, of some sort. Something like that. I don't know what. Yeah. Actually, I'm curious, but what that will be. That'll be. We'll find out.

It could be, your drink would be seasonally correct down there, though. It would be. I don't think you would drink this one, though, to be honest with you. Maybe not, yeah. There are wrong letters on that one, for sure. All right, y'all, thanks for hanging out. Thanks, everybody. We will see you next week.

Bye. Bye. One, two, three, four, five.