Iridium ready to rock if SpaceX gets on a roll

摘要

Within 15 minutes of the Sept. 1 explosion that destroyed a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket and commercial satellite, a competing rocket builder called Matthew Desch to ask whether he wanted to reconsider plans to send 10 Iridium Communications satellites into orbit on the next Falcon 9 flight. The call came so quickly that Desch, Iridium's chief executive, was still trying to make sense of the fire that began as SpaceX was fueling the rocket for a routine pre-launch test. But he already knew Iridium would stick with SpaceX.