Rocket Lab CEO @Peter_J_Beck does the back-of-the-napkin math on Iridium’s ~$3B constellation and says Rocket Lab could have built it for around $350M: "Take Iridium for example. Their constellation, don't quote me on this, is around about $3 billion for them to develop and deploy. We did a back of the napkin calculation and we reckon we could have done that for around about 350 million." "The timeframe to develop the satellite and put it on orbit, typically that would take five years plus. Roll some stuff off our production line, 12 months or 24 months." "When the cost is an order of magnitude less, you can take some risk, because nobody's gonna come up with a business plan, spend $3 billion and wonder if it's gonna work." "You can put experimental business plans in orbit that if it doesn't work out, you've lost a relatively small amount of money. Your ability to innovate drastically increases." @RocketLab