Jane Edwards
Senior officials at Iridium Communications said the U.S. Space Force is interested in adopting the company’s satellite broadband communications services as the military branch advances the Joint All Domain Command and Control concept, Breaking Defense reported Friday.
Scott Scheimreif, executive vice president for government programs at Iridium, said the company intends to provide the Space Force with “very specialized services.”
“We don’t have to be the primary; we may be the emergency or contingency kind of solution. But we’re not going to have a fixed-price for broadband,” Scheimreif added.
He noted that the company does not consider itself a competitor to OneWeb, SpaceX and other major broadband service providers.
“We kind of consider ourselves a very niche, unique capability of highly reliable, very resilient network. And we work with others like a Starlink, and a OneWeb: they’re providing the big pipes and we’re providing highly reliable service,” Scheimreif said.
Iridium operates a constellation of 66 Iridium NEXT satellites in low-Earth orbit, along with nine backup spacecraft.
Matt Desch, CEO of Iridium and a 2022 Wash100 Award winner, said the company’s broadband network could provide the service with resiliency since it is based on L-band and uses a small terminal that can be linked with other technologies.
