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R.I.P. Iridium
Archeopteryx writes, "Motorola has posted a notice that they expect, barring a financial 'White Knight,' Iridium service to end at 11:59 p.m. EST on March 17.
A few questions come to mind: 1) What becomes of the abandoned satellites? They are a real nuisance to astronomers due to the 'Iridium Flash' effect, and they complicate launch windows for satellites destined for any inclination. 2) Have these any Ham Radio use? 3) Assuming there is a use for them, who owns them after they are abandoned? Any Space Law experts out there? An abandoned ship is subject to salvage laws; how about an abandoned spacecraft?"
Firstly, first post? Secondly: two words "Iridium Modem". Screw voice. Think a device the size of a hardback book that will give you email access anywhere on the planet, from four AA cells.
Hexayurt - open source refugee shelter,
Call me ignorant, but am I the only one who has never heard of the Iridium Flash effect? Does anyone have a link to follow? (It sounds intriguing.)
Last time I heard anything about this, they were considering selling the sattelite network to NATO or the U.S. military. I don't know too much about the Iridium network, and I know it's probably not quite up to military specifications, but with a little creative engineering, they could have a nice sattelite network dirt cheap.
WARNING: there is a trojan on your
I have to wonder whether Iridium would have sold better if the US Gov't wasn't so antsy about being able to wiretap it.
How did Qualcomm get around this for their tri-band GlobalStar phones?
-P
Rogue communication satellites abandoned by their creators and no longer supported by their users? Satellites /designed/ for cellphone-like communication?
Hmmmmm... hack targets. *drool* Think of the freenet-style net we could bring on if someone hacked these babies and set up satelite networking. Do they have inband commands?
My bets are on the Cult of the Dead Cow to be the first to OwN these guys. Heh. I predict a satellite-hack version of king of the hill coming up.
Returned Peace Corps IT Volunteer
...but what are the Iridium satelites used for exactly?
BlackNova Traders
It took me a moment to realize what it was that I was seeing, but for a few tense seconds.... :-)
Let it be forever known that on this day, March 10, 2000, I lay claim to the staellites. They are mine, now and forever.
If anyone wishes to purchase one, the bidding starts at a mere $250.
Any takers?
I'm still working on a clever footer.
The Iridium satellites will be bought for pennies on the dollar, and the service will resurface at much lower cost (IMHO). Will it be competitive with cell phones across town, no - but for ships at sea, scientists in the brush, etc. it will be useful.
Now, what kind of deal will there be on these phones on eBay in a few months? ;^)
Ken
1. What becomes of the satellites?
...
Well, my bet is the NSA will "borrow" them. Or else the military wing will use them as "hot rocks" for space defense. Sadly, due to Bill G's and Paul A's holdings, they won't be used to bombard Redmond
2. Ham Radio use.
Nah
3. Who owns them?
The country that the company resides in. AKA The United States of America. But if truly abandoned and noted as such, you could get salvage rights. My bet is the govt agency that takes them will file under the Black Budget restrictions, so you won't know they own them.
4. Can we pirate them? (bonus question)
Yes. Satellites keep working even after the ground crews stop them. Just give them the power up signal and reprogram them. This will show up in the next Bond movie "The Spy Who Spied On Me", when the evil Bill Sateg tries to rule the world, forgetting that he already owns it.
Will in Seattle
gotta love those faq's at the bottom of the page...
q: can motorola help me out at all in finding an alternative satellite service provider?
a: motorola cares deeply about its customers. However, motorola feels it cannot provide you any more help than listing a couple of phone numbers at this time.
While I'm not a lawyer and I don't play one on TV, if I remember rightly (My minor was Space Studies from UND) spacecraft are under the same salvage rules as abandoned ships at sea.
Now just cause Iridium is out of business doesn't classify these as abandoned craft. However if Iridium's offices etc is entirely shutting down and no more signals are sent to these craft then indeed it would seem that someone with "broadcast" capabilities could take over themselves a satellite provided they have the knowledge, software to do so.
I'm sure no matter what this will be a first in the realms of space law. If I were Iridium I'm most certainly want to give these satellites over to someone, otherwise it could be bumper cars in outspace. Certainly don't want somebody unqualified hacking on a spacecraft's navigations. (Scenes from MST 3K the Movie start rolling through my head)
Regards,
One of Iridium's press releases stated that if a "White Knight" was found that they had drawn up a plan for restructuring in the coming year. They also stated that the same plan had steps for de-orbiting the satellites, a process that they expect to take 6 or 7 months. http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/nm/20000306/tc/teleco ms_iridium_4.html
Either that, or they will become the new Skynet.
bun-fhuinneog agam!
Boy Plankton
Still waiting to see if JAWSAT or ASUSAT are going to be turned on.
I don't myself own an Iridium phone or pager (i haven't exactly found the need for one, yet), but I'm guessing that the people that bought an Iridium phone or pager are going to be pissed (they're pretty expensive...). Unless of course it's all big companies that bought them!
Maan
Naw, seriously. Perhaps they can be re-utilized to provide connectivity, or if worse comes to worse, the shuttle can scoop 'em up and melt 'em down to fund the ISS. :)
In addition to desperately looking for new financing, the Iridium folks will be preparing a "de-orbiting" plan for safe destruction of the Iridium constellation. (If they were just left derelict, they might cause significant problems down the road.)
If there is no last-minute financial rescue by the deadline, the de-orbiting plan will start, although it may take up to six months to complete.
And a pity for the readers of Aftonbladet. Now they will not be able to chat with him on his way to the North Pole.
March 15th is my birthday, so how about giving me one hell of a birthday present. Then I will decide what to do (and will accept any of your suggestions) with the satellites..
Some of the work I do is in the space debris area, specificaly in collision avoidance. I'm not an expert, but I believe that all recent satelites are supposed to file a plan for what to do at their end of life. For LEOs (Low Earth Orbit satelites) that usually involves deorbiting them so they either burn up entierly or what doesn't burn up lands in the ocean where it isn't likely to hit something. The Iridium birds will only last a few more years before they fall out of the sky on their own. Since nobody seems to want them, I suspect they will get dumped in the Pacific.
-- Any statement of the form "X is the one, true Y" is FALSE.
To Whome it may concern:
It has my come to your attention that failing to find a buyer you will soon abandon your network of communications satellites, known as Iridium.
I am prepared to offer $100.00 US for your satellite network.
Thank you for your attention to this matter. I'm sure you will agree that such a remarkable sum underscores the seriousness of my offer.
Regards,
........
____________________________________
-- I beleve you'll like this -->
Echelon. How convenient. Abandoned communications satellites from an NSA-friendly company!
I fail to see the logic behind abandoning billions of dollars worth of sattelites.
When you post an FAQ, don't you usually only post questions that have answers, not "We cannot compare other sattellite phone providers." It looks kinda silly...- --------------
---------------------------------------
What if, instead, they were not made of reflective material?
The handful of iridium satellites is nothing compared to all the other debris and satellites that we have put in orbit - if iridium satellites are such nuisances to astronomers, then what about all the other ones?
Is there a set of rules for satellite construction? I'm sure there some rules that everyone follows loosely.
Is there an international organization that regulates satellite launch schedules? I'm sure there is, it's too important for there not to be any.
If satellites were problems to astronomers, should we be concerned about all the satellite launches that seem to happen all the time?
Certainly, the iridium satellites can be put to use doing something, otherwise we'd just billions of dollars of floating space junk?
Iridium will go into bankruptcy, and the bankruptcy trustee will sell the satellite network for whatever it will bring. The proceeds, likely to be pennies on the dollar, will go to creditors. There will be no abandoned satellites.
The frequencies were protected by international treaty. Additionally, MOT agreed to respect the critical frequencies when they received nearby frequencies. Later, they went back on their word and ignored the international treaty.
In fairnes to MOT, they have worked with the major radio astronomy facilities to avoid making the frequency completely useless by scheduling windows when they would significanly limit their interference in certain locations. However, they still interfere and it makes scheduling time an even for obnoxious task for astronomers who try to maximize the utility of their observatories.
Even worse, it sets a very bad precedent for a big company to threaten to ruin an important scientific resource, and then "be nice" by being better than originally planned. What if every big company decides to put up a big network of satelites interfering with one frequency range, but agrees to be nice in certain locations at certain times? Not good for science!
They are not folding the company yet ... just discontinuing service. If and when they fold the enterprise, the satellites will be sold to pay of creditors.
(Link is to the American (only one?) projext).
___________________
He who fights and runs away,
Isnt iridium also swahili for wormwood?????
http://www.livejournal.com/users/cixel
open source it now. I refuse to use a cell phone that I don't have the source code to.
IANAL of course, but I know that anything over 200 miles off the coast in the ocean is complete legal limbo, I would imagine the same thing applies in space, although there may very well be UN agreements of something because we couldn't have people making attack satellites to kill ours and getting away with it just because its in space (like you can go 200 miles out from the coast into the ocean, slay a bunch of people, then come back with no repercussions (at least from what I've read about hospice cruises where they euthenize dozens of elderly sick people once they get 200 miles out))
Esperandi
What exactly is an Iridium Flash? i know that iridium is a communications satellite but what makes it so flashable. Is it the sun refelcting off it or its it something thats special for iridium. And if it is the sun why doesnt every other satellite do the same thing? Lets just take 'em all down!!!
Iridium (or rather, Motorola) is planning on deorbiting the satellites, rather then just leaving millions of dollars worth of stuff up there. I read it on Ars, but they didn't seem to site a source (besides the guy who sent in the story) so it might not be true. But they're obviously not gonna to play finders-keepers with the things. If they don't find a buyer (I don't know what they would be good for, maybe some sort of wireless internet or something, or just use them to tie into another network), then they'll certainly take them down and sell them for something else (i bet a lot of the equipment in them is useful in and of itself).
Sorry guys, no free satellites...
Then again, I could be wrong.
I mean, how else are you going to be able to check your email and read Slashdot while trekking across the Antarctic?
As it goes, last Tuesday they talked about Irridium because some guy was bailing on them, it's the guy who owns vodafon. Anyhow, if nobody buys irridium then they will stop driving the satallites and after a while they will all enter the Earth's atmosphere and burn up. A few of them might make it a while but they will all suffer the same fate eventually. CNBC made it sound like on March 17 they will turn the satallites off and just let them drift.
It's really kind of a bummer, I love the idea of a universal mobile phone. There are tons of applications for it. Irridium has been mismanaged since the get-go though. Nobody is going to be a $3000 portable phone and pay $8 a minute for service except for in the most extreme circumstances or they are the most reckless rich guys around. From what I've heard the line quality wasn't so hot either. My PCS phone works just about everywhere I've been in this country and I could easily buy a few more and use call forwarding in other jurisdictions if I needed it for much less than Irridium. There are also alternative satallite world phone ventures that are going on. I also think there are some laws in the US about satallite communication. I think NORAD or some other government agency will track your satallite and possibly even guide it for you if you for some small fee, that fee being something like they have access to your uplinks. I'm not 100% sure on it, but I suspect that once Irridium shuts down they will make sure the satallites cannot be used by anybody. I think there are a number of fears about people sniffing intelligence data to our spy satallites or determining where our spy satallites are. Perhaps someone else in the know knows the details on this.
Whatever the reasons, I'm pretty sure they will just turn the satallites off and let them crash.
This is my signature. There are many signatures like it but this one is mine..
I'm sure we could find some fun use for them.
I must say that for what Iridium did, it did well. Technically. (Since I worked on the software I'm not going to say it sucked ;-) It's just too bad that by the time Iridium came to market, the market didn't care!
As far as the satellites are conserned, they will either (1) go in to safe mode then auto-deboost after some period of silence, or (2) Motorola will continue to spend money to command the satellites in order to control their descent so no one gets banged by space junk.
I seriously doubt the constellation will be of much use for anything other than what it was designed for, since the satellites were built for cheap and Iridium would have liked to capitalize on any alternative use.
http://www.spacedaily.com/spacecast/news/iridium-0 0d.html ...
What a waste
Have you tried Powdermilk Biscuits?
My, they're tasty, and expeditious...
thank you.
Hmmn. A friend of mine _JUST_ bought an Iridium pager and service so that she could stay in touch for her 6+ month trip to the Near and Middle East. Now, less than a month after this purchase, the service is completely going away.
Will she have some kind of recourse?
Will she still have this recourse available several months from now, when she actually gets back to someplace with enough connectivity to file a claim?
Enquiring minds want to know.
--
Ahh, nostalgia. In the 80's a bloke by the name of Andrew Braybrook wrote a C64 game named Uridium, fly over a satellite, shoot bits off it. I didn't realise it was training for real life...
According to space law one can not be held responsible for the damage an abandoned spacecraft causes. This means that an abandoned spacecraft can be subject to salvage by anyone who feels like it and has the means to do so.
I am not a space law expert, but I did take up a course on space law in college as part my aerospace enigineering degree. During this course the professor gave us an exammple of such a situation in which a sovjet satellite with a nuclear reactor on board caused some damage to other spacecrafts. The sovjets could not be held responsible because they had officially abandoned the spacecraft. It ended up that others had to clean up the mess.
So if these iridium satellites would be officially abandoned anyone who feels like it could try to "safe" them.
"Basic research is what I am doing, when I don't know what I'm doing."
Werner von Braun (The big boss at NASA a while back)
Wasn't there a TV show in the 70's/80's with a similar theme, some guy who owned a salvage yard built his own rocket to salage all the stuff they left behind them on the moon.
Maybe this could be the ultimate open source project, we already have the open source OS and tools, open source chip design, all we need now is a few open source rocket designs are we are on our way.
NASA use Linux maybe they would like to help out, and the Russions have all that old equipment lying around.
I think the TV show was called Salvage, and the main character was played by Andy Griffeth.
Apparently the orbit was so low that they predicted satellites would burn up in the atmosphere every 3 or 4 years, and they would just launch replacements as the others fell off. I remember thinking this was a pretty wasteful way to run a business, replacing your entire infrastructure every 4 years.
Having never followed up on the company, I wonder if this is the way they ended up implementing it. If so, I'm guessing they'll just leave the space network as it is until it clears itself up.
Here is a Reuters article with information about the Iridium destruction plans.
On Sunday ICO Global Communications is going to lanuch its first sat as part of a global moblie network
d _673000/673221.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/sci/tech/newsi
A couple of adventurers here in sweden is trying to ski to the north pole and they are abadoned up in the arctic ice when iridium threw in the towel. Well they got some radio backup systems but kinda abandoned.
Well, I hope they get rid of those satellites before some aliens get here. If the satellites stay up, it will be bad news. Then the alien mothership can hijack the abandon satellites to transmit a countdown attack sequence to all these big killer ships.
Why don't you sue them for putting that shit up in the sky? Clearly they could have designed them so they don't fuck with the pursuit of science.
The bond holders, the people who lent Iridium money, will be the shareholders in a reorganized company. As long as they can pay the salaries of the people who work there, Iridium can go on. Perhaps the new management team can come up with a sleeker design for their phones. Motorola is finding out that it's cheaper to lay cable on the bottom of the ocean and along railroad tracks. GBLX !!!!!!!!!
is the most typical end-of-life for decomissioned satelite. I don't mean that the device "spontaneously" blows up though it is not unheard of for the self-destruct to be issued. Most usual is that a course-change is issued which takes the satellite into a decayed orbit resulting in it's burning up in the atmosphere or more commonly landing in the ocean and breaking up on impact. This isn't usually problematic since these are hardly what anyone would call implementations of "advanced" or "secret" technology.
The older generation originally cost as much as 1 Billion dollars to make and put into orbit which naturally included everything from actual manufacturing of the device to the cost of groundcrew and rocket fuel, so these will be a costly writeoff for someone. Moderm satellites have benefitted immensely from the advance of technology in all sectors and can cost as little as 100Million for the whole thing. Naturally it depends on whether the device is intended for Low-elevation or high-elevation orbit planes, but that just means that if the need to rebuild a satellite network arises it will cost much less for much more capability.
The example I like to use is Anik E2, which up until recently was used for broadcasting C-band television signals versus the new "high-performance" NIMIQ satellite which broadcasts all digital signals. Both of these also broadcast radio and comm signals..
Here we have 80+ satellites in orbit that nobody wants, and I still have to access the net at 56k.
The world is full of irony.
By the way, Heavens Above is a great place to look if you want to know when and where iridium flashes will take place. I'm sure those will be missed...
-CausticPuppy "Of all the people I know, you're certainly one of them." -Somebody I don't know
Yeah, it was the weirdest thing I had ever seen. Very much influenced by BattleStar Galactica, as I recall.. they were out at about the same time.
The internet is great, the internet is good, the internet has a Salvage 1 Fan Page.
- jon
Ganymede, a GPL'ed metadirectory for UNIX
It's kind of like the pony express I suppose.
The problem of course is the phones and airtime were too expensive, and they didn't work indoors.
I have a poster up in my house called "The Spirit of Iridium." Looks like that is all it is going to be... an idea.
if iridium doesn't get aquired, then they stated earlier that they are going to (after the 17th) start working on how to safely de-orbit their satellites. According to an article I read, too bad i don't remember where, or I would post a link there. Maybe C|net?
Opinionated Law Student Strikes Again!
[Humor]
Which one of us will be the first to put a prank EBay auction on one or all of the Iridium Satellites?
All that money burning up in the atmosphere....
[/humor]
Dear or dear they should auction them off on ebay, i'm sure the russians could scrounge up some US Foriegn aid money to pay for them. And then disperse the money to the poor share holders of this doomed company
I saw someone who looked like McCain at Motorola in Phoenix just today!
no you didn't. STFU, okay? now. you didn't see anything, anywhere. nothing. period. in fact, you weren't in phoenix. trust me, you weren't. got it?
they wheeled it out on a fork lift.
i can categorically and absolutely deny any truth whatsoever to this report. it did not happen. period. got it? senator mccain was not at the motorola facility in phoenix. there is no truth to reports which suggest the contrary. those are unsubstantiated rumors, which are not only libelous but in fact very close to treason, as sen. mccain is a high government official and you are making some very serious allegations here -- allegations which are, as i've said, absolutely unfounded.
What could be going on?
i think we've discussed this enough.
...Cidera. (Look at www.cidera.com) for those that don't know already. Nevertheless, I know some people who were at the "closing of the doors" and they said that the gear was "Gateway" gear--not sure if the same Gateway as the commercials with The Who in the background, I wasn't that involved.
Tax writeoff.
I don't need large brains to have a good time.
I figure these satellites could be sold. Free shipping would be a plus. The only catch would be they could only be delivered to the water and they can only promise accurate delivery within 7500 miles :) (oh, and AS IS)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004_U.S._Election_c
Typically when a company goes under, the assets (things like accounts recievable, and oh... satellites for example) become the property of the secured creditors. So the people that loaned money to Iridium, will have first dibs on the birds. Then once they are made whole (paid back, as if that will happen), the suppliers are in line next to get a chunk of the assets. Then once everyone that loaned money to the company is happy, the investors get what's left.
My guess would be, that the bondholders would be able to sell off the satellites for some other purpose, but I wouldn't expect them to be cut loose as space-salvage.
"Politicians are interested in people. Not that this is always a virtue. Fleas are interested in dogs." P.J. O'Rourke
Specifically, depending on how you "take it out", you are likely to introduce a lot of orbital debris. An energetic disassembly (i.e., you blow it up) will result in many small particles being spread out with a broad range of directions and velocities. Many of these will be directed into the atmosphere, where they'll burn up. Many will be directed out into space: if they have sufficient velocity, they'll leave the earth system, however, most will assume a very "tall" elliptical orbit and will burn up in the atmosphere when trying to approach perigee.
But there is a class of the particles that will remain in orbit. These will often have an interesting orbital dynamic in that they'll all have orbital foci at the point of the detonation and at the opposite point on the orbital sphere.
For more information, and some diagrams, look up references to the disastrous Haystack project.
Also, remember that objects in orbit are (not surprisingly) moving at orbital velocity, which is quite fast. Even a small particle or fleck of paint is an amazing kinetic energy weapon at that speed -- especially if you're in a different orbit, and the net vector adds. There are some scary pictures of aluminum portions of the Long Duration Exposure Facility (LDEF) that were badly pitted or blasted through by debris that was 1mm or smaller.
That's why the shuttle always tries to keep the narrow profile (keep tangent to the orbital sphere). It's also why you couldn't get me out on a space walk!
Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachtani?
www.fogbound.net
AFAIK, Iridium cannot support data transmission --which is the primary reason McCaw opted not to bail them out, since he can't use their birds for Teledesic.
The Iridium Satellite communications systems are essentially beefed up GSM towers. Apparently, many of the parts and even model numbers are the same as those you see irradiating your neighbourhood. Some of the Iridium phones claimed to support 2400 baud communications, and we all know that 8kbps is required for a reasonable digital voice transmission.
Also keep in mind that an unreliable and slow connection like this would be almost unusable with TCP (which was never designed with satellite communications in mind).
It would really only be useful in remote areas, or for people who move around a lot, the same reason Iridium was created in the first place. Obviously this is not a profitable business model.
Last I checked space law... (about 3 years ago) anything in geosynchronous orbit above a country if not already owned can be claimed by that country in a widening airspace according to the height of orbit. I don't know if this is applicable anymore due to an interesting set of legislation about the issue due to certain corps. testing the legality.
"Arrogance and Stupidity all in the same package. How efficient of you." - Londo Mollari, Babylon 5.
Enter Ignition. Another News.com article mentions the new wireless investment group started by former Microsoft execs and McCaw Cellular execs. About $140 million was initially invested by Qualcomm among others... I wonder if they're considering stepping up to the plate to acquire the sattelites. Could they be thinking about competing against their former figureheads? I know I'd be more comfortable with competition in the worldwide wireless data market... especially where Gates is involved.
Someone was interested in Ham Radio use of the sats (like the Phase 3D or Oscars). There's a lot of them up there (66 Iridium sats), but they're out of frequency. Also, they're right in the LEOsat hotspots for spectrum use, so I don't doubt that they'll re-farm them out or resell them.
Satellites: 66
Orbital Planes: 6
Orbit Height: 780 km (these are LEOsats)
Inclination of Orbital Planes: 86.4
Orbital Period: 100 min. 28 sec.
Lifetime: 5 to 8 years
Frequencies and Rates
Telephone and Messaging Service Links are 1616 - 1626.5 MHz (L-Band)
Intersatellite Links are 23.18 - 23.38 GHz (Ka-Band)
Ground Segment Links:
Downlinks: 19.4 - 19.6 GHz (Ka-Band)
Uplinks: 29.1-29.3 GHz (Ka-Band)
Digital Voice, Fax, and Data are transmitted at 2.4 Kbps
"First things first, but not necessarily in that order."
- Doctor Who
Actually, I've seen quite a few satellite "flashes."
The first was when I was very young, and I thought I was seeing a UFO.
You can observe the phenomena yourself. The best time is to look after sunset, when there is a minimal amount of light over the horizon, and stars are out. Look straight up, or slightly to the west. A new moon makes a much better night to observe satellites.
Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellites are quite visible during the above times, and you can spot them as a quick moving object about as bright as a dim star. If you follow one on it's path, if you are lucky you might see it "flash" as a flat panel catches the sun. This isn't very common, but more common with the Iridium birds. If you are VERY lucky, you may observe an even rarer sight: A rotating satellite that continally "flashes." I've only seen this once. I was in Oklahoma at the time.
"Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives" should be a convenience store, not a government agency.
Iridium may be going under, but I seriously doubt that Motorola's going to relinquish rights to infrastructure they've paid for. They'll either try to find some way to get their investment back, or failing that, sell the satellite network to the highest bidder.
Anyone care to buy a global cellphone network? US $20 billion (Cheap). Who knows how much Iridium would be worth to the right party. If it ever was sold at a serious discount to its original price the acquiring company would have all the assets of Iridium with none of the debts.
These can be used for wireless networking if they will accept broadcast input. Each person would have to have a large dish, with a possibly very powerful signal, a possible safety concern. However, current dish-based wireless reaches 11mbps for about $500. If the fees were low ($15-30), I could go for that. It won't happen though, becuase satellite maintainence is pricy, and launch costs increase the price of each satellite by several million dollars, making it way too expensive for enough users to run it even if it could be done. Travis forkspoon@hotmail.com
Motorola's Wyman says that the company has a "very controlled process" for bringing down the satellites. "They will be brought down in stages, not all at once," he said.
It is expected to take a few years for all 66 satellites to come down.
Check out http://www.space.c om/space/business/iridium_motorola_000308.html for the full story :)
The Iridium webpage says these sattelites have an expected lifetime of 5 to 8 years. But I thought low-earth orbits decayed in a couple years. Anyone know how long we've got till these high-tech swords of Damoclese re-enter the atmosphere, and you absorbs the liability if the land on say... Bill Gates new house?
"Freedom means freedom for everybody" -- Dick Cheney
Does anyone know how many channels that these satellites will support? I used to do satcom for the USAF, and it probably wouldn't be too hard to communicate with the satellite. The big problem would be getting information about the actual satellite like: What uplink and downlink freqs they use, how many channels can they handle at once, what is the data rate at which they talk to each other (yeah, yeah, I know it's prolly analog), what type of multiplexing do they use, et al.
Big problem: Uncle Sam is going to get his hands on those things before anyone else, so good luck finding any info on how to control the satellites. You're going to need a lot more equipment than just a phone and it's 2400bps data stream.
Big problem 2: If nobody claims those puppies, they will probably have to bring them down. Maybe we can convince them to bring them all down over the U.S. during the evening on the 4th of July! We'd have our first man made meteor shower!
The company cannot leave the satellites there. They will be brought back down and burnup by judicial order. It is unclear how this will be paid for.
The judge has mandated that Iridium or its creditors "deorbit" the satellites, although it was not clear who was going to pay for this.
It was a beautiful -6 mag flare. Truely cool, thanks slashdot. :)
Crash them into Earth and search for intelligent life. (Good luck finding any). Or, better yet, watch the president of Iridium start taking potshots at his mother-in-law's house starting around 11:55PM ;)
--
I think there is a world market for maybe five personal web logs.
Maybe they can figure out a way to move these suckers into orbit around the Moon or Mars to use for communication on the surface. Astronauts on cell phones- I knew it would happen.
...of keeping the program running ? Obviously, scratch on the initial capital investment (esp if they're talking bringing them down), but would setting the airtime cost to something reasonable to stimulate consumer interest ever make it profitable ?
If it's simply too much ahead of its time, would simply suspending the program and bring it back later be feasible (and profitable) ?
I'm sure there's a need, just not at current costs for consumer.
-fl
...they killed Iridium!
You bastards!!!
For an excellent on-line collection of relevant international documents and statutes relating to space law, check out the Archimedes web site. A survey of applicable treaties can be found at the Space web site.
An article on the point raised in the note is: "Emerging law of outer space - the analogy of maritime salvage" / Almond, Harry H., Jr. / 19 J. OF SPACELAW #1, 1991, P67. You should be able to find this in most law school libraries.
The problem with the salvage analogy is that there is at present no legal mechanism for a nation to absolve its responsibility for objects placed into outer space. There doesn't really seem to be legal recognition of abandoned property in space. I understand that the prohibitions against military operations in the Outer Space Treaty have been argued to preclude private salvage as well. This is not to say that salvage is prohibited, only that interest in any property rights to the salvage estate are unclear.
Though I practice intellectual property law, these remarks should be considered coming from a lay person -- I have absolutely no real clue what is going on in these space law/admiralty issues beyond a rudimentary understanding of the Space Patent Act.
So lets start the bidding; I bid $150 for all the satelites, and $25 for the ground stations.
Wonder if ebay will carry this?
The problem with Iridium was that their satellites only had a 5+ year lifetime, of which 2+ is now used. So a buyer was looking at a lifetime of 3 years before they had to start replacing the entire constellation (88 or so?). Not very smart.
Any anyway, as someone else has pointed out, Iridium will have to deorbit them at the end of their lifetime or before, presumably at company shutdown time.
Iridium has already announced they will be retrieving the satellites over the next 7 months.
The simplest would be a remotely controlled drone with a net and conductive weighted wires -- the net for satellite capture when speed almost matched, then release weights and any tumbling will pull the wires out; the conductive wires generate electricity due to the Earth's magnetic field and slow the whole thing down.
But first someone has to build and launch a bunch of the things...
If you really love the idea of a universal mobile phone, check out Globalstar. They're just getting started, but the prices are better than Iridium, and the hardware looks MUCH more straightforward.
Because they're just getting going, all of the resellers, save one, pretty much have the same hardware prices and the same rate plans, but $1500 for a phone and $1.30-$1.70 a minute is a heck of a lot better than either the Iridium inital pricing or the Inmarsat stuff. I've seen AMPS carriers with roaming rates close to that at times!
The phone doesn't look like a bad art school/masonry project either. (The Iridium phones had huge hulking cradles for making the satellite part work, which seemed a bit kludgy.)
Qualcomm is making them a pretty spiffy phone for Globalstar that speaks CDMA 800/AMPS/Global*.
The one area where Iridium's ridiculous overengineering was nice was that you pretty much had one phone # that would follow you anywhere. G* doesn't have that kind of switch integration yet, so you have to have a CDMA/AMPS # and a Globalstar #, but you can certainly call forward
between them.
G* just lit up service in late February, so it's a bit early to tell how things will fare, but they seem to be doing things right for a large-scale market approach.
By the way, I tried one of the Iridium phones, and found the audio quality to be pretty nice. It was GSM after all, so I expected it to be decent. I'm not sure how G*'s CDMA will sound, but their satellites are in lower orbits, so the latency should be less than Iridium's which was almost imperceptible to me. (Echo cancellers have improved much since the days of crossbar switches.)
I don't work for G* or anything, but I expect to be a customer RSN.
Recent Iridium stories have mentioned auctioning, but as the corporation seems to have run out of funding there is even less chance of funding. There has been speculation at this point that companies who are interested in the Iridium system will wait for bankruptcy, then negotiate for the assets at a cut rate. Others have noted that everyone already knows they're desperate and any one interested can negotiate right now.
Has anyone thought about the connection between iridium's failure and the fact that it was the one of (very) few methods of communication (that had the potential for widespread use) that the NSA couldn't intercept reliably? Just a thought...
On their website, there is no mention of the problems, no signs of discontinued service. Hell, I could even order something from their online store tonight if I wanted to.
Seems a little strange to me...
EC
EverCode
Besides the price, Iridium had performance issues. It was based on GSM, but its link power budget limited the net bit rate to 2400, which meant that the voice quality wasn't so hot. And its data applications are somewhat limited, though by no means nonexistent (not everything is fast web browsing!).
But it didn't work in a car. It didn't work indoors. It didn't even work well through leafy trees, or if buildings were in the way. It was for people who were "out standing in their field."
They designed it before cell phones were widely available around the world, and continued to build it for business travelers even after that market no longer needed them. They designed it with complex sat-to-sat relaying, bypassing cheap terrestrial fiber optics. Again, a 1985 design decision gone bad. These errors add up.
It was called Iridium because that precious metal is element number 77, and there were to be 77 satellites in the original constellation. They later lowered it to 66, a decision which might have strained its performance budget even more than it saved on cost... but they didn't change which element it was named for. How fitting, though, that element 66 is named Dysprosium. (Other slashdotters are invited to check out its etymology.)
Look in the upper right-hand corner of this page:
http://www.iridium.com/docs/copyright.ht ml
I don't think they implied the meaning to be what we are thinking! Haha!
EC
EverCode
Offtopic maybe but it isn't really even that. The only moderation this deserves is +1 funny.
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ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
The great power that is the slashdot dumbass. Able to change reality with a single false assumption... assumptions that propagate like viruses acrost the sea of idiocy!
[ c h a d o k e r e ]
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
Offtopic maybe but it isn't really even that. The only moderation this deserves is +1 funny.
Unsuccessful? Abandoned?
Where are the paranoid? Perhaps Iridium was wildly successful :-) Maybe it was all a ruse to get military satellites/weapons platforms into space.
Now that the satellites are up, no point in continuing with the ruse.
:-)
The reflective material is most likely used for thermal control. Without it the spacecraft would most likely become too hot and burn out. Yes, there are other cooling mechanisms, but making a surface reflective is pretty darn cheap and easy.
The handful of iridium satellites is nothing compared to all the other debris and satellites that we have put in orbit - if iridium satellites are such nuisances to astronomers, then what about all the other ones?
Who says they aren't? ;-) Seriously, though, most satellites are in orbits that aren't such a problem:
GeoSynchronous Earth Orbits (GEO) are way the hell away from the earth, and orbiting at the equator, and really easy for astronomers to avoid. The satellites are also in predictable places in the sky (by design). There are many hundreds of satellites in the GEO ring. These are the satellites you have the most immediate contact with - pagers, cable TV, satellite TV, etc.
Polar or Sun Synchronous satellites (weather satellites and land imaging, for instance) are in orbits that run north-to-south and generally pass overhead only very infrequently, and very quickly. Usually there's only a few satellites in these sorts of orbits.
LEO satellites, like Iridium, are pretty common. They're used for a whole host of different applications. I suppose theoretically any of these would pose the same problems as Iridium to astronomers, however they are usually at altitudes where they move too fast or too slow for them to be much of a problem. Iridium is a bit different in that it is a "Constellation". By *design* you're supposed to always have one in view; their velocity is set such that it "maximizes" the problem to astronomers. ;-) I don't know if there are currently other constellation systems like Iridium in orbit, but I know there's been a bunch designed on paper (I should know, I helped design a few).
You may find this an interesting irony... Hubble is in one of these LEO orbits (so that the shuttle can get to it). So one of the things fouling up the Earth-based telescopes is a better telescope. ;-) (Actually, Hubble is at a low enough orbit that it probably moves too quickly to be much of a problem, but there's other telescopes up there.)
Is there a set of rules for satellite construction? I'm sure there some rules that everyone follows loosely. Is there an international organization that regulates satellite launch schedules? I'm sure there is, it's too important for there not to be any.
Lots of red tape. Remember, your government has had its hand in this industry since its inception. ;-)
If satellites were problems to astronomers, should we be concerned about all the satellite launches that seem to happen all the time?
From an astronomy standpoint, no, I wouldn't worry. Let me explain.
First, consider that the vast majority of satellites are going into orbits that for one reason or another won't be a problem. Period.
Second, step back and give thought to how astronomy has developed and evolved. Long ago, we knew so little about the heavens that a simple telescope out the window of a city apartment could generate a vast wealth of scientific data. As they gathered more data and started looking for higher quality images they were forced to move out of the cities, eventually to remote islands and mountaintops, in order to find clear, light-polution-free skies. Would it have made any sense to restrict electric lights in cities simply for astronomer's benefits?
Today, to achieve the major scientific advancements scientists are having to go into space orbit. Nothing we can trace to ourselves as the fault - it's the atmosphere itself that's at issue, this time. Does it make any more sense to hinder commercial spacecraft than it would have to place controls on electric lighting?
I've had the opportunity to work on some conceptual designing for the next generation telescopes. Very cool things are being designed for the new "mountaintops". In fact, NGST (Next Generation Space Telescope) is being designed to orbit a gravitational anomaly! Check it out: http://www.trw.com/ngst/ (My job is to come up with a propulsion system that'll keep it orbiting this point, without fouling the optics, and is as efficient as possible.)
Certainly, the iridium satellites can be put to use doing something, otherwise we'd just billions of dollars of floating space junk?
Perhaps... However it's not like we can retrofit them with radar sensors or something. I'm sure within a few months we'll hear some novel new use for them, but these spacecraft were pretty optimized for the task and business model they were set for.
I must say that for what Iridium did, it did well. Technically. (Since I worked on the software I'm not going to say it sucked ;-) It's just too bad that by the time Iridium came to market, the market didn't care!
Iridium had a few more launch failures than planned, but yes, the system as a whole worked pretty much as planned (as far as I know). It overlooked the massive drop in cell phone costs, as well as the rise of the Internet.
As far as the satellites are conserned, they will either (1) go in to safe mode then auto-deboost after some period of silence, or (2) Motorola will continue to spend money to command the satellites in order to control their descent so no one gets banged by space junk.
The satellites will (eventually) decay and burn up in the orbit no matter what anyone does. The orbit is high enough that this won't happen any time soon (unlike the space station, which is at such a low altitude that it'll fall back to Earth if you so much as look at it crosseyed. I don't think the satellites have sufficient fuel to conduct a controlled reentry, but it doesn't matter - these things are small enough that they'll burn up completely before coming anywhere near the ground.
Seems to me that destroying them would be a terrible waste...sounds like they could live happily up there for almost 7 more years. They should donate the system to the UN Peace Keepers or the Red Cross, or Educational / Scientific groups that require communications in the field. Just reprogram the system to disable all billing/call acocunting set a limit of 10 minutes per call and go nuts. It could be a multi-billion $$$$ write-off for the company and great humanitarian gesture. Why waste it?
I can't find anything about a 'disastrous Haystack project. There's a Haystack observatory that's mentioned that is capable of traking small debris (2mm and larger), but nothing that seems to pass as what you described.
The receiver will sell the satellites to somebody. There are too many useful applications for them, not just continuing to run them as a cheaper satellite phone service.
They could probably do satellite radio, for example. National (or regional as you wish, or global) stations that don't fade as you move from town to town. Plus updates on road conditions, weather etc. for your car or marine computer.
Great for lojack GPS location transmission for trucks, marine, aircraft.
Useful for voice and data on planes going over the ocean.
Voice and low-rate data for truly remote locations.
"Stop the Atrocity" -- build digital cameras combined with Iridium phones. Airdrop them on war zones. Tell the victims of atrocities to snap digital snapshots of anybody who attacks them or any atrocity they see for instant upload. The mere existence of these cameras and their link to the press might be enough to stop some war crimes. Isn't that worth it? Imagine having them in Kosovo, Sarajevo, Tibet?
Low-volume remote transmissions from things like scientific sensors of climate, air pollution data.
Has it been over a year since you last donated to the Electronic Frontier Foundation
In the event that Iridium service becomes unavailable, we would be happy to talk to you about other possible communications solutions.
Well the reason I would have one of these phones is because I'm going someplace that doesn't have phones. So how the heck am I supposed to talk to them about my service being unavailable?
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Why don't they just tweak the orbits to sling the satellites at Mars and crash 'em in to the planet? I mean, jeez, NASA could do this, and probably get all those satellites cheap, and that way we're not spending $100M on some damn thing that was supposed to *land* on the planet. With luck, we can make the Martians eat flaming death and get revenge for them waxing so many of our spacecraft! Hell, spare a few for the moon! Maybe if it was done right, you could carve some company's logo into the surface of the moon with them. Hell, lash them to the ISS and reuse whatever parts you can, like the solar panels... come on, burning these things up in the atmosphere is only going to leave more junk in space, so why not fling them away from the earth?
Then in 1991, following on my legislative successes in space commercialization I went to work with E'Prime Aerospace as Vice President of Public Affairs. I took on that job because they had a potential customer (Norris Satellite Communications -- run by a Dutch Amish expatriate from my ancestral county of Lancaster Pennsylvania) who wanted to launch a geostationary Ka Band satellite called "Norstar", but he couldn't get the license thorugh the FCC. There had never been a Ka Band satellite licensed and there was a lot of conflict over letting this Amish character have the first crack at commercializing the Milstar technology (NASA likes people to think ACTS was the pioneer in Ka band, but even thought ACTS was launched first, the Harris ECL satellite switching guys Norris used did their pioneering work with Milstar, not ACTS). Anyway, to make a long story short, we managed to get the FCC licensing dislodged and the first Ka band satellite license was awarded to Norris, the Amish dude. The satellite specifications called for multiple geostationary Ka band satellites with onboard switching of time division multiplexed spot beams that would allow you to adaptively switch the power (both informational and energetic) to various geographic hotspots as needed. This was getting close to what I had predicted as a geostationary computer network, because the ECL switches were systems that Seymour Cray himself would have respected, and the spot beams made it feasible to load-level much more effectively to stationary ground dishes only inches in diameter. If Cray's gallium arsenide switches, developed for the Cray-4, had made it into production, I think the systems could have been a lot high capacity at lower power while retaining their radiation hard characteristics.
Unfortunately, Norris's satellite system was to go the way of another Norris's (William) Plato system -- to the "before its time" scrap heap of history. The Calling Communications Corporation guys who were cursing me at the 1993 Small Satellite Conference in Logan, UT for grabbing their coveted Ka band first eventually, along with Iridium, got it reallocated. Calling Communications Corporation eventually went away from voice communications to computer networking and changed their name to Teledesic. Everyone seemed to forget about geostationary Ka band computer networking.
Even so, I still think there is enormous opportunity for a geostationary orbital computation satellite network based on phased-array spot beam switching and intersatellite optical links.
Seastead this.
The Iridium satellites are orbiting at 780km. This means they will stay up for thousands of years (at least) if they are not deorbited.
For an interesting discussion of the problem and a novel solution see the Terminator Tether.
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Stop worrying about the risks of nuclear power and start worrying about the risks of not using nuclear power.
Globalstar satellites are much smaller (480kg) and cheaper. They are not switchboards in the sky with satellite cross-links like Iridium. They are just dumb frequency translators ("bent pipe" transceivers).
All the smarts are on the ground. You can think of them as antennas connected to the cellular base station with a really long cable. As a result, they will not work in places like the middle of the pacific ocean. You must be within about 1000km from a ground station. They will also not work in the polar regions. They orbits are inclined and do not cover the poles since there aren't that many customers there... Compare this with Iridum where the poles get the best coverage since all Iridium orbits intersect over the poles.
Globalstar uses CDMA. Your handset can communicate with two or more satellites simultaneously and actually sum their signals coherently before decoding (soft handoff). This should result in better coverage.
Globalstar uses a variation of IS-95 CDMA and probably has the same vocoder - variable rate QCELP at up to 9600 bps. Iridium is not GSM, it uses a low rate vocoder (2400bps).
Both Iridium and Globalstar have negligible propagation delay because of their low orbits. The vocoders cause most of the delay.
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Stop worrying about the risks of nuclear power and start worrying about the risks of not using nuclear power.
After that, maybe I can sell it to the Smithsonian or something. Any ideas?
At least when Commodore went bankrupt my Amiga didn't stop working.
not that i know too much about physics, but i think an international law should be past that every sattelite luanched should have retro rockets. i don't think they need to be very powerful, even a couple of co2 thrusters would start a slow reentry, giving the size of irridiun not much would be left of it.
Where can I warez a copy of redhat?
I'm sure the floating sat's will wind up being used to service communcation and entertainment for those visiting the Mir space station.
As a regular user of Iridium satellite paging, I'm terribly disappointed to hear that they're planning on shutting down. It seems to me that they should have put a little more emphasis on the satellite paging functionality of Iridium, as the pagers are reasonably priced ($295) and the service is, as well ($65). My only real complaint, other than the fact that the pager will be come a paperweight in a few days, has been that the paging coverage suffers somewhat in large buildings and densely populated areas. But the good far outweighed the bad, and I'm really going to miss having a pager that works everywhere, even on airplanes.
Are there other satellite paging companies out there? (By this, I mean pagers that receive messages directly from satellites, not simple nationwide paging.) I've looked around at the other satellite telephony companies and they all seem to be following Iridium's lead, pushing voice applications much harder than paging.
Well, damn, I know what *I'm* doin this weekend!
1979? Seems like it was older. Oh well. Brain fade. That and 'Space 1999', kooky stuff for kidz.
According to Vandenberg AFB, there are still Iridium launches scheduled. Or is that something else?
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IRIDIUM SATELLITE PHONE LEASE
Currently, Lockheed Martin, Telespazio SpA and TRW are combining their resources (financial and technical) to create a system called Astrolink that is a global, GEO-sat ATM-based bandwidth on demand system.
The original design had phase array antennae and intra-satellite optical links; the current desing has a more conventional antenna design and ground-based intra-satellite links. It uses VSAT type terminals and larger 3 meter dishes for network access.
The processing on the ground required to control data traffic is quite hefty, but the system is viable and will be online soon (I hope).
The envisioned use of the system is not for distributed computing but for busines applications such as video conferencing and data exchange.
Everybody loves APOD.
for the guys working on TeleDisc? TeleDisc is a constellation of LEO satillites that will provide high speed internet acess wherever you are in the world (supposedly). It's supposed to work with low power nodes (mobile stuff) and higher power nodes (homes, businesses). I think it would be rad to have a single high speed internet connection that I could take on the road with me when I was out with my laptop. Now I'm wondering if Iridium's failure is going to scare off other satillite based communication ventures.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
Unfortunately, this means bad news for the two swedish adventurers Ola Skinnarmo and Göran Kropp which currently are skiing towards the north pole. No more reports from them then. I hope they have some other ways of communicate with the rest of the world.
I once read that one of the things that made Iridium so expensive was all the ground infrastructure for beaming info from the satilites down to earth. There was also some strange stuff about how if you made a call from a certain country that country's telco would get money for the call, even if the only thing that was being used was the electromagnetic radio spectrum for the transmission.
Anyone know anything about this?
Heck, I'd rather lay claim to the ground stations and government licenses than the stupid pieces of flying metal.
Some people don't know yet ...
278656740 Motorola 9501 Iridium Satellite Pager NR !! at $150
277482885 IRIDIUM SATELLITE PHONE LEASE at $3
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http://www.permanent.com/archimedes with HTML versions of many articles.
InstaPundit! Ahead of the Curve Since 30 Minutes Ago
If you go to the Iridium home page, everything is just fine. You can still order an Iridium phone. No indication that the service may go down within a week, except a vague note about the McCaw deal falling through. Are they in denial over there, or what?
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TangoChaz
"It's not enough to be on the right track -- you have to be moving faster than the train." -- Rod Davis, Editor of Seahorse Mag.
TangoChaz
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Wise men talk because they have something to say, fools because the
Most people probably don't go back through old posts in user info, but sometimes I do so here goes. It's worth a try.
Offtopic maybe but it isn't really even that. The only moderation this deserves is +1 funny.
I agree, and I just clobbered the moderator in metamoderation. What a dumbass. I also nailed the moron who moderated its companion as "Flamebait". It's a drop in the bucket, but ya do whatcha can. If they absolutely had to zap those posts, they could have done "Offtopic", for God's sake. There was no flamebait there. None.
Poetically enough, I'm the troll these guys were responding to when the moderators ambushed 'em