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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.
Satellites really don't anything to stay up there? What? Hello?
While it's true that if the sats were left alone they would continue to orbit for 15 to 20 more years before the earth's gravitaional anomalies and the atmospheric drag at their low altitude would deorbit them naturally. However, to keep them usable communications sats requires 24x7x365 attention. They must be tracked and any orbital deviations corrected (that's why they have hydrazine thrusters on them in the first place). Their health must be monitored to make sure they are functioning correctly. They have to be turned to keep a low profile when a known piece of space debris approaches, and safed when a solar flare is detected.
I would not be surpised if Iridium's satellite operations budget was more than $1 billion/per year - that would not be a lot for 66+ setellites.
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?
Is this some kinda new math?
It's IRS math. The same math that can make a $10 a year raise cost you $200 a year in taxes.
if $10 per year puts you into a new tax bracket, it's at most $10 that's taxed in the higher bracket.
Actually, the tax schedule is jagged ,though not significantly in most cases. I understand that there are more pathelogical cases than the quick example below. The situation is also much more sane now than it has been in the past.
Let's see, (from 1999 tax table for form 1040A): If Form 1040A, line 24, is - At least 48,900 But less than 48,950 And you are Married filing jointly, Your tax is- 8,103.
Next line: blah,blah,blah, 48,950 - 49,000 = 8,117.
So, if I made 48,940 last year, and 48,950 this year, I loose $4
That's just the first example I came to on a very simple tax form. (That is, grab the booklet, flip to the tax table and choose a line at random). There's also the fact that a satellite system that is in orbit and theoretically useful is an asset (as far as IRS is concerned) even if nobody is actually going to buy it and operating it looses money. If it plunges into the atmosphere, it is a total loss of a $5,000,000,000 asset and can be written off. Don't just take my word for it, check out the various articles about Iridium.
it's just that it dosen't follow from your argument, see?
I wasn't meaning to make a full scale argument or proof, just pointing out at a high level that once the IRS and taxes become involved, loss is gain and gain is loss. So they gain plenty by loosing. In the same sense that an individual can actually loose by gaining (at a much smaller scale). If IRS math made any sense, it would recognize that a 5B satelite system that looses money and can't be sold to any sane company is a liability, not an asset.
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
Who said anything about the Army? There are four other branches of the "Armed Services," smart guy. Certainly you learned that one in basic. Anyways, you're still wrong, but I'd just like to point that out.
Here they use them in Bosnia.
Here they are used by the ARMY Corps of Engineers.
Here's the CEO of Iridium saying "We have crystal clear communications. With the freedom to use the Iridium phones in helicopters and Army trucks, and area of total devastation and no electricity.
Here is a story about the DoD reserving Iridium satellite time. Perhaps you would like to chew on the line "The Army, Navy and Air Force are testing ways to integrate the Iridium satellite network into their communications plans" for a while. It's in the first paragraph.
Here's a conspicuously obvious one titled "Army to Use Iridium Pagers."
It seems like with a little research (little meaning like, 20-30 seconds) would've shown you how wrong you really are. I suggest you do just that before posting next time.
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I think there is a world market for maybe five personal web logs.
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.
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I think there is a world market for maybe five personal web logs.
But...
Let's take 'em in turn:
Iridium might have been more expedient or cheaper depending on circumstance, but the US armed forces are not going to be affected, readiness-wise, by iridium tanking.
If anyone from the Pentagon is reading this, how about taking any money you're thinking of spending to buy Iridium and put it into salaries and living expenses for your people? Otherwise you're going to continue losing tech-trained personnel to the private sector in droves.. A USAF tech captain IIRC gets like $38k/yr for like 8-10 years experience doing sysadmin..
"The beatings will continue until morale improves."
Your Working Boy,
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
Just an idea - but it may be that getting PR out of it isn't possible. I don't know very much about the mechanics of how things get torched in the atmosphere, but if I were this company, I would want to plonk these satellites in the middle of the ocean, as far from land as possible. That way, if they don't completely disintegrate, they hit the water, and nobody dies.
If you crash them into the ocean miles and miles from anyone, it may be that you would not really be able to see them. Besides, who knows where they orbit the earth? It may be that they'll be swandiving straight into antarctica, in which case we surely won't see them. (Although the people on the southern tip of south america might have a shot)
-- 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.
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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
Most people have no idea how difficult this is. In fact, this stuff really *is* rocket science!
The moon missions had to hit a date/time-specific moon corridor that was only about 10 miles wide with a velocity tolerance of only about 100 mph. There was one mid-course correction that they could use to finesse position within the corridor, but they had to have hit it in the first place. Think about it for a second, and you'll realize those are *very* tight tolerances, in context.
(BTW: the figures above are from the Ranger missions. Apollo may have used slightly different paths, but the physics is pretty much the same regardless. This is one of the reasons it was such a miracle that we got Apollo 13 back at all. I used to do a lot of work at JSC in Houston, and several of the oldtimers who worked on 13 told me that Mission Control intentionally aimed the capsule along the steepest allowable side of the flight path, so that if something went wrong, it would result in the astronauts being vaporized rather than skipped off into space to asphixiate, which was viewed as being as bad for PR as it would be for the astronauts.)
"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!
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
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.
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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:)
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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.
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The shareholder is always right.
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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.
And the brethren went away edified.
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
d00d, the DOD already has their own 1337 global satellite net. they 0wn j00.
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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...
yeah, but he only did that to turn heads away from y2k induced windows lockups/law suits while he remotely rebooted your computer (he CAN do that you know...)
There are two kinds of people in the world: Those with good memory.
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!
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Anonymous for Obvious Reasons
It shows a 3d image of the earth's artificial satellites, and lets you select from lots of satellites. Gives you a real idea about how crowded our space really is. Also shows you how hard it must be to keep all those satellites from crashing... I don't know if Iridium's satellites are listed here, as I don't know their callnames...
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.
Bandwidth. Or lack thereof.
make everybody in the world pay $1 for the company,
How? Threaten to rain terror from the skies unless every last person on the globe pays? Besides, a buck may not seem like much to you, but in many countries that is a fairly large sum of money.
and have free satellite access for anyone who wants it?
It's hardly free if everyone has to pay a buck, is it? Also, while that might defray the launch costs, and maybe some of the R&D costs, if it's a one-time charge it ain't going to cover the operating costs.
I bet I could write a perl script to keep the birds flying...
I bet you couldn't. If spacecraft dynamics was easy, everyone and their grandmother would do it. It's not easy.
It's one thing to compute a few simple conics using a point mass model. It's something else to accurately account for perturbations due to other celestial bodies, solar radiation pressure, atmospheric drag (yes, the atmosphere extends that high), and zonal gravitational harmonics (fancy way of saying that the earth is bulgy and not uniform). Throw in the coupling between spacecraft attitude and spacecraft orbit (and we'd really like to keep our antenna pointed at the earth), and you have a very nasty non-linear problem. Trying to control all of this, and maintain a desired orbit, is non-trivial to say the least.
Sometimes I am truly astounded that we got to the moon and back. Not because we couldn't build the rockets, but because the guidance and control is so complex.
Al
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)
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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