Company: IRDM
Filing Date: 2025-02-13
Form Type: 10-K
Source: 0001628280-25-005302
Chunk: 53

Company: Iridium Communications Inc.
Filing Date: 2025-02-13
Form: 10-K
Item: Item 1A
Chunk 53
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 perform at the quality and capacity levels required for success. Any system failures, repeated product failures or shortened product life, or extended reduced levels of service could reduce our sales, increase costs, or result in warranty or liability claims or litigation, cause us to extend our warranty period, and seriously harm our business.

Our satellites have a limited life and may fail prematurely, which could cause our network to be compromised and materially and adversely affect our business, prospects and profitability, or cause us to incur additional expense to launch replacement satellites.

We have in the past and may in the future experience in-orbit malfunctions of our satellites, which could adversely affect the reliability of their service or result in total failure of the satellite. In-orbit failure of a satellite or temporary outage of a service or a satellite may result from various causes, including component failure, loss of power or fuel, inability to control positioning of the satellite, solar or other astronomical events, including solar radiation and flares, and space debris. Other factors that could affect the useful lives of our satellites include the quality of construction, gradual degradation of solar panels and the durability of components. We do not have, and do not have plans to obtain, in-orbit insurance to protect against losses. As a result, a failure of one or more of our satellites, the occurrence of equipment failures and other related problems would constitute an uninsured loss. Although we do not incur any direct cash costs related to the failure of a single satellite, if a satellite fails, we record an impairment charge in our statement of operations to reduce the remaining net book value of that satellite to zero, and any such impairment charges could depress our net income for the period in which the failure occurs. Further, a large number of such failures could shorten the expected life of our constellation, which would increase our depreciation expense, or require us to replace our constellation sooner than currently planned, either of which would increase our projected capital expenditures.

If operations at our commercial gateways or operations center were to be disrupted, we may experience interruptions in our ability to provide service to our customers.

Our commercial satellite network traffic is supported by a gateway in Tempe, Arizona, or, for traffic within Russian boundaries only, a gateway in Izhevsk, Russia. We operate our satellite constellation from our satellite network operations center in 

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Leesburg, Virginia. If we are unable to use our primary commercial gateway in Tempe, it could take us from one to eight hours to switch operations to our backup facility for most services, and potentially longer for some