Not only will all of the current Iridium legacy services be supported by the NEXT architecture, according to Traherne, but new kinds of services may be introduced with higher data rates and capabilities.
That is, until US satellite company Iridium decided to sell real estate on a portion of its next-generation global satellites, which are set to go into orbit starting in 2015 and be fully operational by 2018.
And already, Mercer said, Iridium is urging scientists to develop projects right now that can piggyback on the new rockets that will launch the NEXT satellites starting in 2015.