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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.
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
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
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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