{"id":68828,"date":"2017-02-18T01:12:49","date_gmt":"2017-02-17T17:12:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wp-productionenv-bjg9h2g2bgg5b8aa.southeastasia-01.azurewebsites.net\/news\/iridium-selects-target-date-for-second-launch-of-iridium-next\/"},"modified":"2017-02-18T01:12:49","modified_gmt":"2017-02-17T17:12:49","slug":"iridium-selects-target-date-for-second-launch-of-iridium-next","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/news\/iridium-selects-target-date-for-second-launch-of-iridium-next\/","title":{"rendered":"Iridium Selects Target Date for Second Launch of Iridium Next"},"content":{"rendered":"<\/p>\n<p><strong>Iridium<\/strong> <strong>Communications<\/strong> has announced a targeted launch date of mid-June for the second mission of 10 Iridium Next satellites.&nbsp;Originally anticipated for mid-April 2017, the date has shifted due to a backlog in <strong>SpaceX\u2019s<\/strong> launch manifest as a result of last year\u2019s anomaly on Sept. 1.&nbsp;This second launch will deliver another 10 Iridium Next satellites to Low Earth Orbit (LEO) on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket.&nbsp;SpaceX is targeting six subsequent Iridium Next launches approximately every two months thereafter.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cEven with this eight week shift, SpaceX\u2019s targeted schedule completes our constellation in mid-2018,\u201d said Matt Desch, chief executive officer at Iridium.<\/p>\n<p>This announcement comes as Iridium has successfully connected the first Iridium Next satellite via its crosslinks into its global LEO constellation.&nbsp;The new satellite is expected to begin providing service to Iridium customers in the coming days.&nbsp;The testing and validation phase is ahead of schedule and, according to the company, the satellites are working well.<\/p>\n<p>The upcoming mid-June launch will mark the second mission of eight Iridium Next launches with SpaceX, including the recently announced&nbsp;satellite rideshare&nbsp;with <strong>NASA<\/strong> and <strong>GFZ\u2019s<\/strong> Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment Follow-on mission (GRACE-FO). In total, Iridium currently has plans to launch 75 Iridium Next satellites \u2014 66 to serve as operational satellites and nine as on-orbit spares.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Iridium Communications has announced a targeted launch date of mid-June for the second mission of 10 Iridium Next satellites.&nbsp;Originally anticipated for mid-April 2017, the date has shifted due to a backlog in SpaceX\u2019s launch manifest as a result of last year\u2019s anomaly on Sept. 1.&nbsp;This second launch will deliver another 10 Iridium Next satellites to [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":68830,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-68828","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/68828"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=68828"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/68828\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/68830"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=68828"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=68828"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=68828"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}