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Trying to Save Iridium
I think about 20 million of you that have written about the Save Iridium Web site. A band of folks have gotten together to try to save the satellites and "Open Source" the network. I'm not sure what uses it will put to, but maybe they should hook up with the Freenet folks.
Its done through Bfast, the site is a total joke and they are just raking in the money from ads. Great reporting slashdot.
Much like this scam which slashdot unwittingly 'advertised' http://slashdot.org/articles/99/07/19/1625206.shtm l grab and go at its finest
Motorola Inc showed that the space-to-Earth transmissions in the band 1621.35-1626.5 MHz will cause harmful interference of up
to 30 dB above the levels for harmful interference for radio astronomy as given in ITU-R Recommendation RA769. Furthermore,
Motorola Inc states that during periods of low traffic the Earth-to-space transmissions could meet the ITU-R Recommendation
RA769 levels for harmful interference. In practice, this is for about 4 hours per day (night hours), which is catastrophic for many
radio astronomical projects, especially for monitoring celestial objects and project for which daytime observations are mandatory on
physical grounds.
Need I say any more?
I have a flawless plan.
;)
1) Sell it to the Chinese government for 2 billion dollars.
2) Keep the profits.
I know there are some skeptics, but I beleive the Chinese Government has quite a lot of uses for a satellite network.
and opensource? let the Chinese Government call it what it wants
quistas is an arrogant prick... I love it when people scold others, then look like jack-asses in the process...
a) you can't park a satellite over any point on the earth's surface (unless you're geostationary over the equator).
b) It will cost a lot to add weather monitoring equipment to all these satellites.
The stationary monitoring sites would be on the ground.
Do you even know what Iridium is?
Because, just maybe, they were going after the WRONG MARKET? Who is to say there isn't a better market that someone else, using the Iridium satellites, couldn't service at a profit?
One failure does not doom or condemn the entire concept. One "bad apple" does NOT "ruin the bushel"!
I suspect the underlying problem is that Iridium was designed to be so optimal for voice communications, that it lacks the generality to be used for much else. Which is why I recommended SLOW uplinks for consumers. That should work fine with the existing Iridium network.
Other LEO (Low Earth Orbit) and MEO (Medium Earth Orbit) satellite systems now going up, or going up in the near future, are far more flexible and general prupose than Iridium, and will surely capitalize on Iridium's mistakes.
Has anyone thought to ask the Ham community what they think? They have DECADES of experience designing, launching and operating satelites for use by the amateur radio community (I've worked a couple of the OSCAR satellites, and the ham station on Mir), and can surely give us a better view of what it would take to keep Iridium operational, especially as an "Open Source" (???) project.
-BobC
If anyone was to look at the Iridum System Specs, they would find that the reason no other communications company wants the system is that it is useless for anything other than Very narrow- band telephone communications. The channels on the system are band--width limited to 2400 Hz. With really good technology you might get 24KBit/Sec channels working. Check it out.
You would think that SPIE or whatever international organization that has regulating authority would have clearer guidelines? I can't imagine a 7 Billion dollar enterprise such as the Iridium project not satisfying an impact study before implementation. Of course with technology constantly changing and equipment rapidly becoming more accurate and sensitive to interference perhaps a 10 year plan is unrealistic.
Obviously those companies couldn't afford it and lost money and are deorbiting their satellites.
Radio astronomy is important, but it is NOT more important than EVEN ONE human life.
This "band of folks" has been fooled by the clown into fighting to keep Iridium aloft. Not sure what uses it will put to? As I posted recently, he plans to use it to track me and monitor my irregular sleep patterns. The clown was very upset about his plans being ruined when he read on Slashdot that Iridium was going to be burned up in the atmosphere. If the clown succeeds, it will not be "open source" at all, he is just saying that because he knows that term will appealing to everyone here (except the Microsoft people, but he doesn't have to worry about gaining control on that front). Please do not fall for his trickery, you will just be used as his pawn. Look at recent events and you see the clown at work. The DC LUG gathered together in one public place? They will be vulnerable to the clown since he can concentrate his powers on one geographic location to attempt to plant the seeds of his evil in the minds of many Linux users all at once. Freeman Dyson winning a large monetary award for religion? The clown has probably already sent the Scientologists to Mr. Dyson to gain control over those funds. Surreptitious communication over Multics? The clown at work for certain, come on. Perl 5.6.0 out and no comments from Tom Christiansen? The clown must have done something with him (I've heard that Tom is busy with the new edition of Programming Perl, but that's probably the clown's cover story). Tim Burton remaking Planet of the Apes? You saw Beetlejuice, just imagine what the apes will look like. Plus there's L.Ron Hubbard's novel Battlefield Earth coming out as a movie soon, which will be loaded with the Scientologists' pro-clown subliminal messages aimed at the Slashdot crowd to spread the sleeplessness that has affected me so profoundly. Put it all together and I say, no, we should all say that the sooner Iridium burns, the better.
yes it is, yours!
What's Bfast?
well, then shit. i can't get along with them. i am in PICES.
See this for what it is.
Just because you get a credit card doesn't mean you absolutely have to immediately run out and buy furniture. This is just good marketing.
Instead of burning the satellites up, they should be donated to AMSAT, and the corporation should still receive the full tax write-off.
Perhaps AMSAT can use them. If they can't be moved in frequency, then STAs can be obtained from the FCC by a few people for some experimentation.
73, N8KH
Instead of burning the satellites up, they should be donated to AMSAT, and the corporation should still receive the full tax write-off.
Perhaps AMSAT can use them. If they can't be moved in frequency, then STAs can be obtained from the FCC by a few people for some experimentation.
An STA is a "special temporary authorization" to use spectrum for some research purpose. More information is undoubtably available at the FCC's web site.
73, N8KH
I love the word motherfucker.
You're missing the point, they want to make a few bucks with their nextcard site. Anyone can sign people up for NextCard and make money.
> and If you don't like it because you can't map
> your quasars for a majority of the day, bite me
Radio Astronomy is a tad more important than your petty scanning needs, and the above statement really just shows you for the moron that you are.
Iridium *SHOULD* burn, and burn good, for several reasons:
* While a tax write-off, it's still a massive loss to the idiots involved (including Bill Gates) that pushed it through with little to no regard for the radio spectrum they were polluting).
* It's nice to see bad ideas burn up and die (like DiVX).
* It's useless for anything else, anyways...
Harry
are we sure this isn't a joke? read through their stupid survey options.
You're right, lifespan was only 5 years. No option if they didn't load up the system and make their money back in 3-4 years.
Not to mention that they really can make money from signing people up for NextCard accounts. Lots of pages devoted just to that. (Normally not as creative as this one.)
they are taking out the trash, by crashing them in the atmoshepre they are cleaning up their mistakes.
You are in FECES!
Iridium is 2400 bps.
Please! stop fighting! We can work together if we only try...to work together. hmmm...
By working together we can learn to stop fighting, and... learn to try. not quite...
If we stop fighting, and learn to try, we can work together... please?
OH! FLYIN' FUCK! JUST BURN THE FUCKEN, FLYIN' SATELLITES!
Excellent point, but we should go all the way an realize that if millions were raised, then I would have much more respect the guys behind this thinnly vieled, make us rich site. They really do make money if you sign up for NextCard. But they obviously don't know much about IRIDIUM, nor do they care.
Count me in too! In your mom's mouth, actually.
I think it's time to go for that remedial English class you've been eyeing...
Heh.... Good one. Plenty of technical info exists inside of little binders marked "Iridium Confidential Proprietary". =) But what would they give away the specs of their system for?
For general info, hunt around on the iridium site, as long as it's still up.
"Iridium satellite systems"? As far as I know, there's just the one system, right? =)
I hope that wasn't an attempt at justification for your position. The continuing existence of a radio telescope (or a radio astronomer for that matter) has an opportunity cost in resources (land, food, etc.). Does this alone make it a "leech"?
Assuming not, why would you say iridium is misguided? I assume that the fact that it didn't succeed financially is irrelevant to you... unless you can show me a radio observatory that is turning a profit. =) So, what does that leave us with? Scientific merit? (the iridium project was the proving ground for several technologies...) Your political agenda? (Ok, but your argument holds little weight) Some other utility measurement?
.....park them in front of HBO's sattelites & demand ransom from HBO to move em!
Better yet steer them all to bump into Echelons sattelites & make THEM burn up in the atmosphere.
Astro-demolition derby anyone?
You are ugly.
Iridium cause both light interference (the famous so called Iridium flashes) and radio interference (by spraying noise over regions of the radio spectrum important to radio astronomers). Of the two, the radio interference is the most serious, and has led some to boycott Motorola in protest.
As a modest proposal, you might want to think about not posting if you're not sure of what you're talking about,
and learn from others posting actual information.
Excellent advice. Now take it.
Yes, the system uses 2400 bps per channel of audio. And, yes, this requires a huge amount of compression (and correspondingly a huge amount of computing power... the high costs of handsets should give you some idea of how much DSP they have onboard). And, yes, it is very lossy in terms of quality. I'm not sure if there are sound samples up on the web, but if anyone knows of any, they might want to post a link. =)
No, I'm serious. Don't quote Radiohead, or I'll make your mom sleep in in the wet spot tonight! You suck! You suck ass! You have a serious lip-lock on my rectal rim, bubby!
More than likely they'll piss in your eye socket.
Let's see....at $25 per person that signs up for nextcard it'll only take 24,000,000 people to save Iridium. ;) I have that video where 24,000,000 people pay $25 each to do your mom up the pooper.
When you say that amsats aren't secure, you are understating things. Amateur radio operation are not allowed to use encryption at all to disguise the contents of messages. It may be possible to use such techniques for authentication, but as far as I know, no such techniques are currently in use.
To those who have mentioned turning over the satellites to amateurs: they aren't in our bands, they'd cost millions per year to upkeep, and frankly, we don't need tons of unutilized bandwidth, we already have plenty.
There's no compelling need that I can see for "at all costs" Radio Astronomy. Unless some slacker's tenure is a compelling need.
What there is no compelling need for is a thousand dollar phone with six dollar a minute connect charges that can't be used indoors. The market has decided that an "at all costs" phone isn't a particularly viable product.
I'm not PLEASED with myself, but I often PLEASURE myself.
(I mean "jacking off")
(slang for "masturbation")
Actually, if I had a private aircraft I'd like one of those phones. But there already are services like that, with and without satellites.
I don't see why you're upset that they have a next card ad up. They've obviously put a lot of effort into this. They should sell T-shirts too. I'd buy one. :)
I believe the Iridium network is one of the few places the US's NSA cannot monitor. I sure hope they save this thing... We can finally, once and for all, have a 100% Open Forum that isn't censored, and isn't monitored by any government agency.
----
John
Dynamicdrive.com DHTML scripts and code
Nope
Radio Astronomy? A tad more important than _____? Gee, what major practical applications has Radio Astronomy at that particular frequency done for mankind, aside from employing a few stargazers and college professors?
http://ns2.msintergate.com
Is the same site (it resolves to the same IP..)
It looks like this site is hosted by some folks at www.msintergate.com. Let's give them a call.
I've tried calling the phone numbers listed on the domain, but it just goes to some strange voicemail with no name.
I'd give it a 50% chance of being real.
i bet that guy felt pretty stupid
Excellent
It is short-sighted to say that (x) activity is not worth even one human life. Radio astronomy costs money. There are people starving in Africa (Hati, Thailand, wherever) whose lives could be saved by spending money. Therefore no money should be spent on radio astronomy (or any other activity that cannot be shown to directly save lives).
As a society, we compromise. We spend money on life-saving activities, but we also spend it on more frivolous pursuits, the balance being whatever soothes our collective conscience.
It arguable that the billions spent on Iridium could have been better spent elsewhere, since few lives would be saved by expensive Iridium phones, but many more could be saved by better cellular coverage, or just by feeding people.
Your argument would have more merit if you could show that many lives were being saved by Iridium phones, lives that would not have been saved any other way.
I think that if they spent $7 bil they could put a whole LOAD of hot grits down some ninja's pants. WHATCHAAAAA-TA-CHAAAAAAA!!!
We need to get the radio telescopes further out, anyway. To much local interference as it is, even without Iridium.
Gen. 9:6
Don't mind him. He thinks all computers are pee-cees, and that before the pee-cee was only the Babbage engine.
sell pieces of Stallman's crusty beard to save Iridium. Of course, all of the suckholes here would never actually pay for anything anyway, but they woould pay for support on his smelly old beard.
Plus, the satellites don't have a long life being in an orbit so close to the earth. Who is going to replace a satellite when it enters the atmosphere and burns up (they are planned to do this as part of their life span). Plus, what about software upgrades. You think Motorola is going to give you their source code for those units with the cellular market being the hot bed it is now. Do you think Motorola is going to give you their hardware specs for those units with the cellular market being the hot bed is in now. You also need, land base sites to talk to those satellites. What you are heading for is a "Open-source" project larger than a company like Motorola. By the time you get this organized, and actaully working, the satellites will have completed their life cycle and will have already burnt up in the atmosphere.
Can't they donate the sattelites to a charitable (open source) institution and write them off?
OS is great and all, but software alone isn't going to keep those things flying...
What next, a new embedded system Linux distro to save the Mars lander?
The orbits decay. They are in LEO. This is part of the plan.
Considering that the fastest speed on modems was 9600 during the late 80's, and it was a reasonable enough speed for BBS'ing, One could use this to dial a BBS or any sort of dial up shell. I've had to deal with a 9600 modem to dial up to my ISP and it's not at all terrible for mail and telnetting to another system.
I say dunk 'em and let the corporate leeches learn a lesson - sometimes Karma comes back to bite you.
Iridium: Good riddance.
Iridium = satelltite
Slashdot reader = "I aRe a Dumb"
Jason,
I know exactly what you mean! I pay a fair price to have your mom lying in my living room. Of course a 10 dollar whore puts in well in my price range, and she makes a great conversation piece when she has a lit candle in every orafice.
Nothin like open source to take something worthwhile and discredit is into one huge lame joke.
setup your listening station on the far side of the moon and you won't have a problem!!!
The biggest problem is that the FCC would have to take special action to allocate the frequencies Iridium uses for amateur use which I think is rather unlikely. It's still IMO no more unlikely than the SOS people actually coming up with the funds to buy it.
Iridium would be a great set of SDI targets!
Obviously the same companies who presently use satellites to provide Internet service in the first place! Remember, that's another multi-billion dollar network that seems to be making lots of money.
Sheesh.
-BobC
WAKE UP, there are thousands of sites out there trying to drive traffic to NextCard for cash. This one is just a little more creative than some of the others.
you can take my iridium but you can't take my freedom
iridium = space grits
Could it be used to help the projects it was until recently blocking?
Iridium is pretty cool, like when it makes Superman all weak and shit. I wish I had some of that.
Frost Pist could be easily confused with Frost Pissed, which is when you urinate in a blender with some ice. Please make sure you enunciate clearly.
Oh yeah, you mom is here and she's pissing on damn near everything! She really enjoys her sports, no?
It, Sal, really dead. It's just a question of weather. Can it be used for something else? They've already learned. Their lesion, or at last they've lost their collective shirts. I gas. That doesn't mean they leaned on anything.
I'd kill for even 1 byte/sec from a wearable field research e-assistant while I am doing field work in--say--the Xingu rapids, Amazonia. Give me Emacs + Linux + 1 byte/sec free satellite Internet access!!! I an upload research data (text) email (text), and I could find many other uses of it.
gacp...this post from being moderated down to -1.
4nD 7|-|47'5 d4 b0770m l1n3, b3k4u53 d4 4n0nYm0u5 k0w4rD 541d 50!
These guys are smart about one thing, they are driving a lot of traffic to their NextCard site and you are all helping! That site has nothing to do with IRIDIUM except taking advantage of the publicity. It has everything to do with $25 for signing up someone for NextCard. There will be no T-shirts etc. It's a scam.
I like in particular that it parodies the dog and pony show that Open Sores really is.
Who cares about a bunch of Radio Astronomers, is the question to ask.
Is the universe going to go away if we don't explore it sometime within the next thirty years?
Near as I can tell, the only thing that'll happen is a few people who don't do a damn thing except "study the stars" will have to get out and earn a living.
There's no compelling need that I can see for "at all costs" Radio Astronomy. Unless some slacker's tenure is a compelling need.
You too can make big money if you set up a NextCard site that looks like a plea for help for a failed, but famous technological achievement. It's all a scam.
For more than 4 generations the IT Professionals were the guardians of qualty and stability in software. Before the dark times. Before Microsoft...
Please remove this bullshit revisionist history.
And they'll dump 'em in the atmosphere PDQ!
Perhaps you ppl don't remember that Iridium went a *bit* over their bandwidth allocation, and stomped on some adjacent frequencies (hydroxy radical, IIRC...signature of molecular clouds in star forming regions).
Moto paid off Arecibo some trivial amount, but it's just a bit sweet to see Iridium get some "just desserts". They had the typical attitude of "we have lots of money so we can do whatever the hell we want".
Oh, you know that bright porch light you've got outside? Bullets are cheap.
Look at all the ads on this site? The Ask Jeeves one pays 3 cents a question. Clearly someone trying to profit from a bit of free publicity on a JOKE SITE.
/ k.d / earth trickle / Monkeys vs. Robots Films /
Large print giveth, and the small print taketh away
Iridium is a leech on the radio spectrum used
p act.html
for astronomical research. The sooner this
misguided company dies the better.
http://www.skypub.com/sights/satellites/astroim
yea i know varak, he's a cool cat and he wants to save some satellites so he can keep in contact with his international network of ho's. if you want to help this mega phat pimp, lay him some cold cash and you may get some warm lap in return in the very near future as well as help an open satellite initiative... if you wanna know where he ircs just send me a lil e-mail and you will be enlighteneeddd
Why not offer it to the Amateur Radio community? The companies could take their tax write-off and hams would have another resource for providing emergency communications as well as a new toy to tinker with. The possibilities for linking amateur land-based repeater systems are endless..
I think that the logic of the nick should be changed. It should be that if the words 'First Post' or 'F1RST P0ST' or 'Frost Pist' or just about any variation on that, appear in any of the first thirty posts, the nick should be changed to 'Dickless Pinhead.' Thus:
FIRST POST MOTHERFUCKER (Score:-1)
by Dickless Pinhead on Friday March 24, . . . .
or maybe a randomly generated appelation, like "Clueless Moron" or "Bandwidth Gobbling Idjit" or "Self Important Blithering Imbecile",
and so on
a) you can't park a satellite over any point on the earth's surface (unless you're geostationary over the equator). b) It will cost a lot to add weather monitoring equipment to all these satellites.
You know, it's a shame to waste this fine aluminum can that some engineer spent a lot of money designing just to hold a beverage. Rather than trow it in the trash I'll leave it here on the street for other people to marvel at.
These satalites are too expensive to operate and are thus trash. Just as a RESPONCIBLE person does not litter, a RESPONCIBLE company does not leave its garbage behind.
Boobies never hurt anyone. - Sherry Glaser.
Amateur Radio satellites are perhaps the greatest experiment ever achieved by civilians without recurring to government funding. Currently, there are about 9 OSCAR satellites ('OSCAR' meaning 'Orbiting Satellite Carrying Amateur Radio') and 15 MicroSats. Most of these got into space by being piggy-backed into some rocket as a secondary payload during the launch of something larger (like a weather satellite), making the cost rather low.
AMSAT has a new satellite, the Phase 3D, which is scheduled for launch on an Ariane in July. The funding for the launch came from donations by radio amateurs (making it look like PBS), organisations like the American Radio Relay League, and other sources. Being a larger satellite, the Phase 3D has to be launched individually, raising the cost to what is now considered average. The fact that Phase 3D is going to space this summer should be used as a standard.
In Soviet Russia, Jesus asks: "What Would You Do?"
A correction: Phase 3D will be launched as a secondary payload; AMSAT was required to build a special mounting adaptor to fit the satellite into the Ariane's payload bay along with the primary cargo if AMSAT wanted to pay coach instead of first class.
In Soviet Russia, Jesus asks: "What Would You Do?"
bad timing i suppose. i think the ink on the design was already drying by the time the net really took off. It was always envisioned as a voice system.
Speak for yourself! The Interplanetary Federation of Octopi consider sea-crashing sattelites a majorly life threatening danger. That's why we constructed a thick shell of ice on our home planet of Europa.
The idea that some nieve geek consortium can somehow "save" the Iridium network is ridiculous in the extreme. If Craig McCaw passed on it you know it isn't worth much. Besides this will be a benefit to radio astronomers who lost an OH absorption band to Iridium. Now they will get it back!
The next constellation to rain down on us will be Glabalstar, followed closely by ICO. LEO mobile satellite systems will go down as one of the great failures of the decade!
I tried to fill in my name but I got an error at http://saveiridium.com/cgi-bin/data when I hit the "Save Iridium!" button.
And I tried to locate an email address to report the error, but there was none on the site. I tried to go to the guessbook and all I got was to the top of the webpage. Then I tried the "livechat' and I got a blank.
Hmmm....
Can someone please point me to a place where I can actually report the error to SOMEBODY?
Thank you.
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
the price is too high, but that's something more easily changeable.)
If you invest $7000M, you'll need to take about $350M per year in interest payments into account for the calculation of your "operating costs".
If you manage to buy the network of satelites from the bankrupt iridium company for say $7000, you need to factor in about $350 per year in interest payments on that. Suddenly the actual operating costs of the satelites (manning the ground-stations, interconnect to PSTN) overwhelms the costs in operating the thing.
So, the original owners are looking at a minimum of $350M of operational costs per year, and selling services on that network for "cheap" is simply not an option.
Roger.
At one point Motorola was projecting that a replacement satallite would need to be sent up every 18 months, statistically speaking. So even if they aquire the system as it sits now it will start to degrade badly as satallites fail, with no way to replace them. Those low orbits are a pretty harsh environment for electronics. They may not fall out of the sky but they will become useless.
--
When she told me I was average, she was just being mean.
Now, if Iridium were to be "given" to someone, access would never be free, unless adequate ground crews could be gotten for free, electricity was free for the ground stations, and the phone calls from the ground stations to their ultimate destinations were all made free. Then, maybe.
Now, since there is this thought of sending data to the sattelite, where would it go? To "free" NAPs with great big pipes to connect to the internet backbone? And how would access be limited? Why wouldn't everyone want to access the satelites at the same time? They only have a certain, finite amount of capacity...
And how is the Iridium progect going to overcome the loss of their great big tax write-off for the investment? They can write off $100's of millions of dollars of taxes if they dispose of the equipment (remember the landfill full of Apple Lisas?)
If the network were given to a non-profit organization that could give them a deduction, that would be a good start. Then the non-profit could contract back to the Irridium project for day-to-day management and offer service at price that could ignore the original equipment costs, and instead was focused on meeting on-going costs.
The uplinks are slow, there are not alot of them, and the ground stations are expensive to man/run.
But hey, it's Open Source - it's great!
Ken
Iridium turned McCaw down. Not enough money for investors.(No, it wasn't broadband)
Iridium says it cant find any buyers.
Iridium just doesn't want to sell cheap, rather file for bankruptcy.
Now they want to burn the business.
If I invested, Id rather have 1/2 of my money than none.
The courts/investors bought bankruptcy, lock, stock and barrel.
If you were going to setup a scam, surely you'd use a popular topic...
Um, aren't educational donations classed as a tax-writeoff? What it the satellites where given to research or something?
I'm sure the US gov't would be willing to ignore tax if the sats were handed to a useful purpose.
I was thinking of something like `kill -9 aliens`.
Seriously, I didn't have any plans in mind. And I didn't really mean the post to be that funny. I was being serious, actually. I think it would make a good story.
But as to how the aliens are killed, I don't know. Maybe there's some new signaling protocol between the earth the the satellites that people have been working on. Maybe one of the hacker types figures out he can broadcast something in a weird part of the spectrum that annoys them and makes them want to leave. You know, like one of those deals that drives away squirrels using ultrasound. But only with... uh.. aliens. Maybe the aliens are actually lost-lost relatives of terrestrial squirrels and they've come back to get their cousins. So maybe the same noise annoys them too. Yeah, sure. I can see the book's title now: "So Long, And Thanks For All The Nuts."
OK, so the alien thing is pretty pathetic... :-)
-B
Ash and Hickory, straight-grained and true, make excellent bludgeons, dandy for the cudgeling of vegetarians.
I remember it being mentioned numerous times while Iridium was in phase of launching satelites. One of biggest problems with the system is that about the time they expected to pay off their original debt they were going to have to incur the same debt (probably more) all over again as they started replacing the birds.
I vote to save the satellites. If I had to choose between telescopes (radio or otherwise) and (satellite) cellphones, I pick cellphones.
Devout follower of The Ferengi Rules of Acquisition.
I read somewhere that it costs several mu=illion dollars per month to keep all the satellites operational. Where would an open source model of administration raise funds of that magnitude?
Why can't we just set their orbital manuvering thrusters to full blast and let them escape the solar system? Then they might run into a super-intelligent race of machines (shades of V'ger) that would give them intelligence, VC funding, and a killer management team, each of which has interviewed for Wired. They'd come back to Earth, launch a killer IPO and make the $6 bil investment back, in spades. They'd probably also merge with Paul Allen and turn into a pure-energy transcendant being.
It seems to me that the free market has already proved there is NO demand for some dorky looking handheld satellite uplink thingy--so if you don't need to reach a satellite by some handheld then there is a whole slew of standard satellites you can reach, with a good-old-fashioned satellite dish. I've never done anything like this, but a quick look over at the lair of ham radio geeks seems to indicate a lot of other people are.
I like the "AskJeeves" question at the bottom of the page. Click on it and you see an odd assortment of answers -- even odder than usual. I'm still wondering what in the question made it come up with pictures as one subject.
Yes, the $600 million per year cost to run the system is a big problem. It would be quite a challenge to replace the ground stations with whatever an "Open" equivalent would be. And although the problem of calculating the orbits is mathematics, managing the proper combination of orbits and orientations is a challenge.
Well, unfortunately from the article, it appears that the satellites only support phone service and do not have broadband capabilities. I suppose they could be useful for WAP applications, but how bulky would the receivers have to be? As bulky as the phones currently are, I'm sure.
The sad truth appears that there just doesn't seem to be much to do with these satellites. They were poorly conceived in the first place.
Still, I support any effort to save them.a tion/declaration.html
http://www.nara.gov/exhall/charters/declar
http://www.nara.gov/exhall/charters/declaration/d
http://www.nara.gov/exhall/char
What will they do? 'grep' them to death? Send a heard of 'bison' after them?
Telemetry & control of the vehicles occurs in the K-band which is one of the more useful radio astronomy areas.
Unless you can find a use that will recover/save hundreds of millions of dollars every year, it is much better to burn the mofos up.
Could the system be modified to receive instead of transmit? Then instead of being a pain in the arse for radio astronomy it could be a usefull tool...a radio interferometor like the VLA in New Mexico only with a diameter the same (actually bigger) than the earth.
Give me a reason with proof and I will!
If at first you don't succeed, skydiving is not for you.
Does this seem a little silly to anybody but me?
This (very, very anonymous) website claims that they are ("serious") and are working towards aquiring the satellites. Whatever.
Look at their survey. "Do you have some ideas for what could be done with 66 orbiting satellites, (besides a $7 billion meteor shower)?"
Seeing as this is under the Space topic, not the Humour one, I think that some critical thinking skills are required on the part of the alleged many submitters and Hemos.
"It says open-source!! Let's post it!!" is a losing policy.
------
If a tree falls on an anonymous coward yelling 'first post' in the forest, does anybody hear?
Seems that lots of folks keep forgetting about the ground stations these things use. Yea, yea, the satellite can communicate directly with your phone or other device that can use the signal. BUT, the system still has ground stations that need to be maintained, that means continuing bills, including a payroll.
Eve Fairbanks says I drive a hybrid!LOL
find / -type alien -exec rm -rf {} \;
Be careful. People in masks cannot be trusted.
heh. People are trying to save iridium. Despite the fact that the satellites are totally useless for anything but voice communication, and despite the fact that they're not very good at that, oh, and there's other satellite systems that have taken over everything iridium used to do, oh, and don't forget that they mess up radio astronomers hardcore...but we've got to save IRIDIUM! I mean, think of the POOR IRIDIUM SATELLITES...feh
--
"HORSE."
"HORSE."
-Flaming Carrot
These people are tilting at windmills. Yeah, let's collect $650M so we can fly some space junk around for a while.
/. is actually giving some measure of credibility to a half-assed attempt to collect money for the ultimate vanity project. It's asinine. Hell, _they_ don't even know what they're going to do with it.
Remember when people first started complaining at the extravagance of a $2500 Aibo? Now
What makes this a story? Is it the concept of saving some company's ill-advised investment, or the herd mentality of gearheads who are driven to rescue a high-tech project, just because they can?
Let the freaking thing die already, until someone with better, more sustainable tech, with a model that would adequately maintain it, takes its place.
Incidentally Motorola is only prime contractor for the project, eg. they built the satellites. Iridium Corp. owns and operates them. So the statement above that Motorola doesn't give a flying fuck has nothing to do with the facts.
The ongoing cost of ground station equipment and staffing makes this impractical.
They shut the service down not just because of the debt they had to service but also because of operational costs. It's amazing but after all the upfront costs they couldn't even pay the rent.
Nobody is just going to let you 'tinker' with satellites. You might take out another bird or deorbit the thing into downtown L.A., and who's to say you won't do it deliberately or because someone kidnapped your grandmother. Got clearance? Got secure facilities? Got a clue about safely operating a satellite network?
It is actually worth something to have less space junk and light pollution up there, and that's more valuable than anything tinkering could offer, and a heck of a lot safer for the rest of us.
"It seems to me that data is data is data, and it would trivial to send any type of traffic over this connection."
It may be, but he wants to send broadband traffic which requires lots of bandwidth. If these things were designed like the cell phone towers we have now they're probably limited to speeds slower then even a 56K modem per circuit.
And while it might be nice to have a free internet traffic route, bandwidth will matter. You're not going to enjoy doing much at 1 byte a second or less.
"I'm failing to understand something. Why does it take monay to save iridium? Is there no way we could somehow get the company their tax write-off and have them just open up the network for public use instead of directing them all to suicide? "
It takes money, because you need money to run a system of satalites, espically 66 of them. And the amount is on the order of 100 million+ a year.
the open source I could see coming out of it would be the enormous amounts of software that went into the gateways and on the satellites themselves. Who knows what the software has in it. The bandwidth limitation may be from the inablilities of the software.
As far as size of the reciever, that is going down all the time. I've worked on the portable Globalstar antenna and the goal is always to make things smaller and more portable and from what I've seen it can be done.
Does it actually make you feel superior?
It's less than that, even. The designed lifespan is 5-8 years. Read about it here at the Iridium corporate website.
And the brethren went away edified.
For a real-ime track of every little zippy thing cruising the planet, point your Java enabled browser at:http://liftoff.msfc.n asa.gov/RealTime/JTrack/3D/JTrack3D.html
_________________________
But that has nothing to do with burning up the satellites. The investors will get tax writeoffs for the losses they made, regardless of what Iridium does with the satellites.
Mmmm.. Donuts
The problem is not that the satellites are of no use. The problem is that they are so expensive to maintain that any possible use they can be put to is not worth the cost.
Mmmm.. Donuts
And it is sad to see this at only a 2.
/.
This by far is one of the better tech lists of what needs to be done to keep the birds flying that has appeared on
If it was said on slashdot, it MUST be true!
[...]"involved (including Bill Gates) "[...]
Huh? Were you thinking of Teledesic? Iridium has nothing to do with Teledesic, except that Motorola is involved with both projects.
No offense, but, you obviously don't realize that signal strengths necessary for simple analog repeaters would be impractical under the circumstances (not to mention the complexity it would add to do circuit switching).
"They have DECADES of experience designing, launching and operating satelites for use by the amateur radio community (I've worked a couple of the OSCAR satellites, and the ham station on Mir)" ... Yeah but nothing so complex and probably nothing so digital. =)
(8 kbps... sure, with 4 channels.) Ok, but who is going to pay thousands for hardware, and high service charges for data comms when most can get similar service for a lot less (e.g. a fraction for digital or analog cell, and an almost negligible amount for landline)? Granted, the intersection of the unserviced remote location and short text messaging markets is ideal, but it's also very small.
You seem to like throwing around the word idiot... As I don't, I'll avoid returning the favour, no matter how appropriate it is. =)
"Its radio transmission so they can pick it up". How? Where? With what?
Even if the encyption is weak (which I'll admit is a possibility), unless the interlink bleed is really high or something, then the NSA would need an antenna in each footprint radius of the surface of the earth to pick up every signal. I assume that such a monitoring system, even if only for the parts on land, would be very difficult to assemble.
For those who don't know, modern cell phones compress analog data into a digital stream, packetize it, and then broadcast it. This is why most cell phones can be used as "modems" by laptops with the use of a special cable that plugs into the bottom of the phone. (It is quite expensive, but it works.)
The amsats are really not secure, but you should be concerned with sending anything out over wireless. Yes, even digital wireless.
You can, if you want to, talk on these amsats, cool to chat with someone on the other side of the world.
For more info check out the Amateur Radio Relay League for info about becoming a ham and AMSAT for info on pass times and frequencies.
If you really want to talk. There are guys who bounce morse code off the moon. Talk about distance.
KC5Z?? - to remain anonymous
Pair up in threes. - Yogi Berra
I can't comment on US tax laws, but sure, it's possible Motorola (and other investors) may be able to use this as a capital loss to offset other income in this year, or perhaps even years to come (or past) But this still doesn't change the fact that all parties concerned lost a bundle Some comments posted here, and the Save Iridium (sic) website talk like a tax write off means an overall net benefit. It doesn't. At best, it softens the blow, but somebody still lost $7 billion (or 5 or whatever it was). If they (in aggregate) wind up saving a billion or so in taxes, good for them. But they still lost $6 billion (or so). It's gone. So yes, Motorola might "save a bundle", but only because they burned many bundles more. (I'm not an accountant or a tax lawyer and I don't play one on TV)
____
Sounds like a fun read. Maybe if we can't Open Source the satellites, we could write an OS book about it?
___
There already is a book about it, or a short sentence at least. It's called an obituary.
Imagine a network of satellites, sending down satellite television for free. Suddenly, all you need is a television and a receiver, and you're set. No fees.
Such a system would work, if we had advertisers to back us up, and take care of the overhead.
Further, imagine the quality of television we could receive. Suddenly, the entire network depends solely on advertising, which requires quality programming. No more Celine Dion! (sorry).
What it boils down to is, would I end my cable service for free satellite? Yes.
Every radio astronomer on the planet has breathed
a sigh of relief now that Iridium is officially
doomed. Projects like this cause immense frequency
pollution and are a huge problems for astronomical
observatories, particularly as bigger more sensitive instruments are built.Project like Iridium are hated by radio astronomers the same way optical astronomers have in recent times been alarmed by proposals for orbiting mirrors to reflect sunlight at night. Without continuation of basic sciences such as astronomy
technological progress will falter badly.
No flames I know this is technically impossible... :)
But I would pay a fair bit for a former satellite sitting in my living room. Of cousre the billion Dollar mission to go get it. would put it out of my price range but if one landed in my back yard it would mske one heck of a convorsation piece.
They might even have the computational hardware to run linux.
Jason
O.K. here's a technical question for anyone out there who can answer it: What kind of user volume can the Iridium system handle? The reason I ask is that Iridium was marketed on a high-end, low volume (i.e. expensive) sales model. It lost lots of money. But what if Iridium were relaunched on a high-volume low cost model? I.e. the services were provided at rates well below what current cell phone & ISP services cost and to a very large number of consumers. Obviously Motorola might not want to see this happen (assuming it's even possible) because Motorola makes parts for DSL and existing cell phone technology. I have heard rumours that such a high-volume marketing model is technically feasible but I don't know how to confirm this. Can anyone here help? Does anyone have an idea of where to find out what the Iridium system's maximum data handling capacity is? If indeed such a high volume, low profit margin, marketing model is possible it prove a viable alternative to trying to raise the $650 million through on-line advertising! -Steve Petrov www.legaltrademark.com domain-name law & news P.S. Some people have posted that Iridium's a bad idea because it doesn't work inside. But I would think that this could easily be taken care of by having an indoor local hub etc. connected to the outside dish. Infrared comes to mind but Symbian (the cellphone/handheld consortium founded by PSION)is also doing a lot with its "bluetooth" technology. Something like this could be used for wireless interfacing between iridium and all sorts of handheld devices.
*** Please visit my homepage for news and info. about trademark law, domain-name disputes and other e-commerce issues
I like the "under construction" future links such as "Get the source", "Build it" and "Report a bug". Seems like they found a typical open-source software site and copied all the links. Would the "source" in this case be full hardware schematics to building your own LEO sat? I'd like to report a bug in these people's heads.
I find it strange that there is not 1 name on the site of someone taking credit...
[root@www rcarver]# whois saveiridium.com
[rs.internic.net]
Whois Server Version 1.1
Domain Name: SAVEIRIDIUM.COM
Registrar: ALABANZA, INC.
Whois Server: whois.alabanza.com
Referral URL: www.alabanza.com
Name Server: NS1.STRANGETIMES.COM
Name Server: NS2.STRANGETIMES.COM
Updated Date: 17-mar-2000
[root@www rcarver]# whois strangetimes.com
[rs.internic.net]
Whois Server Version 1.1
Domain Name: STRANGETIMES.COM
Registrar: NETWORK SOLUTIONS, INC.
Whois Server: whois.networksolutions.com
Referral URL: www.networksolutions.com
Name Server: NS1.MSINTERGATE.COM
Name Server: NS2.MSINTERGATE.COM
Updated Date: 20-dec-1999
[root@www rcarver]# whois msintergate.com
[rs.internic.net]
Whois Server Version 1.1
Domain Name: MSINTERGATE.COM
Registrar: NETWORK SOLUTIONS, INC.
Whois Server: whois.networksolutions.com
Referral URL: www.networksolutions.com
Name Server: NS1.MSINTERGATE.COM
Name Server: NS2.MSINTERGATE.COM
Updated Date: 09-jul-1997
[root@www rcarver]# ping -c5 www.saveiridium.com
PING www.saveiridium.com (209.60.188.5) from 208.246.241.160 : 56 data bytes
64 bytes from 209.60.188.5: icmp_seq=0 ttl=244 time=151.8 ms
64 bytes from 209.60.188.5: icmp_seq=1 ttl=244 time=153.1 ms
64 bytes from 209.60.188.5: icmp_seq=2 ttl=244 time=139.3 ms
64 bytes from 209.60.188.5: icmp_seq=3 ttl=244 time=136.5 ms
64 bytes from 209.60.188.5: icmp_seq=4 ttl=244 time=139.2 ms
--- www.saveiridium.com ping statistics ---
5 packets transmitted, 5 packets received, 0% packet loss
round-trip min/avg/max = 136.5/143.9/153.1 ms
[root@www rcarver]# ping -c5 ns2.msintergate.com
PING ns2.msintergate.com (209.60.188.5) from 208.246.241.160 : 56 data bytes
64 bytes from 209.60.188.5: icmp_seq=0 ttl=244 time=136.9 ms
64 bytes from 209.60.188.5: icmp_seq=1 ttl=244 time=133.9 ms
64 bytes from 209.60.188.5: icmp_seq=2 ttl=244 time=134.2 ms
64 bytes from 209.60.188.5: icmp_seq=3 ttl=244 time=134.9 ms
64 bytes from 209.60.188.5: icmp_seq=4 ttl=244 time=136.8 ms
--- ns2.msintergate.com ping statistics ---
5 packets transmitted, 5 packets received, 0% packet loss
round-trip min/avg/max = 133.9/135.3/136.9 ms
Just three more hours seapeople and you can finally take me away from this crappy God Damned planet full of hippies
Well yeah, but which ISP can afford to spend hundreds of millions of dollars per year to maintain the satellites?
They sometimes create streaks of light that screw up astronomical photographs. You can see one at
http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap991022.html
AFAIK, they also interfere with radioastronomy.
"In any sufficiently large group of people most are idiots."
;)
Translation: in any group where there are enough idiots for me to consider it a group, there are a lot of idiots.
I understand and agree with the quote, but "sufficiently large" opens a real big hole. What? Mensa's member list doesn't have enough idiots? Well then, it must not be sufficiently large enough!
Also, I just want to add my two cents on the burnup question. Satellites such as Iridium sats are way too small to cause any damage to things on the ground. It is only a matter of concern for large orbiting facilities such as Mir, Skylab, the ISS, or similiar. Those craft have enough mass to have some of it survive reentry, hence the tanks in Austrailia from Skylab and the brouhaha around Mir's possible reentry. Just my two cents.
-Aerowolf
I have to agree that the possibility of keeping these satellites up by a non for profit organization is near zero. So I'll offer another way of making money off the Iridium Satellites. Hire a salvage ship to collect them off the ocean floor and then sell chunks of the satellites on eBay. Sure, about half of a satellite will have burned up in the atmosphere, but I would be interested in a toasted chunk of the internals of the satellite. If a piece of the solar array makes it to the ocean floor, I would be interested that too. The price would have to be around $100.
;-)
Here is a good site about the Iridium Satellites: Lloyd's satellite constellations Overview Iridium
If you want to see an actual picture of an Iridium Satellite go here
On a slightly different note, yesterday night I got to see MIR passing over head from the top of one of my University's garages. It took me a moment to realize that the fast moving bright star wasn't an plane, since it wasn't flashing. If you go with someone to look at MIR passing over head, not forget to tell them to wave.
I'd be interested to know where you got a 10 year lifespan from.
Why is it that people always hear what I say, and not what I mean?
I am sure that a company that is so far in the hole has enough write off's as it is to have no tax responsibilities.
all persons, living and dead, are purely coincidental. - Kurt Vonnegut
First: There are LOTS of data users that still use 9600 bps or less: most ATMs, all those credit-card verification swipers, lots of chain store/gas station/etc. sales/inventory/price networks, just to name a few. Most are a waste of a dedicated phone line, and have (relatively) low data rates over a 24-hour period. Sounds like a perfect application to me, if the cost is low enough.
I agree that coming up with an economically viable syndicate to keep these things in orbit is a long shot. So if they gotta come down, is there any way these things could be used as Space Garbage Trucks to knock down other obnoxious Space Junk when they de-orbit?? Seems it would be worth a try.
The article states that Craig McCaw backed out of buying Iridium due to the satilites not being able to support broadband internet traffic. It seems to me that data is data is data, and it would trivial to send any type of traffic over this connection. Besides, I'd rather see low bandwidth (let the entire world share it), *free* internet traffic.
ok then your [sic] infringing on my copyright! Could you as [sic] me next time before STEALING my comments for your own?
OMG! I can't believe there's another human being who has seen quark! I Think we where it's total viewers;) hehe. I remeber thinking it was funny, and a slight memory of the ship picking up garbage.Scooping might be more acurate.
Of course, I'd rather watch that show from the '70's then hear that damn barkeep...
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
I would consider the term Open Source to be a popular phrase/topic.
I would also consider the use of the phrase 'Open Source' to promote this endeavor to be a bit misguided.
Knowledge of what exactly the Iridium system is and does; simultaneously taking into account the immense legal issues that would be involved with any attempt to actually buy/control/takeover a system of this nature, is truly your friend when visitng their site.
-- this is the sig
Karma Police, arrest this man, he talks in maths
He buzzes like a fridge, he's like a detuned radio
[an error occurred while processing this directive]
Let's see....at $25 per person that signs up for nextcard it'll only take 24,000,000 people to save Iridium. ;)
I an see applications for it though. I'd love to have a GSM phone (not that I leave my state much) but in theory you could just pay for the phone and have free calling for life. Granted someone has to pay for the data pipe on land but you could do that with advertising. It could be sorta like Sprint's wireless web only global and with advertising to pay for the land pipe. I can see why they want to save it, I just don't think it will happen for 600,000,000. The bankruptcy courts will take much much much less for it. They get a write off even if they take a massive loss. But at 7 billion anything is a massive loss.
Am I the only one who thinks this is all just a front to push credit cards on gullible people? Take a look at their web site. It's all just a big story to convince you to sign up for their card.
C++ programmers do it with class.
Perl hackers do it quick and dirty.
I've gotta learn perl.
Wasn't the expected lifespan extremely short for these LEO satellites. With two years already gone by, how much time will remain for planning and actual usage before they start to fall? Although it is a big waste of time and money to put these up and just bring them down,, it may be the safest alternative.
Speaking of money required, I believe Iridium was paying Motorola between 128 and 179 million per quarter to maintain and operate the network.
The Mongrel Dogs Who Teach
Come on folks! Back to Back stories with poor grammar and editing. Sure Taco changed his, maybe he's listening. But Hemos, this is the second one since the beggining of this month for christ's sake:
"I'm not sure what uses it will put to,"
I could spot this on first read of the story. Why didn't you at least preview the story before you posted it? Sorry Mr. I'm too good for the preview button. But something needs to be said.
Pr0n K1ng
Ah well, off to download more pr0n.
Oh well, back to dowloading pr0n...
Pr0n K1ng
The whole effort looks doomed from the get go. The kind of money needed to feed and care for a satellite network is not going to come from web advertising etc.
Here's an idea..
Do they have enough fuel left to break the LEO and land on the moon without too-huge of a bump? It shouldn't take *that* much if you did the slingshot-effect math right.
The idea here is make a little bit of a "garbage dump" some place on the moon, so that if we ever need the spare parts for our colonies, they will be there to use in a pinch, and much cheaper than shipping up.
--
Do daemons dream of electric sleep()?
I tend to agree that the SAVEIRIDIUM site is a scam to get people to sign up for a Visa card. There's no real content on that site.
--
ib
--- Speaking only for myself,
Oh yeah - "Quark"...
"What about that time we caught you naked in the kitchen with a bowl of Jello?!?" "Hey-I was HOT and I was HUNGRY!!!"
Could the "raw materials" not be used in some way? While it sounds as though the Iridium system itself is no longer practical, and schemes for repurposing it seem to be a dead-end, I would think that the structural materials and power-generating solar arrays would be useful in other projects. Perhaps the orbits are too low to make this practical, but at the per-pound cost of lofting *anything* into orbit these days, I can't help but wonder if a salvage expedition of some sort might not be a money-maker. (What the hell was the name of that stupid sci-fi series in the 70's/80's about the space garbage truck? The one with the alien clone girls and the intelligent plant???)
"What about that time we caught you naked in the kitchen with a bowl of Jello?!?" "Hey-I was HOT and I was HUNGRY!!!"
Sunk Cost - "Costs that were incurred in the past and cannot be altered by any current or future decision"
The 7 billion is gone, the project is losing money by the truckload. It doesn't make sense to keep it up. This must be a scam site.
I bet you felt better smarter with that parking cone in your rectum.
-------
neo-opf: the new orange petal flapper
Iridium flash is just one problem. Space pollution is another. I heard the sattelites are in pretty low orbit (which is basicly why they are so annoying) so dropping them into the earths atmosphere could solve that problem. The only question is: These are good satellites, why waste them. Irridium orbits ARE known. Apart from blocking telescopes, they are no nuissance to anyone, other than having cost money which now appears to have been wasted. If I`m correct, another sat-company is planning on sending ANOTHER sat-network into space. It would make sense if the first wasted investment isn`t completely redone a second time all over again, rather, recycled. Technically I`m sure things can be done. Legally, strategically and politcally, that`s another thing.. Maybe we DO need the United Nations to atleast have some sort of control over those companies that plan on polluting our space with their ambitious and money-horny programs. I`m generally against any kind of regulations, but when it comes to keeping our planet clean and healthy, we need definiately more responsibility in this world.
:)
But.. that`s enough idealism for today
i.
With great power comes great electricity bills.
For the low upstream bandwidth needed by the typical user, and the bursty nature of that uplink, the Iridium system should have plenty of bandwidth for the job (8 Kbps?).
/. Accounts, Who Can't Remember Any Of Them"
Since satelite already demands an external dish, adding an Iridium antena to that, and an Iridium transciever to the dish box, shouldn't be all *that* hard to do.
-BobC
"They Guy With A Zillion
As for why it takes money, you don't just put a satilite up and forget it, you have to have all sorts of ground support for it. Plus it has to hook into ground based phone systems etc. All that costs a lot of money, Hell if Iridium with VC etc could not make a go of this thing there is no way a bunch of amatures can.
The Cure of the ills of Democracy is more Democracy.
Erlang Developer and podcaster
A clarification on Economic bug #2, the satellites can actually be programmed to stop broadcasting when they fly over a given land area in the case where it is prohibited by a government. I remember in the beginning that feature wasn't quite as automatic as needed to be.. and sometimes they wouldn't turn back on. It's quite good now =) Also on the licences.. the politics of those are really tricky. It explains a lot of why the business model was designed like it is.. many independently owned gateways all over the world. The fact that this is a chinese owned gateway is probably the only reason the communists allowed it. (they run the gateway) So it's certainly a very valid point that many of those licences could be in jeopardy depending on who wants to take over.
Of course as far as I'm concerned, any communist or non-free country can stay in the dark ages. I just wish we'd eliminate our immigration laws so their citizens could come here.
Cute, but it will never work. First, these are nothing more than GSM satellite towers ejected into space. That's it. I'm serious; some of the parts have the same model numbers as GSM cell tower stuff. Getting to play with satellites is cool, but you need to play with something that is actually worthwhile. If I could buy the DirecTV satellite, or a spy satellite, now that would be cool. But there are nothing more than expensive, cold radio repeaters. You get about 9600 baud. If you really have your heart set on communicating around the world, save a couple million and buy a packet radio...
--
I think there is a world market for maybe five personal web logs.
1. Iridium just happens to transmit on a radio band that radio telescopes listen to. Whoops.
2. The satelites are low enough, and have such a profile that sunlight reflecting off of them (even when it's night on the surface, the satelites are still out far enough that they may not be in Earth's shadow) can create bright flashes that can damage or destroy (expensive!) sensitive telescope optics.
The latter is a problem with other satelites too (to a small extent), but Iridium is by far the most severe.
DNA just wants to be free...
The radio astronomers all jumped and said "Hooray!"
Outdated narrow bandwidth was found to be a flaw
They're losing too much money, said a fellow named McCaw
Throw them away, can't save them to-day-ay
They're Boat Anchors in the Sky
Boat Anchors i-n-n-n the sky-y-y
Think I can sell the idea to Weird Al?
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
I don't think ditching the satellites is such a huge waste, and for a lot of reasons they probably should be dumped now.
If anyone else takes the network over, what assurance do we have that they will deorbit them properly? Most likely, the satellites would fail and be left in their orbits creating a future hazard.
The Iridium network isn't a huge waste, because the engineers who built them have taken home paychecks and eaten the groceries for years now. As Chris Rock said, any corporate mission statement is equivalent to "all babies must eat." Those babies would have had to eat anyway...
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
they won't beconne space debris, they are LEO sats.
Low Earth Orbit Sats can't stay in orbit without constant fuel burns to lift the orbit, so within 5 or so years every Iridium sat.will run out of fuel and drop into the atmosphere.
Better to de-orbit them in a controlled manner than let them run out of fuel and re-enter randomly
I think it's a peice of performance art, like that guy that does hoaxes...
Seems to me it could have succeeded in the sense of being useful if it could have supported higher data rates (say ISDN speeds at minimum).
Any idea why they didn't built that into the system? It seems like a pretty obvious requirement in hindsight.
D
----
Very interesting message. I have to admit this whole thing has fascinated me in a morbid sort of way.
How could they add the data capacity down the road? I thought what capacity existed was dependent on the specific satellites that were already up there. Or were they just planning replacement satellites for the data services?
D
----
Ten years may also be the design lifetime. The satellite's components and fuel capacity being designed for a 10-year mission life. At the end of ten years, assuming nothing major has broken, maneuvering fuel is low, solar cell and transmitter output are near the low end of the acceptable operating range, and other components may be degraded or worn out.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
Come on, this isn't for real. It's a joke.
Do you think we are crazy? y|n
Will you help us anyways? y|n
Actually, according to the article, Motorola had everything to do with the development and implementation of that system. So I guess you're just completely wrong. Of course you do go to Choate haha.
Astronomers are jumping for joy at the death of Iridium. Why? because it broadcasts signals at a critical wavelength interferes with ground-based telescopes. If I remember correctly, Iridium is in some type of geosynchronous orbit, so astronomers have to deal with "Iridium Bursts" or "stars"... I can't remember what exactly they call it. Its the equivalent to having your telescope up the street from a car dealership with 50M watts of electricity flowing through their flood lights. I say let Iridium die a quick painless death and let someone else design a more practical, less pollusive system of satelites.
My $0.02
I'm failing to understand something. Why does it take monay to save iridium? Is there no way we could somehow get the company their tax write-off and have them just open up the network for public use instead of directing them all to suicide?
Furthermore, The guy who pulled out of buying it--how much bandwidth is actually available on these things? If we're talking 56k or somesuch for uplink, then we need to rethink this. Sure, it could be the absolute cooooolest text-based orbital BBS, but really. Beyond the coolness value, I'm doubting the iridiums have that much to offer. Certainly not security.
But it would be cool.
Returned Peace Corps IT Volunteer
Anyone ever read the great book called "Virus"? Not the movie, the book. Depending on how modifications were made to the satalites, open source could be a key protection against what happen in the book Virus (StarWars satalite system gone bad). If one person had the ability to modify code and update the systems, there could be some real security issues. But in any case, if these people save the network I would love to be them now. Make a few billion by doing this.
-Nicholas Blasgen
The individual price, however, can indeed be lowered. It called volume.
The only trick is that you have to manage to increase the volume without falling below your break-even point. This is where break-even analysis using computer-based CVP models comes in.
Now whether or not Iridium could have lowered their individual price remains to be seen. I don't have sufficient access to their accounting information to determine that.
My journal has hot
Exactly. Open Source is not the answer to all the world's problems. (I know this may have come as a shock to some of you :)
... but I doubt that)
Folks, this is capitalism at work here. If you spend $7 billion and only manage to attract 55,000 customers, well, sorry, you lose. Them's the breaks.
And why is anyone trying to save it? If they only managed to attract 55,000 customers, obviously either A) they really, really suck at marketing, or B) there is simply insufficient demand for their services. (With a possible C) the price is too high, but that's something more easily changeable.) I suspect that the answer is B. And if that's the case, there is no point in trying to save the satellites... (unless there's going to be some big ecological disaster or soemthing
My journal has hot
Mechanical bug #1: They're not burning the satellites for a tax write-off, they're buring them to keep them from becoming space junk, that
would present a traffic hazard to future spacecraft. If you leave them up there, they will run into something eventually. Guaranteed. Good citizens deorbit their sats before they run out of fuel.
Actually it's worse then that. These are LEOs. At some point in the future (less then ten years from now) they would fall out of the sky regardless. Deorbiting them over the Pacific Ocean is definaly preferable to having them deorbit themselves over a major population center. People really have been hit by falling space junk. The odds are low, especialy with small comsats, but it can happen.
-- Any statement of the form "X is the one, true Y" is FALSE.
I believe that Iridium was a low orbit system that slowly fell back to Earth in about 10-12 years. You can put satelites in stable high orbits but the time lag starts getting really bad. I always doubted a system that had such insanely high recurring costs.
-B
Man, they should have the sattelites flame out during the burn at Burning Man.
Maybe even see if they can impact a few of them around Black Rock - talk about performance art!
Will in Seattle
Count me in!!
Economic bug #1: They're not going to get a tax write-off for this. They're losing money, so they don't pay any taxes anyway.
WRONG! Iridium the company can't get a tax write-off, but everyone that invested in them or lent them money could. In fact, it's possible for the total amount written off to exceed the actual cost of the company, since a lot people bought the stock at prices much higher than the IPO price. Anyone that is still holding stock or debt of the company (or that sold at a loss as the stock plummetted) will get to write the off investment against gains/income from their other investing or lending activity.
Motorola is like to save a bundle in taxes by writing off this sucker. It shouldn't matter much to them whether they burn the birds or donate them, either way they should be able to get a write-off.
Work for Change & GET PAID!
Iridium is so entangled in an expensive mesh of settlement and orbital agreements that this effort makes me think that Edmund Blackadder's servant Baldric has just suggested, "I have a cunning plan, m'lord. Let's replace them with really, really big turnips!"
You're missing the point. What these guys are saying is that here is an opportunity to tinker with satellites, even junky annoying ones. Sure, their orbits will eventually decay and they will be destroyed. No one wants to replace them. But why can't we keep them up until the end of their useful life? I mean, when is anyone going to have a chance just to work with a satellite? How much would it take just to keep the ground stations running on a shoestring?
This is the argument I see these guys making: Lets try doing something with these satellites instead of just destroying them. Maybe we can't do anything with them, maybe we can. But don't just wipe em out without looking into it. We may not have another chance like this for a while. It is at least worth looking into.
Just myTo quote from The Princess Bride: "You keep on saying that word. I do not think it means what you think it means."
"I shoulda never sent a penguin out to do a daemon's work."
Cat, the other, tastier white meat.
Expensive though it was, it's still cheaper than INMARSAT, the only other satellite cellular system up and running. I'm suprised somebody didn't want to keep it up until a better satellite service came on-line. You'd think they could sell enough service at a lowered price to cover the operating costs, writing off the launch costs.
The best thing to do is to order these pieces of junk to crash into the sea someplace. This should reduce the space hazard a little bit (less than 0.1%?) but every little bit helps.
It seems sad that the government would encourage the destruction of $7B worth of investment over it's re-use.
Then again, we don't need swarms of unused, orbiting trash. So burning them up IS the right answer if no-one can find a use for them.
NOW THEY WANT IT TO GO TO WASTE!!!
Okay, you may not realize this, but in 1997 French high-school students built a replica of the original Sputnik satellite. It was put into orbit with the help of Russian Cosmonauts in November of that year, and its battery died late that December.
As far as I'm aware, it's probably still up there!!!
So here's my plan. If everyone on Slashdot sends me just a little money (and some of you make a lot, so don't be cheap-asses! ), I may be able to get some Cosmonauts to replace the battery. I took a semester of Russian once, so Russians tend to like me, making this a very plausible plan!
Alternately, if they can't find the thing, I can definitely reprogram one of the Iridium Satellites to go, "Beep... beep... beep..." And I swear I'll GPL the code. For God's sake, there are 66 of them, the least they can do is let us use one for a good cause!
Think it over. Why not direct your money towards helping establish the world's first Open-Source imitation Soviet satellite? Anyway, my car needs painted.
"The best we can hope for concerning the people at large is that they be properly armed." - Alexander Hamilton
Actually there are satellites up there for non-profit Amateur Radio use, don't know anything about how much they cost or where the funding comes from - but it would be a neat idea <FANTASY> if the court just turns the whole thing over to public use untill such time as it fails from lack of maintenance - ok, here it is, here's the freq, here's what you need to access it, go for it, but when it fails, it's over</FANTASY>.
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
Before chasing the unfeasible, look into AMSAT These guys have a real amateur satellite system (over 30 satellites, 20 currently operational) going back 30+ years.
.sig: Join AMSAT
If the S.O.S people excite you, consider contributing your efforts here. They have a strong volunteer/hacker base of regulatory and technical know-how and experience that most of us obviously never believed could exist! If they don't want Iridium, it's not workable; and if they do... they are 501(3)(c) certified, so Iridium could conceivably be donated. AZny way you look at it, they're a lot more qualified to run the network than the SOS guys.
(from the web page http://amsat.org/amsat/amsat-na/amhist.html)
The Radio Amateur Satellite Corporation (as AMSAT is officially known) was formed in 1969 as a not-for-profit, 501(c)(3) educational organization chartered in the District of Columbia. Its aim is to foster Amateur Radio's participation in space research and communication. Since that time, other like-minded groups throughout the world have formed to pursue the same goals. Many of these groups share the "AMSAT" name. While the affiliations between the various groups are not formal, they do cooperate very closely with one another. For example, international teams of AMSAT volunteers are often formed to help build each other's space hardware, or to help launch and control each other's satellites.
Since the very first OSCAR satellites (OSCAR stands for Orbiting Satellite Carrying Amateur Radio) were launched in the early 1960s, AMSAT's international volunteers, often working quite literally in their basements and garages, have pioneered a wide variety of new communications technologies that are now taken for granted in the world's satellite marketplace. These breakthroughs have included some of the very first satellite voice transponders as well as highly advanced digital "store-and-forward" messaging transponder techniques. All of these accomplishments have been achieved through close cooperation with international space agencies which often have provided launch opportunities at significantly reduced costs in return for AMSAT's technical assistance in developing new ways to launch paying customers. Spacecraft design, development and construction has also occurred in a fiscal environment of individual AMSAT member donations, thousands of hours of volunteer effort, and the creative use of leftover materials donated from aerospace industries worldwide.
My new
If you can go to bed, knowing you did a valuable thing today, you're very lucky. If you can't... it's not bedtime
You could use these to establish a massive network of weather monitoring stations. Put one station in the center of each 10,000 square mile grid and get constant updates for an array of environmental data:
temperature, windspeed, CO2 concentration, Ozone level, humidity, precipitation, pH of precipitation, barometric pressure, seismic activity, InfraRed radiation, etc.
Feed the data collected over the remaining life of the satellites into NOAA's new supercomputer and maybe we could develop a weather model that predicts hurricanes, typhoons, droughts, (maybe even earth quakes and volcanoes) etc. weeks, or even months in advance. This would help prevent the loss of tons of crops and thousands of lives a year. And perhaps indentify potentially harmful longterm trends (like global warming or ozone depletion) in time for corrective action to be taken. The large re-insurance companies like Lloyds of London would likely provide a substantial amount of funding for such a venture.
All this could be done with very little bandwidth. Just because you can't stream video, or play Quake over an data connection doesn't mean its worthless. NASA is still getting data back from satellites it launched in the 70's that only transmit at around 2400 bps, it doesn't mean they no longer bother to listen.
----
Another idea would be to give free phones to UN and NGO workers (For example, Doctors without Borders (MSF), or Oxfam) in isolated locations. They could then request supplies specific to a given crises based on what they find in the field like the need for seeds of a specific crop, or vaccines for a specific disease.
Work for Change & GET PAID!
OK, 9600 Baud is slow, but it could be used for research all over the globe for scientists. This would be good for unmanned stations like weather, seismagraph, ocean level, etc. Things that require realtime data, but only small amounts of it.
If lighter hardware could be made, it would be good for tracking vehicles or automated drones. Just put a GPS receiver on a high-altitude weather balloon and have your iridium data link that transmits the weather data and current location.
What about taking a couple thousand BUD (big Ugly Dishes) satellite dishes and setting them up all over the globe and hooking them up to PC's to process data. A sort of automated SETI sniffer. Sniffer stations can use the iridium network to get assignments, and if any interesting results are found, it'll send a signal to the monitoring station through iridium for someone to come by and physically pick up the data.
The network is already there. Don't throw it away. With some brainstorming, many good uses can come out of it.
tasty and delicious
It costs Iridium LLC $10Million dollars per month to keep the satellites whizzing around the Earth. According to stories like this one it is going to cost $30-50Million for them to even de-orbit the satellites.
Bottom line: Maintaining a constellation of satellites is VERY VERY VERY expensive. To think that a group of people could raise $10 million a month for basically useless satellites for a non-profit purpose is just pure insanity or idiocy, whichever you prefer.
into the realm of that which
can be endangered? I never
thought I'd see the day...
Maybe an astronaut activist will
abandon the shuttle and attach
him/herself to one of the iridium
satellites, kind of like those
activists who climb up redwoods
and refuse to climb down until
logging companies consent to stop
clearcutting forests.
In the past, outdated technology tended
to end up in a museum. Space, it seems,
offers us a new frontier for activism.
If I owned the satellites, I'd first start
a cult, and then send satellites into
the atmosphere whenever I needed a miracle.
Amazing magic tricks
These guys want you to send money, or get a credit card. There is no way that a bunch of well meaning part time volunteer geeks would be able to get any sort of benefit from the constellation.
Motorola (or Iridium LLC) still holds the rights to the frequencies, and I would imagine the going price for that would be far greater than what a volunteer group would be able to raise, assuming this is on the level.
Even if it were possible to put software in the satellites to do something more than 2400baud, the task of keeping the satellites on orbit is emmence! Why do you think the operating costs of the constellation were so high? It is because the vehicles are not smart. Their orbits drift and they must be tracked very carefully then commanded from the ground to be repositioned.
As much fun as it is to think about giving this "to the people" I would submit that it is better to cut the losses and instead think about running fiber everywhere.
It is sad to see something as big and complex as this fail, but sometimes it is better to just pull the plug and let the patient die.
This is clearly one such time.
I've woked closely with 2 people who were the top dogs on the Iridium project. They were the archatects of the project from the beginning.
From the beginning it was a good project. Then managment steped in and caused huge hassels. They left for greener pastures when the environment became hostile to good work. That is when I met them. They told me that this was how it was going to end for 1 simple reason...
The satalites are in an extremely low orbit, if you can call it an orbit. They are traviling through the upper most parts in the atmosphere in a constatly decaying orbit. There is constant wobble in there flight path due to the friction of the atmosphere. The monitoring/control system used to keep the satalites communicating with the surface and them selves is one huge beast with an extremely high maintenance cost. Whatever benifits that can be gained with the satalights is offset by the monitoring/control system. It is just too expensive to keep going. It will be cheaper to ditch, err... splash the satlights than any money gained from the use of the satalites.
If at first you don't succeed, skydiving is not for you.
This message is merely to remind people of the simple rules of business.
1. Choose your market:While the idea of iridium is great (and still is) i am afraid that iridium never made up its mind as to who where its customers - the rich jetsetting corporate head honcho or the larger middle market and i think thier advertisements and strategies reflected that.
2. Technology: Much as the concept of starting with worldwide coverage is attractive it is also very expensive and the choice of higher equatorial orbit satellites didnt help.
Iridium is a victim of its own decisons and all like all bad businesses it should be allow to die. And if u have kids well show them the $7 Billion fireworks.
And God created Linux on the 7th Day.
The main problem with the system is not the phones or even the prices, It's the cost of maintaining and building the system that was impossible to overcome. There was also way too much overhead built into the network. I don't think it could ever sustain all the gateways which exist. Legal issues in other countries do often require some sort of entity to exist in the country in order to sell the service.
;)
I was extremely impressed with the Motorola 9505 phones. They are relatively compact and come with all the international accessories and cables you should ever need.
Iridium LLC also never took advantage of the Maritime market. They never dropped their rates for coastal waters to a competative level. Had they done that, it would have certainly captured everything in that realm. Another example, The cruise lines were great customers. They were some of our largest usage customers.
Also, the paging service never got the backing it needed. The thing that most impressed me about them was that they actually worked while you were flying in an airplane.
There are lots of reasons why Iridium should have been able to succeed, but too many others why it didn't. I still feel, we all did, that it is a great product which many greate niche markets where it's extraordinarily valuable. I hope someone understands that and saves it before it plunges into the atmosphere.
btw. I worked at the N. American Gateway as a programmer/analyst and I'm in need of a job.
...what they're getting into. (assuming for the moment that they're legit)
I kind of resent their abuse of the term "open source", too.
It's not as if you can just buy the birds so the old owners won't crash them. There's a lot of maintainence work that has to go on... continuously...
You then have to deal with them when they break (either write the affected satelite off, or see if you can engineer a workaround from the ground).
You have to keep them out of trouble.
You have to turn and shut them down at critical moments so the delicate bits won't get fried by solar flares, hit by flying bits of space junk (which you have to track relative to your birds and figure out if you need to worry about a particular item), or damaged by any other number of interesting astronomical "events".
You have to nudge them back into their orbits periodically to keep them from reentering and burning up early, screwing up other satelites, and just generally not being where they need to be to do their job.
It's a lot like taking care of a herd of 66 insanely expensive flying metal sheep, really. Remotely.
Ever since they've been launched, the Iridium satelites have been royally fucking up earth-based astronomy, too.
So, it's a lot like having a huge herd of 66 insanely expensive flying metal sheep that poop on everyone's lawn, so everyone hates them.
Oh, and they're in a low-earth orbit, too, which means their orbit isn't going to last that much longer anyway (five, ten years? ...the original plan was to keep launching satelites as the old ones expired... I don't think these "saveIridum" folks are prepared to do that). I hope these "open source Iridium" people (I really dislike their abuse of the moniker) are capable of deorbiting them safely, and in a controlled fashion, when the time does come.
(and when they come down they very likely might come down over major population centers if you don't know what you're doing ... the current owners at least know what they are doing)
(although I should note for the sake of the /. alarmists, that they'd probably just burn up in the atmosphere ... you still don't want to take those kind of chances, though!)
So, really, it's a lot like having no experience, buying a herd of 66 insanely expensive flying metal sheep that everyone hates because they poop on their lawn, and which are going to die soon anyway ... with the potential of severe (but spectacular) property damage ... and then calling it "open source".
Fortunately, looking at their page, it looks like they have about as many financial backers as they do clues... so, in conclusion, I'm very thankful that this "open source Iridium" thing is unlikely to succeed, if nothing else for the sake of the "open source" reputation.
DNA just wants to be free...
Looking at the site, it appears to only be a way to harvest email and snailmail addresses. In fact, they'd just appear to prefer you sign up for a "Next Card" credit card.
/. then harvest addresses and collect credit card referrals. Ah, why work for a living.
Come up with a cool (but irrational) sounding scheme ("open source satellite network" WTF?) and get it published on
Short answer: it's not.
Why does every geek cause have to use an open source rallying cry? This is equivalent to politicians pleading us to pass a law "for the children." Are you for or against Open? Are you for or against Children?
I don't get it. If someone / some group / some consortium acquires the satellites, does that mean service will be Open (what?) ? Free can mean whatever you want it to mean, but services can't be Open Source without being free. So if I want to bounce a Jungle Porn website off Iridium deep from the nether areas of the Congo, that's OK? It is the "world's first orbiting Open Source public network."
This is a load of crap.
And because everyone can contribute to the creation of the new "entity", the network grows and mutates into something like a cross between Stephenson's Metaverse and Gibson's Bay Bridge. Everyone's particular skills wind up making something that it much more than the sum of its parts. It's so big and weird, nobody understands all of it, much less the extent of its existence.
Then, mayhem. This new network becomes really important (since people can use it freely, they come to rely on it). Now, you add whatever second-act scenario you want:
Pop in a wrap-up about how OSS (and "hackers" -- the White Hat kind) saved the world (or made it a better place to live; pick your grandiosity level) and you've got a story.
Sounds like a fun read. Maybe if we can't Open Source the satellites, we could write an OS book about it?
-B
Ash and Hickory, straight-grained and true, make excellent bludgeons, dandy for the cudgeling of vegetarians.
I don't think these guys realize just how much money and effort, mostly money, it takes to maintain a satellite-based network. This is NOT something that could be done by a bunch of poor (by corporation standards) amateurs. Besides they need to consider the difference between the world of bit and the world of physical objects. Open Source works well for bits, but I don't really see how it will help with maintaining a large amount of very complicated hardware (including launching new satellites on as-needed basis, etc.)
In other words, this is a fun idea to play with, but it does not come even close to passing a reality check.
Kaa
Kaa
Kaa's Law: In any sufficiently large group of people most are idiots.
I was an engineer on the ground station software for Iridium. Here are the kinds of things someone would have to do on a constant basis to use the satellites:
1) Run and maintain at least 2 ground stations devoted to telemetry, tracking, and control of the vehicles. The vehicles have a basic understanding of how to stay in orbit, but essentially this knowledge needs to be constantly tracked and maintained by multiple ground station contacts a day to obtain proper tracking data that gets fed to the orbital tracking services system.
2) Run and maintain a very complicated orbital tracking services system. This system constantly predicts where the vehicles are in relation to each other and to the various ground stations (the telemetry and control stations as well as the telephony gateways). The vehicles themselves have no understanding of their geometry in relation to each other or where they are in relation to the ground stations.
3) Run and maintain a very complicated scheduling system that precomputes the routing of EVERY packet destination that could take place in a 48 hour time span. You would think that the vehicles are smart and can figure out routes in the satellite constellation themselves, but that isn't the case. The constellation / ground station topology changes roughly every 3 seconds, creating about 18,000 topology change events that must be managed during the scheduling process. These form routing tables that are uploaded to the vehicles roughly once a day.
4) Run, maintain and staff a complicated real time satellite command center. The vehicles need pretty much constant baby sitting and attention from the ground (by well trained satellite operators, I might add) in order to function properly. This system coordinates all of the real time communication between the ground and the vehicles, uploading new routing tables, making tracking contacts, supervising vehicle burns, etc.
Basically, the Iridium network of satellites is a constellation of blind and dumb vehicles, that don't really know about each other or the ground. The whole "intelligence" of the system is in the various ground systems that I outlined above. These ground systems are constantly running and updating the constellation. Iridium was never designed as a "fire and forget" type of system, where once launched, the vehicles operated autonomously. The whole system requires constant attention to remain functioning.
I haven't even really addressed that the whole system doesn't really understand data networking. It only handles voice packets and barely handles pager traffic. The bandwidth available is also extremely low, in the vew thousand bps.
Once profitable, there were plans to put more digital traffic capability in the system, but that hasn't happened.
So, anyone who thinks they can throw an informal band of volunteers to run the system in an "open source" manner, clearly has no knowledge of how Iridium really works.
Economic bug #1: They're not going to get a tax write-off for this. They're losing money, so they don't pay any taxes anyway. The problem is that they owe more money than they can pay, and a Judge has commanded them to stop running up more debts, and pay the ones they have already. They'll probably end up paying pennies on the dollar.
Economic bug #2: Iridium spent years getting permission to broadcast in 167 separate countries. Are all those foriegn telecommunications agencies going to be happy about handing those permissions to a bunch of geeks that advertises itself as "beyond the reach of any govt"? Fat chance. And without the approval of the local governments, the network won't be allowed to operate.
Mechanical bug #1: They're not burning the satellites for a tax write-off, they're buring them to keep them from becoming space junk, that would present a traffic hazard to future spacecraft. If you leave them up there, they will run into something eventually. Guaranteed. Good citizens deorbit their sats before they run out of fuel.
Mechanical bug #2: And they won't come down as a rain of molten metal. There isn't anything in a communication satellite solid enough to survive re-entry. That takes hefty chunks of metal or ceramic. Remember how the only chunk of Skylab that came down in one piece was the lead-lined film safe? And they can steer the satellites to re-enter them in the middle of the ocean so there's no hazard even if they did reach ground level.
None of this is rocket science (well, some of it is-- how about "None of this is brain surgery"). I'm not even in the satellite business, and even I can tell these people are making it up as they go along.
The cake is a pie
And another thing. "Open Source." What the heck does that mean applied to this? I mean, I understand what they're trying to do, but unless I really don't understand the concept of open source, what they want to do is a parallel concept, at best. IT sounds like they're just trying to throw around buzzwords to get recognition from sites like /. (kinda like Wizards of the Coast's "Open Gaming License," for that matter)
Some Interesting Facts:
A quick whois shows that the site is registered to Mike Emke or Emke and Associates. A quick search of the Net picked up an article (www.trancenet.org/heavensgate/news/409.shtml) attributing Mike Emke or Emke and Associates (alias Varak) as one of the authors of the "Heavens Gate" spoof site highersource.org.
It would seem at the very least this man has a knack for getting noticed.