On 2/1/2017 8:13 PM, Rick Jones wrote:
is this perhaps trying to squeeze things into a smaller number
of launches?

It could have just been a bargain. Perhaps Iridium got a good price on
the excess capability of that one launch?

One thing though, ten identical birds at one time, with all of them
belonging to the same company, sounds like a huge crap shot to me. They
could all be lost in a single launch failure, or (being identical) they
could all share the same technical problem. Putting up a few at a time
via shared launches sounds a whole lot safer.