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0 pointsazernik9y ago0 comments

Except that they didn't. They just offered a nice fat contract to keep it afloat. TFA: "Staving off a fiery end to the 66-satellite necklace and its spares, the Pentagon on Wednesday awarded a projected two-year, $72 million communications contract to seal a new ownership deal worked out in a New York bankruptcy court."

That's like claiming that NASA is "running" SpaceX, since its contracts are extremely important to SpaceX's business model.

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7 comments · 1 top-level

ChuckMcM9y ago· 6 in thread

Fair enough, that said, if your biggest customer and source of 99% of your revenue said, "Hey, we want you to put a special something on your satellite the next time you fly one..." do you think they would say "No way!" ? :-) Not saying they did or they didn't but if they asked I'm sure Iridium would have accommodated any request from the customer.

Edit: Iridium would have accommodated their customer.

nickpsecurity9y ago

I agree with you. Many defense contractors already do this. We've seen it most in telecoms post-Snowden. There are secure phones based on Iridium's tech. There's no reason to think they aren't getting some kind of side benefits out of the leverage they have. They usually try & often get it.

nrjdhsbsid9y ago

Unfortunately most of HN doesn't :) , the downvotes brigade is strong on this one. I'm not normally a purveyor of conspiracy theories but to me this seems like the most obvious reason why the rest of the launch would be not only filmed but Livestreamed, with no footage of the sat deployments

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karambahh9y ago

Apparently Thales is involved in the construction of the iridium sats. Would quite risky for the DoD to expect secrecy when construction is made by a european, mostly french, defense contractor.

US does not share its intelligence data openly with european countries, the only exception being UK.

ChuckMcM9y ago

If anyone would care to share I would be interested in understanding the negative interpretation of this comment.

taneq9y ago

The way I interpret the comment is that the Pentagon bankrolled Iridium with a $72mil contract, and that therefore Iridium is likely to respond favourably to Pentagon requests to quietly add a little something extra to their satellites.

I'm not sure if that interpretation is negative or not, I guess it depends on whether you approve of the Pentagon and its intelligence gathering activities.

sfifs9y ago

Why bother? Couldn't the American military just launch their own satellites instead?

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