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Iridium Hardware May Burn
Someone from PenguinRadio was one of the first contributors to write about what may be the ultimate fate of the Iridium network: "For those who were wondering what would happen to all the Iridium satellites that are floating around in space, reports out today say they will be brought down into the atmosphere in a massive burn out. The flames should be just about as cool as watching $5 billion in cash burn in a big bonfire pit, which, coincidentially, is how much it cost to put them up." Or $7 billion, depending on who's counting. Divided by 66 satellites, that equals one very expensive meteor shower.
Yeah and I've heard it's a real tough job converting inches to centimetres too.
That's almost a valid argument, except for the fact that there was never any such thing as an "Iridium funding bill."
I'll bet you're one of these people that believes whatever he reads in these state-owned publications (Time, Newsweek, etc.) without asking any questions at all. Do you really believe that Motorola shouldered all (or any) of the financial burden here? If so, you're out of your mind.
get the fuck out of here...
Um, the Iridum funding bill was PROPOSED and PASSED by .. drum roll, you guessed it, a REPUBLICAN congress!!! Look, I'm not a big fan of Clinton's, but if you're going to lay blame, at least point fingers in the right direction.
Well, score one for Nancy Luft. May we all live our lives free from the dangers of the Sputnik mind-control lasers.
Uh... Was that a troll post? (Ha Ha, only serious.)
>No doubt, international pressure motivated the dicision [sic] to drop iridium.
I agree. No doubt.
a) Nah, the ever-climbing _multi_billion_dollar_debt_ had nothing to do with the various international investors' decision to dump the puck... =)
b) Why would secret-police/cabal paranoia be a problem? Not for the reasons you've given; Many other current mobile systems don't have a turnkey system for locating users. And as far as monitoring goes, the system already had the capability to route users' traffic through specific gateways on a per-user basis (all calls made through a phone sold to a person in country X by the Xese Iridium-investing monopoly tel. co. go through the Xese gateway under the strict orders of the Xese regime, say.) If anything, such functionality, when taken in perspective with the major investments in Iridium by various US three-letter agencies, probably alienated a fair number of prospective foreign millitary and government customers, I'd imagine. =)
I mean really thats only fair? You hack em, you keep em. :) What are they gonna do? Trace you down? :) hehe.
a bewoulf cluster of these running Linux. Oh Yeah!!!!
Uh btw AC, 3rd Post.
.
Hmm but someone always WINS that lottery... it just isn't me..
If I remember correctly, there were many-a-post about this in the discussion of the original post:) Just thought I'd make note of that.
This is exactly on topic. How is discussing why Mot is abandoning Iridium off topic? Even if the proposed reason is a bit whacked?
Mot exec: no. No. NO! 5% on the dollar is not enough, dammit!
AC: Well, how about 0% then, sir?
Mot exec: Wow! That's a much better offer. Deal!
Is this some kinda new math?
People keep harping about bandwidth. The Iridium system is presented as a low bandwidth network for a large number of customers. You can easily repartition bandwidth. If I owned an oil shipping fleet and wanted a secure multichannel communications system I would buy the Irridium constellation up in a heartbeat.
The problem of the Iridium flash annoying astronomers is nothing new there are so many LEO satellites allready out there that those people complaining are probanbly seeing non Iridium satelites. LEO satellites are going to be visible to amateur astronomers there is no getting around it.
GEEK Humor & satire and rubber chickens breasts!@!!!@
So even if foreigners out scouting the uninhabited regions of Kraznovia for oil/minerals/ruins are making $8/minute calls. None of that $8 is going into the local mafia. Hence, local gov'ts were pissed at iridium. NO PIECE OF THE BOOTY! GET IT?
Iridium is a private enterprise. Its failure doesn't cost the taxpayer a dime, except for the fact that Motorola will probably try to make up for the loss by padding defense contracts for the next 300 years.
or taking it down on Redmond
Apparantly the developer is going to sell service in places like Central Africa where there are no cell towers or land lines. Of course if you divide the cost of operation by the population of Zaire you still have an expensive phone. Not to mention that everybody that can even afford a loin cloth would have to buy into the service to make it profitable.
Iridium has an array of satelites with the ability to reach (almost) anywhere on the globe. I don't understand why nobody is interested in buying them. Even if the network isn't used for phones, I'm sure someone could come up with a brilliant idea to use all of that globally accessible bandwidth for something useful! I just wish I had more info on their capabilities, and a few billion dollars...
Only if you are doing some simple conic approximations that assume point masses, neglect other perturbations, and include just the spacecraft and a central body. That's fine for a rough back-of-the-envelope conceptual design. Not so good for flying the real thing.
Assuming you include all of the other junk, you get a set of differential equations that describe the motion. That's fine as far as it goes. But we want to do more than describe the motion, we want to put our spacecraft in a particular trajectory that will enable the mission. That's the hard part - you have to solve the DEs, and that ain't easy.
Now you can use conic approximations as a first guess, and numerically integrate your DEs, but you will still need to refine your solution to get something that works in the real world.
Now add mission constraints like launch dates, propellant budgets, pointing requirements, thermal control, and so on, and the problem becomes more complicated.
Don't forget that the spacecraft attitude is coupled to the orbital motion and vice versa - yup, the fun has only just begun!
Ok, so now we've got our perfect trajectory, and it satisfies the mission constraints. But our mathematical model is far from perfect - there will be unaccounted for drift from the nominal orbit. So we have to do some stationkeeping. Better figure out an algorithm for that before we actually launch this sucker. Hope we can stay inside the mission constraints, maintain the required orientation, and obey the laws of physics, all at the same time.
The mechanics are simple in concept, but extremely complex in implementation.
As for navigation, I remember a that the Apollo missions used to verify navigation using simple star based navigational aides like sextants - amazing they made it there and back.
Fine when you have astronauts onboard. Not so easy with an autonomous system. And those astronauts had a massive team of specialists on the ground helping them maintain an accurate assessment of their current state, and where they would be in the future.
Astrodynamics is still a very challenging area of study, and while we know enough to do a few things in space, we are still far from solving every problem.
Don't assume that just because we went to the moon there is nothing left to work out.
Al
You hit the nail on the head on the head brother!
I think they should simulcast it on MTV with rock groups playing in the background.
Dire Straits comes to mind, say "Money for nothing?"............
hmm a few cron jobs and scripts later, you could have a fairly automatic system to take care of itself. Offshore data haven for DeCSS code? Maybe we should park them all in one spot and use them for spare parts for somebodys space station.
It was useful for the Yugoslavian army to call up the US airforce and ask (in an Albanian accent) for a bombing a run on civilian convoys. Worked great!
NEWS FLASH In a recent slashdot article on sleep deprivation, many posters remembered the radio DJ Peter Tripp who once stayed up for 201 hours straight. It was announced today on Howard Stern that he has died, and I would say that it was the doing of the clown. This is sad for us all, staying awake did not help poor Mr. Tripp in his endeavor to avoid being eaten by the clown.
I don't see why they don't donate them to NASA, the UN, the US DOD, Colleges, etc. A few calls to the American Congress could get Motorola the tax break they need without the physical destruction of the equipment. Email your Senator today!
With this half-arsed solution, Motorola is basically sticking its middle-finger in the face of the environment. Why not use all of that orbiting junk as scrap metal? I mean what a waste of precious natural resources...
As a radio astronomer who works in the L-band, all I have to say is:
Burn, baby, burn!!!!!!!
Sorry for griping... it's late...
Buy it for backbone!
Currently there are at least three different groups heading for the north pole (From Iceland, Danmark and Sweden). All three of them set up before the news broke that Iridium might be shut down today. And they are all relying on Iridium for their communication needs! It is known that the Icelandic group is the only one to have a backup plan. But that is only a simple emergency sender. Wow, I wouldnt like to be on the north pole now!
my name is EKG we all do something like this!!! I know i would donate a few dollars like maybe 100$ if i knew it was in my area!!!
Why don't the open up the network, make everybody in the world pay $1 for the company, and have free satellite access for anyone who wants it? I bet I could write a perl script to keep the birds flying...
go get a life dude and stop being a karma whore.
Im surprised the DoD didn't buy it, Iridium sounds like a pretty cool toy. Phones that can actually be used _anywhere_. An internet connection in the middle of the atlantic or in middle of the sahara. That would be 31337. The DoD has tons of $'s to blow, wtf are they doing!@$
In an effort to help the NSA support the UN's effort to establish the New World Order that George Bush Sr. wanted to see come about, the Klinton administration killed off important engineers at Motorola/Iridium in a successful effort to prevent the phones from becoming smaller than a jumbo sizxed box of detergent. This was all reported months ago by the Drudge Report, and investigated after the Republicans started screaming about it. But the cover up was clever. They destroyed all the evidence. Iridium would have meant death to the intelligence gathering capabilities of the nation-state, as well as leaked out the truth about Vincent Foster. This is all true! This is all true! This is all true! And yes, I am a Dr. Laura fan. - Anonymous
That's almost a valid argument, except for the fact that there was never any such thing as an "Iridium funding bill."
The project was privately funded.
I still have an Iridium phone. I feel like a big winner, too. Call me before midnight, and we can complain together. +8816 310 29239
...now, why not turn most of them spaceward instead, and use them as a big virtual radio telescope?
Probably because they don't have the necessary time synching equipment on them, and their recievers aren't sensitive enough.
What if NASA or the DoD bought them on the cheap and used them as inter-orbit signal relays, like the TDRS?
Nah, makes too much sense.
> Sometimes the flares are bright enough to be visible by
> daylight.
Remember, these satellites are in *low* earth orbit. If one of them is in sunlight, and you see it, then that means that you too are on the sunlit-side of earth.
Therefore the Iridium flares can only be seen in daylight (or at dawn/twilight).
I still have some shares of iridium :) I bought at the end, thinking...well, they still have 66 sat's in orbit, and that must be worth something to someone. Geez, the disposability of modern society. I bet Motorola is pissed. PS, I'll trade these shares for a 2/2 condo in Vegas or a box of twinkies or best offer.
Thos phones were too expensive and too bulky. End of discussion.
Errr......if you want an anonymous *untracable* link with someone, walk into *any* shop in the u.k., buy a `pay as you go` phone for 50 quid cash, use it for your dodgy deeds, then chuck it in the river/burn it. The end.
They should may thoose satelites public domain
if a company were able to move those satellites to a higher, more stable orbit they could make money from it just by selling the satellites as scrap metal to the international space station. getting mass into orbit is an EXPENSIVE proposition, and is the one thing of value iridium has now that their service business model has collapsed.
currently we have a lot of 'space trash'. this will end in the future when there is enough infrastructure in orbit to make a secondary service like collecting space junk and selling it as raw materials economically feasible. it will be a great little industry until the space trash is gone, and is basically an inevitable development. if i'm a company with a lot of material in space would i buy items shipped up from earth at an astronomical cost or would it be cheaper to buy space junk from a future sanford & son and turn it into what i need?
companies of today should realize and plan on this. we should designate one of the earth - moon lagrange points as a collecting space for 'trash' that we will want to sift through and use in the future. material in any of the lagrange points should stay there for longer than any current country has existed so it is a decently middle term solution.
Sell them for SDI targets instead of crashing them. The government should pay big $!
For your edification, Iridium did not send the 5-7 billion up *in* the satellites. The money stayed on good ol' t.f. and ended up in somebody's grubby little mitts. So all that will be lost is some iridium, gold & plastic and probably a bunch of sweat. Let's take that money a dig a CHUNNEL across the pacific or something useful.
Why would NASA buy them to use as Mars probes? They don't have big enough rocket engines to get out of Earth orbit. They weren't designed for interplanetary flight, they get their power from solar cells and there isn't as much sunlight out near Mars. Also, they don't have cameras or other instruments. All you could do with them is set up a phone network!!! They're also no use to amateurs since the transponders don't work on the ham frequencies!
In other words, the only thing to do with them is to toast 'em!
You mean, have them go down at 10PM in whatever locality each sattelite is over.
Well, yes, seeing as he said exactly that.
Don't forget, they can't change the hardware in the satellites! They have the Iridium hardware and work differently than Globalstar!
GPS sats are not in geosyncronous orbits. Also, the Iridium satellites are not equipped to be GPS sats, they're cell phone sats! You can't just upload a new program to them to change them!
I hate to post as an AC, and I don't think this runs afoul of my NDA, but I don't want to take the chance, having done some work for them in the past.
I have to take issue with your assertion that people under oppressive regimes could use Iridium "without being tracker, without being monitored", and could "bypass local controls."
Iridium didn't offer service in any country where they weren't explicitly permitted/licensed by the government, and engineered their system so that they could deactivate service to fairly specific geographical areas through either the use of spot beam technology, or the use of user location technology.
In the case of call setup, one of the first pieces of data in the call setup handshake was user location, for exactly the aforementioned reason.
With regard to privacy, I have knowledge that they never turned on GSM encryption, because they didn't know how to get the A-keys back and forth with their gateway partners. (I heard that in a meeting with their GSM security people.)
So, while I think that satellite telephony does have promise for privacy and freedom, Iridium was NOT the award winner in that department.
Anyway. My first thought was "This is terrible." I wanted satelite phones to succeed, because I hate the site of Cell towers. I live in southern Nashville, and I can see three (3) out my window. I grew up in the rolling country hills of middle Tennessee, and now this landscape is marred with cell towers. I'm getting sicker and sicker of all the new towers they put up every day.
On the other hand, we have too much garbage floating around our little planet as it is. I'm kind of glad they're taking them down (aside from the thrill of a good light show). I do, however, like the idea of opening them up to everybody. I guess it all depends on how limited they are.
Don't get me wrong, I love technology. I just wish there were a way to have the technology without maring the landscape (spacescape?).
I take full responsibility for all spelling errors,
Anonymous Coward
Do you think we can port Linux to it...
Large reflective dish antennas? They're flat phased-array antennas, you dweeb.
He's right. The name Iridium is from the Periodic Table of the elements. Iridium is number 77. When they decided 66 satellites was enough they kept the name Iridium. Dysprosium somehow describes my feelings when I create an account on slashdot and never get a password.
Spare a thought for Frenchman Jo Le Guen. Not only has he invested in one of their satellite phones, he is using it as he rows across the Pacific. Not only will he lose his only form of communication, but his service provider is about to dump their infrastructure down ontop of him. (The Pacific is the traditional 'unpopulated area' used to de-orbit satellites into) http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/nm/20000317/tc/iridiu m_rower_1.html
Yah, the law enforcement agancies will love iridium. They're already bitching and demanding that cell companies and/or gov't mandate GPS or some other locating ability into cell phones to know exactly where calls originate from. I know iridium is supposed to use local radio towers when abailable, but just sit inside a large metal funnel pointed at the distant sky and the phone will go satellite mode, and your true location cannot be pegged to within a 10000 mile radius. Clone an iridium phone and you can talk to anyone (preferably that anyone has another stolen/cloned phone) with impunity from being traced.
Unfortunately, the Iridium network sucks hard. The link from the phone to satellite is an amazing 2400bps (yes they have incredible voice compression to get voice going through it). The link between satellites was about 1.5MBit (T-1 speed). I should know, because I made hardware that simulated the entire Iridium constellation for software development. The system at least used ATM type packets, which was cool... Not only that, the phones were huge! It was best to kill off this thing,although I wished that they had killed this off 3 years earlier, when I first worked on the system. It's a better investment to get G3/G4 systems up all over the world, on airplanes, on boats, quickly, so that we all have REAL bandwidth in our wireless systems. -bobby
This failure will help thoses who build the next global phone system, most likely when space launching is cheaper and the demand is greater.
Just think about it: (1) Setup a website to control the birds (2) Let people control when and where they burn through the sky (okay, within some constrained area but still...) (3) Give high schoolers the priority for space & science education I bet the website would be jammed, just like the Mars97 mission website. Sell advertisements, exclusive TV rights (of the birds' showers). Put TV & real-time Internet broadcasts near the area of the showers. Turn this bad event into profits (& donate them to charity). Perhaps even make an Internet startup (iridiumfireworks.com) and an IPO == just kidding! Think about it, this space educational "event" could rival NASA educational events and surely would beat them by cost & excitement (the kids will see the results of their control by satellite fireworks display). Who would pass a chance in a lifetime to control a satellite? When else could the kids try real science and play with toys this cheap? IMHO, tax-supported (okay, partially tax-supported but still...) Iridium & Motorola people just too self-centered, crashing these birds without asking the tax-paying public what to do with them first. Give my tax-dollars back!
66 Active, 11 Standby; So 77 total in orbit. (And yes, it was originally 77 active.)
>I (along with many astronomers and others bothered by Iridium's disregard for science) [snip]
If you've got some good utility measurements for this kind of thing that you suggest for setting optical/radio interference generation limits, feel free to present them. (Or are you alluding to something posted above that I didn't notice? If so, consider me a raving lunatic.) Otherwise, this degenerates into a lame "you have no right to interfere in my pursuit of money/knowledge" shouting match.
Anyway, I'm assuming that you're talking about either a) spectrum assignments or b) the optical flares. If a), go complain to the ITU (and/or boycott it with a vengance). If b), then you'll probably need to create a substantial amount of new international law before you can do anything about it (again, assuming I'm not missing something, as IANL); feel free to. =)
Huh? Infinite-lifetime isn't an option. (You can't exactly affordably refuel them.) So, you optimize lifetime vs. launch cost.
Running a backup system (including operations cost, dual-moding all of the phones, etc.) would be prohibitively expensive, IMHO.
OK, here's the way its going to work:
Phase I:
1. Start an opensource "FreeNet-control" project, get a page on SourceForge.
2. Send in some of that excess cash we make from obscenely overpaid IT jobs to the central project coordinator (Someone respectable. Getting John Carmack would we sweet.)
3. Project coordinator buys satellites from Iridium, real quiet-like so as not to upset The Man. Get a lawyer to leverage the purchase with Iridium's bankruptcy-court.
4. While purchase details are being worked out, hack up v0.1 of "FreeNet-control". FreeNet-control will be a simple, distributed system of controlling and coordinating the satellites via cheap radio mechanism, or somesuch affordable technology. Trust-based FreeNet-control-sites will be run on redundant Linux servers in strategic geographic locations. The distributed control network will have no centralized master controlled, but rather will each maintain their own satellite and constantly coordinate with other controllers for positioning.
Phase II (satellites purchased, FreeNet-controller 0.1 implemented and deployed):
1. FreeNet satellites linked with FreeNet-router (version 0.0.1) sites, using a protocol to send and receive data to the satellites using aforementioned cheap technology.
2. FreeNet-router sites linked to closest local internet backbone for local connectivity.
3. End users install FreeNet-receiver, which is a radio device that connects directly with FreeNet-satellites.
The result: completely free, open source, wireless global network unfettered by any contry's attempts to implement nasties like geographic-site blocking or country-wide firewalls.
#include "manygrainsofsalt.h"
I don't see why the major Iridium investors (primarily telephone companies around the world) would have invested in non-communications-related projects... What am I missing?
Or does this guy really think that a) Motorola actually has billions of dollars stashed away in bank accounts to entirely finance spin-off companies ("As director, I promise to use our $7.5 billion corporate rainy-day stockpile for my mission to design a hot fusion power cell for the portable travel hair dryer market...") or b) that investors have strange compulsions to invest large sums of money arbitrarily in specific companies? ("Gee... My boss said I should think about investing the surplus in high tech; My hairdresser's wife's gardener's nephew thinks Motorola is a strong pick, and my Magic 8 Ball agrees...")
P.S. What exactly is a "motorola field"? Is it some innovation in theoretical physics that I'm not aware of? =) (j/k!)
I don't care how high the cost of the hardware is. But does not selling the whole system, even at a nickel on the dollar make better financial sense than to plow everything under and get nothing? I simply cannot believe that no one is interested in a network of global satellites. At the very least, turn the sats over to the amateur radio community. The decision to destroy them, *must* be the result of orders from someone... someone very powerful.
If you were forced to part with a $20 bill and your *only* choices were trade it for a $1 bill or to burn it, what would you do? I smell great fear and heavy political machinery and state sponsered threats (perhaps even death threats) behind this decision. As a result, my original assessment of the reason for the destruction of the birds stands. PH33R of direct global comm and ability to bypass local telco controls.
No, welcome to Amazon.com!
(-1, No clue)
Iridium, o inattentive one, was funded by a private corporation. Duh.
You forget that someone will have to earn at least the operations costs of the system to make it worthwile... What can you do with a such a limited network in the sky that uses expensive transceivers?
Hmm good thing the american govt aren't stockholders or the likelyness of this accidentally hitting 66 chinese embassies would increase dramatically.
Bull.
High operations costs mean nothing if you turn them over to something like amateur radio. Those things are going to stay up for a few years working, like it or not, unless you dump them. The operations cost is at the earthside.
Community Global Comm, anyone?
No, the change was made at the design stage AFAIK. But, regarding persistant trouble, there are actually eighty-some up there in total. =) See http://www.satellite.eu.org/sat/vsohp/iridium.html for the list.
One interesting line was, "...and the Pentagon's own UHF satellite network..."
Interesting.
/ k.d / earth trickle / Monkeys vs. Robots Films /
Large print giveth, and the small print taketh away
10+% of the US population is black 3-4% is white-jewish and yet, and yet they represent any newspaper, TV station or public office worth a damn.
Are you so incoherent that your meaning totally lost, or are you some kind of paranoid racist psychopath?
Just curious.
"Christianity neither is, nor ever was a part of the common law." --
http://www.nodezero.org.uk/iridium/
http://www.nodezero.org.uk/iridium/
Send them as decoys with the next Mars lander
With enough alternate targets for the Mars Aerospace Defences the real lander just might make it.
Even a small return does make sense on the surface... except that when they put the satellites up, they had to submit a proposal for how to bring them down should the Iridium service fail. If you read the linked article, you might have missed the quote "...Wednesday, the court-imposed deadline to find a buyer or face a windup of operations." If a buyer doesn't show up, they have no choice in the matter.
The simple fact is that without a buyer who will then be obligated the maintain the satellites and control them to maintain their orbits, which is important to their operation in the first place, they become free-floating useless space junk which we have enough of already.
No.
--
And I thought Lyndon LaRouche (sp?) was a nut!
Boobies never hurt anyone. - Sherry Glaser.
They already do act in a way similar to GPS. The resolution isn't very good, but the billing records indicate a Location Area where the call is made. We don't define many Location areas smaller than a U.S. state. I think there could be a lot of useful applications combining Iridium Data service with GPS. The major criticism is that the speed is only about 2400bps.
well... motorola maintains them. There are some rumors that General Dynamics was looking to partner with Crescent Communications, and run the system for quite a bit less.
doesn't matter. the iridium sats were placed into a particularly low orbit b/c of the technical difficulty in making a handheld phone that can punch up to orbit. and even so, the handsets are friggin' giant.
iridium was always going to burn, and the sats were always going to have to be replaced on a pretty frequent basis. instead, they'll burn and will not be replaced. but they would not be very useful for anyone who they were donated to for very long.
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
actually, let's please not drop things on Microsoft. satisfying as it might be, I live way too close to feel safe about it. (but no, I don't work for Chairman Bill)
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
launch scheduled for 11 July 00 here at Vandenberg.
Check Here
Guess it isn't happening now...
--Ben
--Ben
I thought the idea was that they would burn up...
altought that would be an interesting way to go.
Did you mount a military-grade, variable-focus MASER on an unlicensed artificial intelligence?
Forgive me if I'm naive, but couldn't they lease out the satellites? You would think that the onboard computers would have some sort of software that could be modified to support generic data transmission. It just seems to be an awful waste of natural resources to burn these up. I'm not talking so much about investors' money but more about all the environmental damage caused by the mining of the materials used on these things. Please not that I'm not talking about "open sourcing" them, which is a pretty impractical idea if you think about it. I'm thinking more along the lines of leasing them to major long-haul telcom carriers, governments, etc.
Reminds me of Max Headroom, when the Zic-Zac coperation schedules their yearly satellite burndown ;)
I think someone out will think of some business idea with these satalites something so obvious you don't even won't think out it
http://theotherside.com/dvd/
The Ocean (pick one) is REALLY big.
There are not all that many boats out there at any given time.
There are only 66 satellites, they will probably burn up completely on re-entry.
Go buy a lottery ticket, you'll figure it out.
Search first, ask questions later.
If they're going to de-orbit them just because
they went bankrupt and don't wan't anyone to
possibly benefit from their bankruptcy, I'd
call that being a dog in the manger. If I was
them, with a anarchistic streak, I'd open the
channels and the encryption and say "Have at it!",
letting all and sundry have use of the band-width.
Maybe then someone would realize their value!
This article here seems to say otherwise.
Personally, I think it would be an AWEFUL waste of an established satellite network to just burn it up. It's not like it costs money to just have them orbit for a while.
---------
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"They misunderestimated me." --George W Bush, Nov. 6, 2000
At the very least I guess that could result in a record number of fake bids...
I have a serious question for slashdotters here: do you really think the world would be a better place if Bill G. wouldn't have been born?
Absolutely.
Perhaps not dramatically better, but one less jerk is always a net gain.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
First, I'm sure its not alone in this. Iridium only had 66 + 11 spare satellite. There are a lot more satellites and other bits of junk up there. Not to mention the planned launches of more satellite constellations as well as more satellites.
Second. The hardware was difficult to upgrade. The software was very upgradeable and was done so many times. Most stellite communication is not compatible and Iridium phones (at least some models) could be converted to use the cell network of you choice by simply inserting another card into the phone.
Second part two. The problem with stupid satellites you can only bounce the signal to a ground station that the bird can see. Necessitating many ground stations. Iridium only needs one since the call can be routed in space. (which it is despite another posters comments to the contrary). So it is a design trade off and as such a matter of opinion. All satellites have a limited lifespan. Space is a harsh environment and eventually manuvering fuel and batteries are used up.
Third. Stupid economics did apply. It was expensive, although not as expensive as I've seen stated. $2000 for a phone. Minimum of $5/min for a phone call. For a while iridium phone to iridium phone calls were free.
Fourth. The quality was not there at the begining.
It has improved a lot. You can tell its a staellite call, but it sounds good.
It seems such a waste to just de-orbit and burn such a network. I do not know the asking price for thier fleet of satellites, but you think somebody would have jumped at the offer, after all, look at what this is, a global communications network, in place and ready to go, all you need to do is pay Motorola a few hundred million a quarter to keep them up. You think at least Microsoft would have bought them so they could beam out messages of kindness and benevolence to all the unsuspecting proles below, all while using the same network to co-ordinate thier anti Linux armies, spy on everybody, and direct thier Big Brother bombers and Victory battleships to take over the world.
Seems a shame....
You say you want a revolution....
...is that MS-12 is scheduled to launch July 11 from Vandenberg. See? :)
Mission Config Launch Date Launch Location
MS-12 7920-10 11-JUL-2000 SLC-2W
No, kids dying of cancer is sad. Iridium's flameout is more pathetic than anything else.
In my humble opinion, it was obvious that Iridium would fail. What audiance are they targeting? There are maybe 50,000 people in this world that need around the world coverage in places like Antartica(I'm probably grossly overestimating). The places where rich business people do business is in places where there is already sufficient coverage by Cellular and or some form of digital wireless. CDMA, TDMA, and the european equivalent (I forget it's name, GSM I think) are in each of the major cities. So, who where they thinking would want this service? It's said to see 5billion go to waste on this. Total gross mismanagement on the side of Venture Capitalists, and market research specialists. Just because we live in a boom economy, doesn't mean people will want to spend a few grand on a phone, and a grand a month on phone service, just so they can have the novelty of calling from the north pole. Well, at least the major satelite launching firms got a boost of capital from the business.
-Master Switch, one more element in the machine
Actually, if they destroy them, it's a tax writeoff. I heard that they could writeoff 1/3 the value of the satellites if they were destroyed.
So they are still worth money even if they are destroyed.
-dustin
I'll be happy just to be able to find out if there are any going down over my part of the sky at night so that I can see them. Well, it probably won't be any more exciting than a meteor shower. Hrm.
And I just saw a magazine article last month saying how good Iridium was and that you should get an Iridium phone if you can afford it.. hehe.. suckers.
And indeed, there are some last-minute Iridium bidders.
If they can get them to re-enter at the same local time all over the globe (10 PM Eastern, 10 PM Central, 10 PM Mountain...) they'd be able to announce it and get a lot of attention. Not that Iridium would be able to do anything with the publicity after burning up all the assets other than their name...
Anybody know where I can pick one of these phones up on the cheap now, or does anyone have one they want to sell to me?
yeah, just stick a satellite antenna on people's houses, and wire the system to their internal telephone wiring, and Kazam! instantly, you are a worldwide Local/long distance Telco.
Opinionated Law Student Strikes Again!
Wired Iridium story
"After millennia of people looking up at the same night sky, we're the first to put up a new constellation since God. It's never going to be the same again."
Because the cost of launching a manned mission, retrieving the satellite, bringing the silcon back down, retooling, and re launching is more expensive than build your own and launch.
Unfortunately, if you live in the U.S., you'll most likely miss the entire show. They will bring the satellites down over the ocean, most likely the Pacific if they can. The last thing they want to do is risk causing damage to something. As unlikely as the possibility of damaging something may be, there are 66 of those things, and 66 chances to screw up.
Unfortunately, I don't remember where I saw the article, prolly Cnet News.com or Wired, but an article concerning the pending shutdown of Iridium stated that the satellites would be brought down over the ocean.
http://www.nodezero.org.uk/iridium/
Strangely enough, ICO Global is launching a fleet of satelites to do the exact same thing Iridium did.
Taken from an article on Yahoo talking about the recent SeaLaunch failure :
The satellite lost Sunday was the first of 10 which ICO Global wants to launch to build a satellite-based mobile phone network
Haven't they read the news lately ???
Murphy(c)
While I agree with your statement about governments in some countries having (and abusing to some extent) their phone monopolies, this system is likely FAR out of reach to the ordinary people in these countries in the non-"Free World", so I can't see these governments viewing it as a threat. Hell, with the super-high prices of handsets and airtime, Iridium is out of reach for most of us Slashdot readers.
The failure of Iridium had nothing to do with governments wanting to maintain power. This is nothing political. Do you really think Iridium/Moto would shitcan a $7 billion project if they felt they could get any more money out of it? Even on the far stretch that politics had ANYTHING to do with this, it wouldnt stop it for long. As with all technology, someone is going to find a way to do the same thing cheaper and more efficently. I'm willing to bet that the design of the satellites (upgradability, maintainability, etc) has something to do with why no one is buying them. Either that, or Iridium wants too much and wont just accept the highest offer regardless.
I strongly believe this was not "purely politics", it was "purely financial".
>A college with decent funding could take one of >these satellites and do really neat things with >it and really learn lots to boot. Hmm that sounds nice. At least I would love to have in my papers that I've operated a satellite for a week. I can just imagine some college student taking the satellite straight down at New York city.
I actually used an Iridium phone last year on a diving trip on a live-aboard diving boat on the Great Barrier Reef. I hadn't been on a vacation in three years at that point, and even though my company was in the midst of being acquired by Red Hat I was able to take that long-needed vacation and still keep in touch with the Iridium phone.
This really sucks - there just aren't any cells out on the GBR or in the Aussie outback.
"It is our blasphemy which has made us great, and will sustain us, and which the gods secretly admire in us." - Zelazny
Basically, at the maximum, we should only have to go up there, get the things, then park them near the station, or on the station, to be used as needed - like a scrap bin (with VERY expensive scrap).
We shouldn't have to bring them down, retool, then send them back up - that's stupid and wasteful. They are already up there, so do all the work UP THERE. There shouldn't be much need for retooling, and what little there is needed should be done up there as well.
Think of this analogy - I need a part for my car. Do I go to the scrapyard, find a part, then send it to the manufacturer to have it rebuilt, or do I just bring it back where I need it (home), and work on myself, installing it in the right spot (with maybe a little hacking/tweaking here and there)? Which one seems like the most the LOGICAL solution?
This would be a much better solution than letting them all burn up (aren't they in a higher orbit than the space station, anyhow? Couldn't you deorbit them to a lower "altitude" and have them slowed down by nets or something at the space station (assuming they aren't moving too fast relative to the station speed)?) - though I did like the ID2000 idea...
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
The GPS system isn't as expensive to run and the have to know exactly where those sats are and they have silly key managment issues.
The court has been lead astray from the facts if they were told it cost 1/2 billion a year to run this system. It may cost motorola 1/2 billion but something somewhere is way too far into the dilbert zone.
Of course if this system isn't on autopilot someone messed up the design real bad. If it is on autopilot then the court should let someone else take a stab at running this thing seeing that the R&D has all been paid for. Then if the second buyer (even if they only pay about $1m) can't fix it, then force motorola to deorbit the birds.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
Another company or somesuch could avoid the cost of making and putting 66 satellites into space. Considering they're just going to destroy them anyway, they might sell cheap, selling them at all would be making more money than just letting them burn up.
Chris Hagar
"The price of freedom is eternal vigilance." - Thomas Jefferson
Um, you were boycotting them because they were blocking your view? "Down in front!" essentially? That strikes me as kind of stupid. Maybe you can explain, so it'll seem less stupid?
Napster-to-go says "Fill and refill your compatible MP3 player", which is a lie. It's not MP3. It's WMA with DRM.
There's a guy I knew over at Nasa who operates a program known as Cool Space who sure could put these birds to use. COOL SPACE is an acronym for Communications Over Obscure Locations / Special Purpose Advanced Communications Equipment. They do launch tracking and special-purpose communications support in exotic parts of the world where cell phones don't work.
I met them while I was working in Antarctica. Oddly enough while exploring their home page, I discovered a 1995 picture of myself in a helo on one of their experiments. (I'm the seated guy in the red parka in the helicopter at the bottom of the page).
-- There is no truth. There is only Perception. To Percieve is to Exist.
Is it just me, or does it seem really odd that no other communications company or research organization could use these satellites and that they want to destroy them..?
I think one reason for the failure is, that everyone who really needs a phone ...) already has a satellite phone, i.e. an Inmarsat Phone.
but cannot use a triband phone (people on the ocean, in antarctica
Inmarsat has the three geostationary satellites (36000km above the ground) instead of 66 Satellites flying around at low orbits.
While these mobil phones are not very handy, they are there and they are available since a long time (i think 10+ years)
Funny enough, i just looked if they have a webpage (http://www.inmarsat.com/) and found the following:
-------------------------
Looking for the Iridium alternative?
Inmarsat mini-M phones offer cost-effective and reliable voice, fax and data
communications for use virtually anywhere in the world. The phones are
lightweight (about 4 lb., 1.9 Kg), portable (roughly the size of notebook
computer) and easy to use.
-------------------
Who said anything about the Army? I did. Why did I say something about the Army? Because that's what I know about. I don't know anything about the other branches. And according to what the DoD taught me, the U.S. Coast Guard isn't actually a branch of the military. (Although, IMHO, they SHOULD be, since they get shot at more frequently than anyone else!) So, the math is Army + Navy + Air Force + Marine Corps = four branches of the US Military. Not five.
In any event, if Iridium were in fact crucial to the US Military, why would we be hearing about the Iridium satellites being scuttled in teh first place?
Easy answer: Because Iridium isn't cruicial to the US Military. Convenient, both from a practical and a PR perspective, sure. But convenience != cruical.
Now, that all being said, IMNSHO, it would DEFINATELY be a Good Thing© if the military used something like Iridium.
Did I do the "little research" that you so kindly and tactfully suggest? Nope. Why not? It's really a moot point. With a judicial application of logic, it is clear that your statement is incorrect. However, I concede that the idea is TERRIBLY meritous.
It is by caffiene alone I set my mind in motion. It is by the beans of java that thoughts acquire speed, hands acquire
Iridium phones are crucial to military peacekeeping operations where there is no established phone network, a la Kosovo.
BZZZZT! Thanks for playing. The US Army has it's own, field-capable version of AT&T. I know. I was trained for it. The Army has both microwave and wire-line telecom that they can rig up on the back of a HMMV and cart out to "the Zone" in order to have communications in the field. These field-units can tie in with the rest of the military comm system and be just about as useful (if not more than) as a cellular phone is in the heart of any major metropolitan city in the USA.
It is by caffiene alone I set my mind in motion. It is by the beans of java that thoughts acquire speed, hands acquire
Think of it, kind of like the OSS from space! hehe
I read that it cost about $42 million a month
just to maintain these.
Right now they have about 50,000 customers
Do the math...
if you double your customers to a 100,000 they
would need to each be paying $420 a month before
you would even start to cover the maintince costs.
If you increased your customer base to 1,000,000
they would have to paying $42.00 a month to cover
maintince.
As I remember the phone is somewhat bulky and
only works outside. I think you would have to totaly redesign the phone before you would get
a million peple to buy them.
Even then I don't think you could be competitive
with regular cell phone companies. Your phone would have more range but would only work outside. Only people who really need to service are going to want it and those 50,000 already have it.
Oh well....
AdFuel
RE: Man-years
I first heard this term a few years ago. I heard someone say that x took 300 man-years to develop. My mind went:
* 300 years is a long time
* people don't live for 300 years (anymore)
* this seems wrong
* uh! I get it - x people for y years = 300 man-years
* this is a cool metric because the more $ you have for your project the more time you can buy
I was just reading the story about the likely fate of Iridium (literally burning up 66 satellites).
They said it cost $5-7 billion dollars to develop. It took "over 50,000 man-years".
To extrapolate that, say people work from 25 years old to 60 years old - 35 years of paid work per person.
50,000 / 35 = The same value as 1428 people's entire working existence.
So can we now "place a value" on a human life from a business point of view?
not really. at least not in any normal way. if $10 per year puts you into a new tax bracket, it's at most $10 that's taxed in the higher bracket. IRS may be stupid, but not so stupid as to make the tax schedule jagged, as you seem to think.
sh_
Interested in learning Chinese or Japanese? check out Chinese/Japanese-English Dictiona
Well, stupidity died pretty quick in this case. Despite the 5 billion investment, it WAS allowed to die. No reputations, no government, no nostalgia is being allowed to keep it alive beyond its time.
:)
Its still sad..... And I agree.
As I remember it, much of the story was actually about how expensive and less-than-ideal Irridium service was going to be due to the political deals that had to be made with third world governments (and their telcos) to get WARC to allocate them the frequencies.
Yesterday I had a lecture on Innovation Management in my institute. The professor told us about communication systems, Iridium in particular, we watched a promotional video tape from them and discussed that a lot. What a surprise was it for me, when at home I read in the news that tomorrow Iridium is going down... :(((
Future Wiki -- If you don't think about the future, you cannot have one.
Been playing too much Syndicate Wars? Heh.
Mmmm, satellite rain...
Only the dead have seen the end of war.
Persistant trouble? Any help from the 'management'?
.sig: Now legally binding!
I think they've invented a new element.
"Dyspepsium."
What are you going to use the phone for? Tracking the satellite as it plunges into the atmosphere to make sure you don't miss the fireworks?
--
The shareholder is always right.
Ahh, another Yogi Berra fan. Not necessarily because of baseball -- I don't follow sports at all -- but because of his great sense of wit.
Some more sites with Yogi Berra quotes ("Yogi Berrisms" or "Yogi-isms") are aphorismsgalore and the official Yogi Berra site.
--
The shareholder is always right.
Or maybe a global era of dysprosium. Sounds like a long economic depression to me.
--
The shareholder is always right.
Actually, if you go in beyond the front page of the Iridium site, there's a link to an "urgent customer message" at the top. It doesn't exactly stand out in terms of color, but it's there.
The "urgent message" saysbut it's Thursday evening (US) now...
--
The shareholder is always right.
I did some research on rural communications for Cambodia since I have been helping my partner who has built a hospital, free newspaper with two printing presses donated by Heidelberg, Future Light orphanage (with one of the best Internet computer labs in the country), and now schools ($10,000 each with your name on it, matched by World Bank), for charity there. This was supported by King Sihanouk. It seemed that security and technological needs pointed to satellite, so we had inmarsat et al give presentations. But Thailand has a phone system set up in the sky based on satellite already (no Cambodia doesn't want to be dependent.. duh). Why not turn over some of these satellites to countries that don't have any telephone switching (or lines for that matter) and a phone could mean a lot for a single village? How much would it cost to contract commercially with someone to keep one of the satellites in orbit and operational. Use Iridium handsets in the third world and UNHCR camps. Unfortunately at the end of last year heard from Nicholas Negroponte, who is on the board of Iridium, as saying that they "weren't good for data" in response to my asking about how to put Internet into Cambodia using them. He did buy a school though. And Kyocera already had an Iridium data service on their home page.. Ouch. If anyone at Iridium or MIT reads this please email, I will pursue this from my end as well. Seems to make more money for Iridium than the red ink it will cost to manage the satellites' death cruise. Cambodia hospital and mines effort (with the Princess Diana fund): telebody.com/sihanouk/, telebody.com/diana/ this thread is old now so please continue via email. mattr@telebody.com.
(p.s. This is a joke
I have a serious question for slashdotters here: do you really think the world would be a better place if Bill G. wouldn't have been born? Seriously?
---
DO NOT DISTURB THE SE
Oh, do you live in Seattle?
If Irridium was a threat to dictatorships, they would never have let the project begun. It would be much easier to stop a program before money is spent, otherwise they must compete politically with investors who now expect a return.
By the time students could get their hands on the propulsion system in the Irridium satellites, MS will have their own AA missile-defense battery to stop it. And besides, wouldn't the atmosphere burn the satellites first?
According to some news show, NASA has prototype airborne satellites: Essentially a flying PC with some sensing equipment, a giant solar array/wing with propellors and battery for night flying attached. The theoretical advantage is that this "flying wing" would perform the same jobs as satellites at $5M instead of $200M. They would take more monitoring as they are flying in the atmosphere but on the whole would be much easier than vacuum satellites. Might this work for Irridium too?
And I live here...
I'll just blame finals week.
marotti.com
He's probably refering to an area West of Seattle, i.e. Redmond...(Or the home of BG himself.)
marotti.com
So in the end, you got the expensive connection with the same poor quality as local service.
--rick
there was one episode which took place on "sky clearance day" when ZikZak shot down all its disused satelites. Chunks were shown actually hitting the ground, too, which'd be a lot cooler.
Why not donate the birds and ground equip to the UN as part of the bankruptcy? Hell, give it to NASA, or the NSF, or the US gov't, since they're the biggest user. With all the pollution the launching produced, do SOMEFUCKINGTHING useful with it, don't destroy it. Too bad they don't have any email addresses on thier web site. There seems to be no way to get the idea to them...
It was Judge Woodlock, in the US District Court for Massachusetts, with a gavel.
Oh, It makes warped sense. Think Tax laws. If they sell them, they don't get a tax writeoff for the full amount, if they fry them, they do. It would actually cost them money to sell them
NASA was pretty sure it would burn up...mostly. But a big chunk did land in remote Australia (there's someone on eBay now putting up some fibres they claim are from the wreckage).
Sure, most people would love to see these things put some light shows up in the night sky, but seeing the really horrendous PR generated by the skylab-crash-phobes would make anyone want to make these crash in the ocean away from land.
As it is, watch the news covering this.They'll put some teasers out there and we'll have a few people selling "Iridium Shelters".
someone may yet save this? tag=st.ne.1002.thed.1004-200-1575212
go here:
http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1004-200-1575212.html
Go news.com!
I think this is good. it would be an awful waste of technology.. and its a really good idea for civilian use, if only it were cheaper.
--jay
Actually, it makes a lot of sense, assuming my facts are correct.
I had an interview with some Motorola folks out of college and they explained to me
how these LEO satelites would ony be orbit for a short time before they fell out.
With this in mind, Iridium's lease on life, if not maintained, was short anyway.
What one should ask is did it make sense to put a network in orbit that would need to be replaced every 8 years or so?
Followed by Maurice - And probably the most important thing, that greatly helped in the orbit calculation -- the FFT algorithm. Yep. It's not called "Fast" for nothing you know. It's probably not an exaggeration to say that FFT got man to the moon.
Actually, I'm not sure that even the FFT is fast enough to have done useful work on the machinery available for the moon launches. You still have to store a whack of data to have it do any good, right? While there may have been some use made of FFT, the real heroic algorithm, and one that you don't often hear praises sung for, was the Kalman filter. In brief, the Kalman filter allows you to track a linear signal that exhibits some random dynamics given only noisy observations of that signal. The nice property it has is that it can compute an estimate recursively, which is to say that in the particular situations for which it is suited, it is MUCH faster than other methods available at the time. It was used as the essential mathematical component of the control systems for the moon landings.
If you look at any texts from the '70s about stochastic filtering, they all go crazy about the Kalman filter, try to do some nonlinear stuff, and then have numerous chapters at the end with titles like "Application - Orbit Tracking", or "Application - Reentry". Cool stuff.
So why does he only do it when I install something then?
The poor cook he caught the fits
And threw away all of my grits
actually, this is straigt from miriam webster dictionary site: Main Entry: dysprosium Pronunciation: dis-'prO-zE-&m, -zh(E-)&m Function: noun Etymology: New Latin, from Greek dysprositos hard to get at, from dys- + prositos approachable, from prosienai to approach, from pros- + ienai to go -- more at ISSUE Date: 1886 : an element of the rare-earth group that forms highly magnetic compounds -- see ELEMENT table
Arun
Their market is probably a bit limited since I believe they'll be bringing them down in the Pacific, but for parts of Asia they might get some real interest!
fencepost
just a little off
idiot
There MUST be a better use for 66 telecom sattelites in orbit, even if the primary use (wireless phones, right?) failed...
Guess it's too late now. And I can't imagina the people over at Iridium didn't think of other solutions themselves.
<grub> Reading
For FFT you have an input array, and output array, so it's not that memory consuming. I'd never heard of the Kallman filter before, but FFT can be used to multiply polynomials in nlogn time which is useful when you are using a Taylor series to represent a function.
Sell them on eBay...
Beep!
?
Can't these satellites be connected somehow to the GPS system that is already in place? I mean it could mean a better navigational system for everyone, more accurate.
I'm sure there are lots of technical problems with this, but lots of companies and the government could easily swing the bill...
Nathaniel P. Wilkerson
NPS Internet Solutions, LLC
www.npsis.com
Nathaniel P. Wilkerson
www.haidacarver.com
1. I agree totally with the idea of parking them for future use in another platform. Once a space station is established in orbit, would it not be useful to have a readily-accessable source of spare parts, hydrazine, etc - with no launch costs..? Sure, it wouldn't be indefinite - they're _going_ to come down - but I'm one to believe in potential utility over "oooh - pretty light show." Oh well, just a thought...
2. As for the handsets, they may be big and bulky, but the analog cellular range isn't bad.. I had one to play with for a few weeks when I lived in Alaska, and I noticed that when it was in the cellular mode it tended to get some impressively good signal in areas other phones died completely. (Or maybe you didn't know the handsets worked on the terrestrial cellular network.. [shrug])
make it into a beowolf cluster running seti@home.
(sorry)
i am suprised at how mny people think motorola can just walk away from it and leave them for some type of free use.
this system requires a lot of maintenance both on the ground and in the sky. very expensive. not to mention replacements.
and $5B "wasted"? i dunno. MOT does/has done some very cool things. not everything turns out as planned! i tend to agree with other posters that this one got too far along before they pulled the plug. so goes it.
voice over 2400 baud does sound rather impressive...anyone heard the quality? how does it sound? maybe MOT will open source the algorithm?
Treatment, not tyranny. End the drug war and free our American POWs.
See my user info for links.
It'd be far cheaper (and free up more bandwidth) if the signal from the phone simply bounced off the satellite and back to a ground station. I can't believe that a ground station would be more expensive to maintain than a satellite.
I/O Error G-17: Aborting Installation
If Iridium does decide to instigate mass-suicide among their satellites, will any of it be visible from Earth? That could be a pretty cool roof-top party...
These comments and opinions are mine and mine alone, although they shouldn't be.
I disagree. In fact, Motorola is patenting the technique of redirecting satellite to satellite communications to a ground station as well so that the call may be monitored. This was an invention required by many governments and state run telcos in order to license the handsets in some countries.
BRENT ROCKWOOD, EST'd 1975
Don't get me wrong I think something constructive to benifit our planet's Scientific knowledgebase should be done with the sats. oh yeah ... our we need a planetwide Knowledge base.. Keep dreaming. Please Excuse the gramatical and spelling errors. but proof reading your own work sucks.
- Better to speak your mind than to remain silent, or someone may speak for you.
hmm i would have thought that the fact they didn't use cell phones in the first place meant they couldn't?
With all due respect, people still use cell phones, and that technology has been around for a while. The only drawback that these phones had was that they were imperatively expensive. A company that could offer them for cellular prices, and provide all of the other technological tidbits that these have to offer over cellular would do very well.
Eh...
Yes they can collect a couple of those...apply special atomsphere protection coating, shoot them back in Shoemaker formation...
I mean - in 30 years, with space travel getting comercialized, it's The Right Thing.
Here's to hoping other satelite owners will be as responsible when their hardware lifecycle ends.
I did some work on an ICO handset in my previous job. The antenna on these things is 12mm diameter by about 10cm long. Nice! Oh, and the handset will use about 20 watts of power. Just see how long those batteries last.
Betcha that ICO will suffer the same fate as Iridium. Just too darn expensive for the minuscule number of people who need it.
Jeff
stty erase ^H
West of Seattle would be the Puget Sound and the Whidbey/Bainbridge islands. You're looking for Redmond, which is east a ways. But thanks for playing.
Donating the satellites to education is the right thing to do. As for the comment about dropping one on Redmond. Colleges all over the U.S already operate their own satellites. As for the workforce, I am in the satellite field and yes I have controlled these spacecraft but finding someone else who has experience is a really closed field. Satellites at least the majority were a government entity until recently. So there just weren't a lot of people who knew how to control them. Give the constellation to the universities for training and they have an instant job when they get out.
If you aren't making mistakes, you aren't working hard enough.
Why don't they just wait until Dec. 31st and give us a show to welcome the new milleniun in?
It's not everyday you witness the intentional destruction of hundreds of millions of dollars worth of equipment. --- Just wait for the first major company to roll out Windows 2K
Even so, I was still able to place an order all the way up until it asked for the credit card(which I don't have).
Actually, it's not more economical. It costs Iridium hundreds of millions a year to keep these birds up and running. If someone were to buy these at two dollars each, they would be fools. They would go bankrupt too, just trying to keep them running. This is the safest and most economical way to end the Iridium service. They also get in the way up there. That's 66 more things to collide with out there.
anyone else see a trend here? didn't we just plan to destroy one that got too close to (Jupiter i think) ?? humm.... just a thought
- "yes but can you hit someone over the head with a rolled up internet?" -Foxtrot
"Altruistically, they could just lower the offering price to something trivial, but businesswise, this would be a bad move. The company that bought it would be able to offer the service that they designed, for a fraction of the cost, and edge out their potential future market."
The company that tried to do this would fail as badly as a company trying to buy and sell off Commodore 64's!
Tech moves fast and mistakes suffer from compressed scrutiny.
Dropping them is best.
That means the network -- variously reported to have cost $5 billion to $7 billion -- would be vaporized as its satellites, bumped by their thrusters, plunge from 485 miles above the Earth in flames over the ocean.
Man, what a waste... we could've sent a probe to mars that would've actually worked and still have change for beer and pizza!
Even Bill Gates' Fireworks Show did not cost as much. For those non-Seattleites (I know that's around 99.9999%) Bill gates put on a VERY LONG, VERY Spectacular fireworks show on Y2K Eve. This oughta make his show look like a bottle rocket in comparison, if price means anything :)
This
Currently, I don't think it's difficult to tap a naked VoIP stream, but within some corporate VPN, forget it. IPv6 or IPsec built into a consumer-grade phone is what I'd like to see. Ya gotta dream...
-- It is my strong belief that it is a mistake to hold strong beliefs.
I was doing some research on the IRIDIUM satellite, hopefully IRIDIUM will burn and we wont have to see these flints/glares. I read up somewhere that motorola was having some issues with money and supporting these satellites. Anyways, if you want to read up on it, go to http://www.satellite.eu.org/sat/vsohp/iridium.html
Slappy
I hope these satellites lag out in the middle of Space and blow up due to motorola's services. I would also like to nominate myself for the extra 2 billion that will fall out of the satellites, i will donate to charity. Remember, motorola says "As of yesterday, March 15, 2000, we have no further information as to what will happen with respect to Iridium service after March 17. We will provide an update if and when we receive additional information.", motorola spent all that money for a great cause.
Slappy
While I agree with your statement about governments in some countries having (and abusing to some extent) their phone monopolies, this system is likely FAR out of reach to the ordinary people in these countries in the non-"Free World", so I can't see these governments viewing it as a threat. Hell, with the super-high prices of handsets and airtime, Iridium is out of reach for most of us Slashdot readers.
.................................................. ..........
Kind of proved the point you were trying to disprove there didn't ya?
The governments don't care what most of us regular Joe's are talking about - it's the people who can afford to pay for those costly handsets and airtime who're having the conversations that might interest them.
adam
The last magazine in my stack of Wireds before the subscription finally ran out is dated "October 1998" with the cover story "Iridium launches the global phone" Big, long story about how neat Iridium is. Heh.
F0 07 C7 C8
Might make a nice collector's item. Not everyone has a $5K phone. It's also something you can point to as an example of an obviously bad idea next time your boss/coworkers come up with something similarly bad.
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
Um, you were boycotting them because they were blocking your view? "Down in front!"
Lets put it more clearly. Iridium was interfereing with studies in a radio band protected by international treaty. They KNEW that it would before they launched, and they COULD have avoided the interferance by more careful planning and design.
To turn things around, how do you suppose Motorola would have felt if after launching all of those satellites using a band actually licensed to them (and causing no interferance on other bands), the radio astronomers decided that they needed to try to phone ET for all but 4 hours in the early morning (Call for ExtraTerrestrial Intelligence?), and by doing so, completely wiped out iridium communications?
What should happen is that some TV network should get a plane to fly out there at high altitude where they can get some great footage of a burning-up satellite. I'd love to see that! I might even turn on my TV, which I haven't done for a while. (and not because I left it on :)
I think it would work. A plane doesn't cost that much to fly around in. Iridium could even recoup some money on it if they sell the TV rights or something. (well probably a couple million, which is chump change compared to what they're in the hole by, but it's a lot to me :)
#define X(x,y) x##y
#define X(x,y) x##y
Peter Cordes ; e-mail: X(peter@cordes ,
What they really needed to do was develop a better marketing plan. They should have produced a ton more handsets but made sure 4/5 of them were defective. The should have set the price at $100 per handset and sold the airtime for $1/min. Offer a premuim service for $500/handset and $20/min. Everyone but the premium customers get the message "Were sorry but all satellites are currently busy. Please stay on the line and the next available satellite will assist you." They have to stay online for 15 min to get a connection and get auto-disconnectd after 5 min. Push out lots of press reports saying ,"After being bombarded with much more demand than expected we are currently in the process of upgrading our service." ala` AOL style.
"God fights on the side with the best artillery." - Napoleon, Marshal of France - speaking truth to power
My thoughts exactly, especially when one potential buyer, historically, has absolutely hemorraged money for things like this: the US government. Iridium phones are crucial to military peacekeeping operations where there is no established phone network, a la Kosovo. The Armed forces own 3000 Iridium handsets which would be a pretty hefty investment to lose. They even built a $14 million base station in Hawaii for Iridium service. They are very dependent on this and I wouldn't be surprised to see them buy it. Also, the State Department owns an additional thousand Iridium phones. Between them I think that we will likely see an offer. I mean, come on... compared to the R&D and production costs for the F22, even a fscking satellite constellation must look like small change.
--
I think there is a world market for maybe five personal web logs.
Here's a company that's strapped for cash. Because of bankruptcy, they'd prefer to sell the satellites to work off some debt, but instead they decide to destroy everything.
:)
(???)
It seems to me that if you're looking for money, you can probably find any number of people who'd be willing to buy it. I mean, let's face it, selling the satellites for $2.00 a piece would be far more economical than crashing them into the ocean at 4000 degrees fahrenheit, since you wouldn't have to pay the technical staff to make sure that the satellites didn't land on Jesse Helms. (Or at least not on purpose, anyway)
But then again - the article said "Barring finding a 'qualified' buyer" - whatever that means. I'm sure you've probably got to have some pretty heavy duty terrestrial hardware to keep the things functioning correctly, but come on.
I wonder if we can call Bruce Perens and his ham radio buddies and convince them to buy the satellite array for amateur radio.
But seriously people, please point out what I'm missing here - it seems to me like there couldn't POSSIBLY be a way where destroying them all would be the most economical thing to do for Iridium. What gives?
-- Truth goes out the door when rumor comes innuendo. -- Groucho Marx
Another issue is that I understand the Irridium birds are a serious problem to astronomers, especially radio astronomers.
The amateur satellite community has it's attention on "Phase 3 D", which is an amazing, sophisticated piece of engineering, 100% ham radio. It's slated to ride an Ariane 5 to a highly eccentic sun-synchronous orbit, perhaps as soon as July.
-=Maggie Leber=-
I'm not sure where you got the idea that Iridium is an instrument of freedom and individual privacy. The reality is that Iridium greased the political skids for its system by making deals with many governments and government controlled telecommunications companies to set up local Iridium gateways where traffic could be monitored by police and intelligence agencies. It was rather clever, coopting possible opposition by giving interconnect franchises to governments who would otherwise have felt threatened by the system.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
(Instead, use relatively dumb and cheap satellites and keep the complex processing in a handful of distributed ground stations. Sure, you'd have to use two satellites each call, but reducing the complexity and weight of each satellite would save lots. And upgrading the system in the future would involve ground station upgrades, instead of satellite replacements).
Hate to argue, but unless the specs for iridium have changed... that is exaxtly how they worked. And that is a design flaw,IMHO. If all of the switching were performed in space, then signals could have been direct to nearest downlink teleco, instead of the convuluted ground base stations, plus the many Iridium companies which exist to manage them.
Good riddence. I talked to Iridium in 1992 and told then that unless they could do a 64k uplink/128k downlink they were sunk.
Bah.. such a waste!!!
Well, Moto is now the official BONEHEAD of the millenium.
Pan
I said no... but I missed and it came out yes.
you'll probably just get out about halfway to mars and then just go into a really elliptical orbit around the sun. don't think there's that much fuel in those things. firing to earth is a HELL of a lot easier; just aim a _little_, fire a _little_, and gravity just does the difficult work for you. and think about it, even if you DID get outside the solar system somehow, space is REALLY large and REALLY empty. the chances of coming across anything are almost nonexistently small.
----
On March 17, 2000, the motorola corporation set the boosters on its 66 Iridium satellites to fire into deep space, into which they flew at random, travelling further and further through the limitless empty void..
By random coincidence, iridium satellite #37 did, about 7.8 billion years later, reach something.
COMMANDER YYYYT: What's going on? why have we stopped?
ENGINEER ALTWK: We are having minor fluctuations in the quantum integrity stabiliser. I have slowed us to General Relativity speeds for about fifty seconds to give it a chance to cool down.
COMMANDER YYYYT: What's broken? Is this bad?
ENGINEER ALTWK: There's no problem. Probably just needs more stasis fluid. It can wait until port, we won't have to stop again.
COMMANDER YYYYT: Alright.
Suddenly there is a deafening thud, and the ship is jarred a bit. The shielding light blinks softly for several seconds.
NGLB: What the hell was that?
Altwyk reaches for the external sensors and sets them in pictoral projection mode. The screens focus on a wad of metal, battered, twisted, and dented from the effects of time, with two jagged, decaying panellike things sticking out, slowly spiralling away.
ENGINEER ALTWK: An asteroid.
NGLB: Damn, for an asteroid it looks pretty wierd.
COMMANDER YYYYT: I've seen wierder.
ENGINEER ALTWK [into intercom] Resuming travel speeds. Disassociation to commence shortly, please sit down.
And thus ended Humanity's final contact with the universe.
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
..Who's gonna be selling the debris on ebay? :-)
I think this will be remembered as an era of waste. That is really sad that they are just going to let those things go into the atmosphere. Imagine how these could be used in education. A college with decent funding could take one of these satellites and do really neat things with it and really learn lots to boot. Shoot, they might even make something useful out of it. Imagine attending a college and getting hands-on experience with satellite technology. Now *that* would be neat.
:)
Motorola charged hundreds of millions per year to keep those things running. But what were they really charging for? All the money probably went to well-paid man power and the rest to profits. A university could probably run one of these at a relatively low cost. And even better, the company would receive huge tax breaks for donating the satellites.
Perhaps a university could experiment with different ways to utilize aging technology. They wouldn't have to use it for the purpose it was intended. I'm sure for what these things cost, they must have some sort of flexibility in terms of programming them to do different things from Earth.
So... how do I get ahold of these guys to give them the idea of donating them to education?
--SONET
Any fool can criticize, condemn and complain and most fools do. --Benjamin Franklin
IIRC, Iridium satellites are noisy on the electromagnetic spectrum and impede radio astronomy. There are something like 60-odd of them and they're not geostationary so they swoop by on a regular basis. (They were parked in LEO to save money.) This means that most radio telescopes worldwide have to plan around the timing of the overhead Iridium passes. Lots of people were displeased by this commercially-devised obstacle to scientific inquiry.
I am not an astronomer or a physicist: corrections, amplifications are welcome. I forget which part of the EM spectrum, in particular.
...you might wish to get your money back for that Iridium phone you bought!
Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachtani?
www.fogbound.net
Instead of letting them burn up, they should sell them on Ebay! Maybe that could erase their 4.4 billion dollar debt.
Life is perpetual change, regardless of your economic system. ;-)
There are something like 60-odd of them and they're not geostationary so they swoop by on a regular basis. (They were parked in LEO to save money.)
;-)
This is completely bogus. Does *anyone* here bother to understand the facts before posting thier ill-informed opinions.
There is a VERY GOOD technical reason why Iridium satellites are in LEO - and it's quite simple: You want them low to avoid tha time-of-flight problems that plague geostationary satellites. (I used to do geosync satellite protocol tuning - TCP/IP wasn't even capable of dealing with geosyncronous delays until the RFC 1323 enhancements became commonplace. (It took Sun forever to put these in Solaris.) The delays are on the order of thousands of milliseconds - that's right, whole seconds. More bandwidth only hurts the problem. The only things you can do that really help are: 1) shorten the communication path, or, 2) speed up the signal. Mr. Einstein says you can't do the second even if you want to.
It's true that LEO birds are cheaper because they don't need the expensive boosters to geosync (23,000 miles is *way* the heck out there - nearly 3 Earth diameters!), but the chief reason Iridium birds are in LEO is to achieve reasonable signal latencies.
It's a shame Iridium got the moey first and dd it wrong, because the concept is excellent. Iridium just underestimated bandwidth requirements of the network by a couple of orders of magnitude, which put a serious crimp in their pricing model.
"The future's good and the present is nothing to sneeze at." - Roblimo's last
phrase meaning "inability to talk".
This is not a joke. Look it up.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Nice try, conspiracy boy. There's a very public and compelling reason to burn the sats. The IRS. Assets that are floating around in orbit ready to be turned back on or sold at some later date, aren't *nearly* as deductible as assets that have been reduced to a fine dust floating in the Indian Ocean. Someone would have to come up with a lot more than 5% to make it worthwhile to sell Iridium.
I wonder if they have enough fuel to put it into :)
a "slingshot" orbit to send them to Mars.
Use them as Mars orbiters for future missions.
That would be an instant hit with Nasa!
heck Nasa should just buy 'em!
I don't know enough about how Motorola's internal divisions work, but it seems that saving 5 billion in one sector means the others have more $$$ to play with.
Besides, we all know the NSA secretly bought out the system and is using it to read your email from space. The voices in my head tell me it must be so. :-]
I use Macs for work, Linux for education, and Windows for cardplaying.
To calculate man-years.. What I did was I divide the total economic output of the US by its population. (9 trillion divided by 300 million). I then multiplied in a fudge factor of 3x..
.1% of one years worth of economic output of the US.
....)
Roughly for every $100,000 spent, that's the economic output of a full individual for a full year. And 5 billion is 50,000 times that. Of course this counts all of the production used, from the cleaners who cleaned the floor where the rocket fuel for launch was refined, to the engineers who designed the chips in the birds.
Another way to look at it is that its about one half of
(Some armchair economics follows)
My belief is that there's only one real fundamental shortage, that of human labor. There are enough atoms of iron, uranium, alluminum, iridium, and everything else in the earth's crust to satisfy almost any demand that's short of building a dyson sphere. Anyways, I sorta like to convert currency from units of dollars into units of human labor. So the CDR I burned today cost $.71 or required about 6-30 minutes of human labor to build. (including the price of the raw materials, the amortized cost of the manufacturing equipment, the cost of the materials to build the manufacturing equipment,
Its sad that a beautiful idea just came too late to work.. Its sad that the result of 5 billion dollars (over 50,000 man years) of work is being scheduled to be burned to ash in the atmosphere, barely a year after it went public. (Iridium first opened for service Nov 98)
But it does go to show how capitalism works.. Sometimes mistakes happen and lots of effort gets wasted. But things aren't kept artifically alive beyond their time. It shows that the market works.
The people who put their dreams and time into iridium will go on to other projects and create new ideas and give us technological progress.
Its sad, but life must go on. The only thing that is unchanging is death.
Life is perpetual change.
The U.S. government should cheerfully pay, oh, $100 million, (under 45 cents/citizen) for the best fireworks display in history to celebrate Independence Day 2000.
The ITU = International Telecommunication Union (with a *.int domain name, ooh, aah) has a broken search engine on its site so I can't do an internal search for "Iridium". I'm sure there's something good on there, though.
Some FCC (United States, Federal Communications Commission) stuff on Iridium authorization.
The Netherlands Foundation for Research in Astronomy had some stuff in an old newsletter about Iridium and radio interference.
Thanks to "astrophysics" for mentioning the ITU again.
--
The shareholder is always right.
I'm posting at 1, so moderators, you don't have to mark me down as redundant due to the similarities of the articles, but since I'm addressing you, you shouldn't moderate me up either. (I hope saying that doesn't make me a troll or flamebait. Doh... now I'm trying to get marked up as funny. Bleh, do whatever you want:)
--
The shareholder is always right.
Optical astronomers are getting screwed over because they have to make a lot of effort to avoid pointing their telescopes at Iridium satellites while the sun might be reflecting off of the satellites, or else risk damaging their equipment. Some people are having fun observing the "iridium flash" phenomenon, but many astronomers are annoyed.
--
The shareholder is always right.
--
The shareholder is always right.
Perhaps it's far fetched, but maybe NASA could figure out a way to scrap the hardware for the space station, I mean, it takes quite a bit of money and fuel to raise those satellites, they're packed with communications equipment, high quality solar panels, and other miscellaneous parts that are valuable, why not make an effort to use them?
Just because you disagree doesn't make it offtopic or flamebait.
as far as my understanding goes, iridium was actually a more *expensive* than many local exchanges. In poorer countries with telephone monopolies, Iridium was waaaay to expensive for the local population to afford. In countries where lots of people actually could afford Iridium, cheaper alternatives existed - namely cell and PCS phones.
Iridium went under the old-fasioned way: it ran out of money because not enough people bought it's product.
Cause those aliens from ID4 will be annoyed when the arrive and realise that they can't use our own satellites against us :P.
> Anyway, I'm assuming that you're talking about either a) spectrum assignments or b) the optical flares. If a), go complain to the
> ITU (and/or boycott it with a vengance). If b), then you'll probably need to create a substantial amount of new international law
> before you can do anything about it (again, assuming I'm not missing something, as IANL); feel free to. =)
Both. On a: It's my understanding that Motorola agree to respect the restrictions put forth by the ITU, but then changed it's mind. So I think boycotting Motorola is more appropriate than the ITU. On b: I know there's not much I can do, but boycotting Motorola seemed like at least something.
US$5 billion.
Who will cover the tab ?
The same people who provided the money in the first place. Investors.
Who are the investors ?
Joe Bloggs walking down the street has an insurance policy and a retirement fund. Anyone want to guess how much of the capital traded on Wall Street and Nasdaq originates with the Joe Bloggs of the world ?
Now, which is better ?
* Destroy the products built with community money because no immediate return is forthcoming, ensuring net loss for company and net loss for the community that invested in the company.
* Make the products built with community money available to the community in the hopes that there will be at least some future return ?
- antoine
What if one of them hits a boat or something?
As with NASA's faster, cheaper, flatter missions, the lesson is: if you're going to spend the money to launch something, it had damn well better be worthwhile!
"You can't get something for nothing." - my grandfather, on the stock market and Reaganomics.
If someone were to buy those satellites and put them to good use, this would be a bad move. Unfortunately, the only offer was from the United States Department of Defense, and they have since retracted their offer. It is a shame to see them go, tragic actually...
However,
NASA is applauding the decision to scuttle these satellites. If they were to stay up in the air, they would be unused space debris, which complicates missions and is potentially dangerous. This move is actually strategically removing potentially dangerous debris, not just destroying valuable equipment so others can use it for a bargain...
Altruistically, they could just lower the offering price to something trivial, but businesswise, this would be a bad move. The company that bought it would be able to offer the service that they designed, for a fraction of the cost, and edge out their potential future market.
Que sera sera...
Eh...
Why burn them for a couple of seconds worth of flares...?
I think we should actually send them out to deep space (providing they have enough fuel to get out of gravity)...this would definantly last longer.
There's a greater chance that maybe if anything is out there, will find a Satellite floating around...track it's path back to earth etc etc..
don't know if that's good or bad...
Maybe our space travel in the future..we'll find these old satellites again somewhere....and put them into our museums for our future generations...
Just a wild thought...
First of all, it gets pretty costly to keep Iridium up and running. An article here shows just how much Iridium pays Motorola to operate and maintain it. 129 million per quarter on the low end!!
Anyway, is there a date set for this "massive burnout". It would be pretty cool to see. It's not everyday you witness the intentional destruction of hundreds of millions of dollars worth of equipment.
It also seemed a little weird that they are still selling the service online on the Iridium web site.
They should have claimed Y2K 'problems' and ditched them over new year's eve and claimed the insurance.
"Yeh, we dunno what happened. I guess they all turned around, aimed themselves at the same location, fired their boosters, and crashed. Ahh those crazy Y2K bugs. *sticks hand out*"
Or they could perform a pretty cool UFO invasion scare.
Everyone seemed to forget to ask these four very important questions...
Everyone seemed to forget to ask these four very important questions...
Yeh? And? So? What?
Maybe folks in the free world don't appreciate their ability to contact anyone, any time, via a wide selection of LD carriers for the cheapest cost. In many nations, the phone company is still a gov't owned and run monopoly. Gov't sets the prices, gov't controls whom you may call. Gov't can tap their own lines to listen in as they see fit. Enter iridium. The telephone version of the internet. Individuals now with the power, for the first time, to bypass local controls and place calls directly, to anyone, anywhere on the planet, without paying local 'access fees', without being tracked, without being monitored. Scared the crap out of local govt's. No doubt, international pressure motivated the dicision to drop iridium. But no, that was not enough. A bankrupt iridium could be bought by someone else. They wanted it destroyed, and the failure to scare other companies from trying a similar global phone plan. This was pure politics, at its worst.
Millenia from now, will our era be marked by a thin, global era of iridium?
Just like the dinosaurs......
Here is a report from the The Committee on Radio Astronomy Frequencies (CRAF) of the European Science Foundation (ESF). It has more details on the interference with Radio Astronomy (particulary the work of the VLA and the VLBA (Very Large Baseline Array).
I visited the VLA last year, and was saddened to hear that Iridium seem to care so little about the outright damage they were doing to the scientific observations of these hard working scientists. This report speaks of limiting their observations to low traffic hours, giving them only about 4 hours a day! This is terrible. Radio astronomy doesn't require darkness like visual astronomy, so under normal conditions, observations can take place 24x7.
So, if it were up to me, I'd continue the boycott.
?
Iridium is/was developed about 50 feet from me at work. There is no savior. Motorola/Iridium held out hope that the Pentagon would buy it, but they refused. The last day anyone could purchase it was Wednesday. It's too late.
No one is developing for it anymore; and the general sentiment among the engineers is "it's about time".
I suggest this story instead.
The thing about the Iridium is that it was such a huge and obvious mistake. They wanted to allow international buisness travelers to have a phone that they could take with them around the world. Instead of just making dualband and triband phones, they spent 7 billion dollars to launch satelites and to market $5000 phones, $3000 pagers, and phone calls at the low-low price of $40/minute. PLEASE!
And once it became obvious that it was crashing hardcore, Motorola (the largest investor in Iridium LLC) kept throwing money at it.
Now here's the best part. Motorola wasn't the only one to throw billions at a DOA idea. There were no less than 4 other direct competitors to Iridium. All of which have either already met, or are currently meeting, a bitter end.
On the upside, I should be able to get one of those phones for ultra-cheap!
--
Anonymous for Obvious Reasons
Iridium was a huge mistake from almost day one. Cellular technology already had become pervasive, and there are other satellite-based communications systems readily available (albeit just as pricey as iridium was). Essentially, Iridium was designed to fill a market need that really didn't exist (people working in remote places not served by existing cellular), at a price that only a few users could afford.
Unfortunately for Motorola and their partners, the Iridium team had fully drunk of the kool-aid and didn't see their market evaporate even before they were operational. Besides that, Iridium phones suffered from serious technical limitations, and the network that they designed didn't factor in data becoming the killer app for wireless. By 1995 or so it was clear that the Iridium market as envisioned did not exist.
If they could have gone back to the drawing board, it might have been possible to redesign Iridium into something viable, but there was too much financial pressure to get into production, pretty much mainly due to all the money Motorola sunk into the venture. As it was, they scaled back from 77 satellites to 66 due to financial issues.
Sadly, by the time it was in deployment, the marketplace had saturated virtually all the populated earth with cellular technology at a fraction of the cost. The exclusive market for Iridium was pretty much the two Poles and a few desolate places like the Sahara. Ships have alternate means of satellite communications.
Oh well. They'd be really pretty to watch when they come down... Maybe the Geek Cruises people could throw an "Iridium cruise"?
- -Josh Turiel
-- Josh Turiel
"2. Do not eat iPod Shuffle."
First, because it interfered with astronomy.
Second, because it was a stupid design -- launching a hard-to-upgrade system of 66 highly specialized orbiting telephone switchboards which needed to be replaced every ten years and are incompatible with any other satphone service or other use.
(Instead, use relatively dumb and cheap satellites and keep the complex processing in a handful of distributed ground stations. Sure, you'd have to use two satellites each call, but reducing the complexity and weight of each satellite would save lots. And upgrading the system in the future would involve ground station upgrades, instead of satellite replacements).
Third, because it was stupid economics -- the market for the service is people who can't use cell phones where they are, but can afford to pay higher fees than with a cell phone. But any market where the cell phones can make money will sooner or later develop a local cellular system. So you have a serivce that appeals only to people who are by definition marginal markets, but which costs billions to maintain.
Steven E. Ehrbar
Here is a time-lapse image, here is another, and here is a web site with several more images.
Typically, a flare lasts about ten seconds or so.
--
The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing. - Edmund Burke
Curiously, this article on news.com, written within ten minutes of the article referenced, makes it seem that there may be a savior for Iridium.
Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachtani?
www.fogbound.net
And I'm sure the $3000 cost of the handsets had nothing to do with it, or the very high per minute cost of using the service. European users can pretty much travel throughout Europe and use their GSM handset with no problem. There just wasn't a big market for this service. The Iridium technology is pretty much useless for anyone else since it's obvious that it isn't profitable in it's primary function, and it doesn't handle data well enough to be used for any Teledesic-type of wireless Internet functions. Craig McCaw (of Nextlink, Nextel, and Teledesic fame) was probably their last hope, but he recently decided against bailing them out.
The Iridium satellites have large reflective dish antennas that, when hit at the right angle by the Sun, produce spectacularly bright flares in the sky. Sometimes the flares are bright enough to be visible by daylight.
To figure out when and where these flares will be visible in your area, visit Heavens Above. There you can plug in your location and receive data which will tell you where to look.
So far I have seen several. The flares are usually short-lived, much like the company that spawned them.
I (along with many astronomers and others bothered by Iridium's disregard for science) have been boycotting Motorola and Iridium. Should we continue the boycot?
Once the satelites are burned up, they are no longer impeeding science. But it's not like they admitted the error of their ways and have decided to do the ethical and socially responsible thing. I think I will end my boycot on the basis that they are at least destroying them rather than leaving them around as space junk that interfere with optical astronomy and future missions.
I mean, after dropping the # of satellites from 77 to 66, they really should have been calling it Dysprosium. But would they listen to me? NO.
I have no idea why that bothers me so much.
*snicker
(sour grapes maybe?)
Starts at $5,000,000,000.00
Quantity 66
Seller (Rating) motorola001 (0)
Payment Visa/MasterCard, American Express, Discover, Money Order/Cashiers Checks, Personal Checks
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A REAL COLLECTORS ITEM. COMPLETE SET. ONE OF A KIND. LIKE NEW CONDITION. HARDLY BEEN USED.
Can I send a little money to Iridium so they can precision-drop one of their birds on the location of my choice? Somewhere in Seattle, preferably. (grin)
"Dancing is the vertical expression of a horizontal desire" --Robert Frost