3 Months After Explosion, SpaceX Plans to Launch Rocket Bearing Satellites

I agree, it's a terribly ambiguous headline. Headlines have a way of dropping everything that gives context to a sentence. Makes sense when you're limited to a relatively small piece of paper, but on the Internet you can write as much as you want. So put those extra words back in there! "SpaceX plans on launching a rocket bearing a satellite"... or better yet, "SpaceX plans on launching a rocket containing a satellite".

"carrying" would have been much better WC.

Military, maritime, energy exploration, adventure/scientific exploration. They all either have a life or death need for comms in an emergency or extremely accommodating budgets.

Once the satellites are launched, they require relatively little maintenance.

Per https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iridium_satellite_constellatio... the service is useful for journalists, explorers and military units.

They have the only global, instant availability, low latency, SBD (short burst data) capability.

Transmitter is very small as well. https://www.iridium.com/products/details/iridium-9603

The US Department of Defense is a huge customer, for one example.

The current constellation got bought for pennies on the dollar when Iridium went bankrupt. I believe this new generation is the first new constellation they've put up since then. It will be interesting to see if they can make it work. Launch costs are a lot lower now, which ought to help a lot.

There's a lot of ships and boats around that have a need for wireless communication.

I rented an Iridium sat phone while on a month long caving expedition in a remote part of Peru. It was nice to have in case of emergencies and also to check in daily to let family back home know we were ok.

I use a DeLorme InReach, which uses Iridium, on a regular basis for location tracking, text communication, and potential emergency signaling, while hiking and backpacking in areas with no cell coverage.