A SpaceNews artist's concept depicting an Iridium Next mobile communications satellite observing a missile defense intercept.

CEO Matt Desch said the next batch of 10 Iridium Next satellites is scheduled for launch June 29.

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Jeff Foust has more than a decade of experience writing about space policy, entrepreneurial ventures and regulatory affairs. In 2001, he established spacetoday.net to aggregate and summarize the day's space-related news stories. In 2003, he started The...