Rocket Lab Aiming for Enterprise, Defense Services with Iridium Acquisition
Comments are due to the FCC on the deal Oct. 15
WASHINGTON, Sept. 22, 2026 – With its planned $8 billion acquisition of Iridium, Rocket Lab is aiming to lean more into government and navigation services than consumer communications, the company’s CEO said Monday.
Rocket Lab CEO and founder Peter Beck compared Iridium’s exclusive L-band spectrum holdings to a “loud voice” capable of punching through walls and inclement weather.
“You have this really, really loud voice, and that enables you to really build upon these safety-critical things where the signal just must get through,” he said. “There’s a lot of really exciting opportunities sort of based on that thesis.”
He contrasted that with fixed satellite broadband, which uses shared bands he called a “quieter voice” that would be more easily disrupted by obstacles and weather.
He spoke on Monitoring the Situation, an 24/7 online tech news show backed by investment firm Andreessen Horowitz.
In addition to defense, Beck gave position, navigation, and timing services as an example of something he thought the rocket launch company could pursue with Iridium under its belt.
He said a GPS-like system using L-band spectrum would be much harder to jam than normal GPS because of the extra signal strength.
Iridium already provides some communications and GPS services for governments, pilots, and mariners. Beck said a major reason Rocket Lab acquired Iridium was the L-band spectrum those services run on.
Rocket Lab launches rockets and makes satellite components. With the spectrum necessary to provide its own communications services, the company would be more vertically integrated.
That would allow the company to get new constellations and services off the ground much quicker and cheaper than either Rocket Lab or Iridium could do separately, Beck said.
SpaceX, the dominant low-Earth orbit satellite operator and rocket launcher, has a similar model. It launches its broadband and direct-to-device satellites on its own rockets.
SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rockets are partially reusable, with boosters that can be recovered and re-launched. Rocket Lab is developing a new rocket, dubbed Neutron, that will have the same capability.
Reusing gear allows a company to launch more often for much less money, which has contributed to SpaceX's dominance in the space. The company is developing a fully reusable rocket, which it’s planning to test again next Monday.
Analysts said when the Rocket Lab-Iridium deal was announced in June that it was likely the company would stick to enterprise and government services rather than join the fray of consumer direct-to-device competition with SpaceX.
Beck didn’t mention direct-to-device specifically as an aspiration of Rocket Lab’s — Amazon and AST SpaceMobile are hoping to compete with SpaceX on that front in the U.S. using exclusive airwaves similar to Iridium’s — but said the company was planning to offer a range of new services.
“We are not stopping at being the L-band communications company,” he said. “We can build whatever satellite you can possibly imagine and we can launch it. Why would you provide any service from space that you possibly can?”
FCC review
The transaction needs approval from the Federal Communications Commission. The agency said last week it was taking comment on the companies’ application.
In that application, filed in August, said Rocket Lab would accelerate development of Iridium’s next-generation constellation and manufacture it in the U.S.
The application also said the companies weren’t planning to emphasize consumer direct-to-device.
“Although some providers are investing heavily in broadband-oriented, consumer-scale D2D connectivity, Iridium’s globally harmonized L-band spectrum differentiates Iridium’s D2D services for the mission-critical, government-grade applications in which global coverage, small antenna form factors, high availability, and secure connectivity matter more than raw throughput,” the companies wrote.
Other areas Rocket Lab would continue operating in or expand into: position, navigation, and timing (PNT) service, marine and aviation services, and equipment monitoring for large industrial projects like mines.
SpaceX has already said the FCC should scrutinize the deal, although hasn’t outright opposed it. SpaceX has claimed in multiple filings that Iridium threw sand in the gears of its Earth station deployments, and asked the FCC to “carefully consider Iridium’s anticompetitive conduct as part of the transaction.”
In a response filed earlier this month, Rocket Lab said SpaceX didn’t oppose the deal and was bringing up unrelated issues, so the FCC should disregard its comments “pursuant to long-standing policy.”
Comments are due to the FCC on the deal by Oct. 15. Responses are due Oct. 30, and replies to those responses are due Nov. 9.
“I’m aspirational we might be able to close it by the end of the year,” Beck said of the Iridium acquisition. “Although technically I think it’s going to take until the middle of next year.”
