Satellite phone company Iridium has placed a huge, multi-billion dollar order for 81 new satellites. It is, according to industry watchers, the biggest commercial spaceflight order in the world at the moment.

The contract for the satellites went to Thales Alenia Space, jointly owned by French company Thales and Italy’s Finmeccanica.

While mobile/cell phones work on ground stations, Iridium’s network is currently based on 66 orbiting satellites. It boasts 359,000 subscribers. The new $2.9 billion contract will put up the next generation of this system, under the rather obvious moniker Iridium NEXT (press release, BBC, Wall Street Journal).

Starting in 2015, these new satellites will start being launched. Eventually 72 will be put in orbit: 66 operational and 6 spares to mitigate against something like this happening again. The remaining 9 satellites in the contract will be kept as ground based spares.

Good news for Thales and Finmeccanica, bad news for Lockheed Martin. As the WSJ notes, Lockheed was eyeing the Iridium contract hungrily:

At a time when global commercial-satellite orders are climbing only gradually and Pentagon investments in new, big-ticket space projects have nearly dried up, Lockheed’s management had been counting on the Iridium job to avoid production cutbacks. Lockheed recently reorganized its satellite business in a bid to wrest more synergy from its commercial and military satellite lines.

…

Lockheed Martin officials previously felt they were ahead in the competiton, but on Tuesday a company spokesman said they were “greatly disappointed with the contract decision.”

Image: the distinctive ‘Iridium flare’ of one of the company’s satellites reflecting the Sun / photo by Dominic’s pics via flickr under creative commons.