WASHINGTON — Rocket Lab is acquiring satellite telecommunications company Iridium for $8 billion as part of its effort to become an end-to-end space company.
The companies announced an agreement June 29 under which Rocket Lab will acquire Iridium for $54 a share in cash and stock, valuing Iridium at $8 billion. That is a 24% premium over the closing price of Iridium’s shares June 26. The deal is projected to close in mid-2027 pending regulatory and other approvals.
Iridium operates a constellation of 66 satellites, with 14 on-orbit spares, that provides phone and data services using L-band spectrum. That includes aviation tracking services from Aireon, which Iridium acquired in May for $367 million by purchasing the 61% stake it did not already own, as well as a recent push into positioning, navigation and timing, or PNT, services.
The acquisition gives Rocket Lab, a launch services provider and manufacturer of satellites and satellite components, an entry into the satellite services market.
“This will be one of the most transformative deals in the space industry,” said Peter Beck, chief executive of Rocket Lab, in a presentation about the acquisition. “It combines Rocket Lab’s launch capability and satellite manufacturing with Iridium’s global satellite communications network and its rare spectrum.”
“Rocket Lab will become a fully integrated self-launching space superpower delivering critical communications capability to millions of users worldwide,” he said.
Beck, in earnings calls going back more than a year, has hinted that the company would pursue its own satellite constellation to provide unspecified services. He offered few specifics about the plan, and the company had not taken steps such as filing for spectrum needed for a constellation.
Beck, in the presentation, noted the difficulties in obtaining globally harmonized spectrum as well as the long time needed to deploy a constellation and generate revenue from it. By buying Iridium, “we think we’ve found a little bit of a shortcut here.”
“The result of this is it creates a self-launching company that can deliver new constellations and new services to the world,” he said, but did not elaborate on the plans for those future constellations and services.
“We are going to apply the Rocket Lab magic to it,” he said of Iridium. “We’re going to absorb it and optimize it and scale it into something really truly fantastic.”
“Combining with Rocket Lab is the best way for us to take our experience and success into the future of the space business,” Matt Desch, chief executive of Iridium, said in the presentation. “Together, we believe we can cost-effectively launch, operate and sustain new services like the plans we envision for our next-generation PNT service or expand on our Aireon business by transforming the way pilots communicate with air traffic controllers.”
Adam Spice, Rocket Lab’s chief financial officer, said the deal should be “significantly accretive” to the company’s cash flow and profitability. Iridium reported $871.7 million in revenue in its 2025 fiscal year, with $114.4 million in net income. Rocket Lab had $601.8 million in revenue in 2025 and a net loss of $198.2 million.
“These impressive and meaningful levels of revenue and profitability contribution are expected to materially transform Rocket Lab’s financial profile,” Spice said. “This acquisition fundamentally enhances our business model by combining our strong satellite subsystems, satellite platforms and launch businesses with Iridium’s proven cash-generating satellite services business.”
The deal also closes a chapter in an era of the space industry that goes back decades. Iridium was established in the 1990s to deploy a satellite constellation to provide global phone services. The company, though, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in 1999 because of the high costs of deploying the constellation and difficulty competing with terrestrial cellular services.
The company, in danger of going out of business entirely in 2000, was sold in bankruptcy court in 2001 for $25 million and secured the Defense Department as an anchor customer. It went public again in 2009 as Iridium Communications through a special-purpose acquisition company merger and funded the deployment of a replacement constellation built by Thales Alenia Space and launched by SpaceX.
The acquisition of Iridium by Rocket Lab comes less than three months after Globalstar, a contemporary of Iridium in the satellite telephony and data market, announced it would be acquired by Amazon for about $11 billion. Amazon said it would continue to support Globalstar’s work to deploy a next-generation constellation while gaining access to spectrum for direct-to-device services.
