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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.
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); }
No offense, but I just had a PhD describe the problem to me last week at Lowell Obeservatory. When I said broadcasting, I meant the Iridium network, regardless of how satelite communication works.
Yes, it is radio telescopes, I should have been more descriptive, but I felt that it was farely obvious.
Here's an article on it, and how Motorola doesn't give a flying fuck. Now go eat my shorts.
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
- It may not be technically possible... It's Not.
- Couldn't they retrofit the satellites... If they were in a higher orbit perhaps. But technically not worth while -- for the cost of the the retrofits, a state of the art network could be put in place (in the right orbital pattern as well) that would use the frequency much more efficiently.
...and use them as a big SETI array or something? I thought about that too -- I mean, suppose these things could potentially be a globe size radio telescope. But (if I understand the math correctly), the satellites are essentially tone deaf except in their specified frequency rangem, and even if it were a useful frequency for radio telescops, I don't know if there is any way that they could be turned and selectively focused outward. Or that the signal bleed from planet earth wouldn't render them inaccurate anyway.
So really, though it seems like a huge waste, it's time for them to be brought down safely....Open Source isn't the only answer -- but it's almost always a better value than the alternatives...
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
No offense, but, you're obviously not familiar with radio.
Usually, with ham radio at least, you'd use a TNC to convert from serial data to RF for a radio to transmit. The faster the data rate, the higher the bandwidth. Why do you think they call cable "High Bandwidth"? 'Cause you can't do 6 megabits over 560kHz (AM Broadcast), you need Higher Bandwidth.
Ask youreself: What kind of line quality do you need for voice? To answer this, think in terms of an MP3. A radio recording of a talk show only needs Mono/22kHz/8bit/96bps. That is fine for radio, but for data (especially for full-duplex) you're gonna need some serious improvement. You may be asking "But doesn't the audio get digitized first?" Yes (probably) but it still only requires a 14.4-class data rate to transfer.
References...
TAPR: These guys are the IETF of packet radio.
Guerilla.net: An underground alternative to the wired Internet.
P.S. TNC is a "Terminal Node Controller". Could be described as a radio-modem.
Oh shit! I forgot to click "Post Anonymously"...
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
"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."
Absolutely. No argument.
"Still, I support any effort to save them."
This is where the phrase "Throwing good money after bad" comes into play.
Yes, there are 66 satellites up there going around and around, and yes, billions of dollars were spent in getting them there. BUT: they can't cover their own costs. Suppose this multimillion-dollar fundraiser succeeds and they stay up there a bit longer. Then what? The cash is spent and we need to de-orbit these moneypits. Are you now going to hold another "Save Iridium" campaign? You should, because now you've got an even greater investment in the satellites (where investment is defined as money pissed down the rathole and never coming back). And then again? And again?
There comes a time when you have to cut your losses. Iridium was a bad idea, poorly conceived and technologically inferior. The features and capabilities that the satellites can deliver are unfit for any purpose that will generate revenues sufficient to offset operational costs. To pour money into this failed idea because the satellites are up there is as foolish as putting them up there in the first place. Every dollar spent on a "Save Iridium" campaign is a dollar _not_ spent on something that might work. Consider that.
Learn to spell: nickel, missile, lose, solely, amendment, speech, kernel, probably, ridiculous, deity, hierarchy, versus
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.