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.

Comments

Worth Saving.

[quadra]

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. ;)

These people really seem to have no clue...

[MenTaLguY]

...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.

Scam?

[jlv]

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.

Come up with a cool (but irrational) sounding scheme ("open source satellite network" WTF?) and get it published on /. then harvest addresses and collect credit card referrals. Ah, why work for a living.

Re:No Broadband Service?

[jimhill]

"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.

How is this Open Source?

[A Big Gnu Thrush]

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.

Sounds like a good Sci-Fi storyline

[Wee]

Think about it: An expensive, globe-encircling network of satellites becomes abandoned, and a loose-knit group of hackers take possession of it. This group turns the network inside out, and severly tweaks everything from the software to the hardware (via privately launched Arianne rockets, maybe?). Suddenly, the network bears little resemblance to its former self.

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:

1. Middle Eastern terrorists (or whatever other group suits you) on a jihad against technology takes control. Oh no, Luddites in the wire! Suddenly, they have the world's gonverment's by the short hairs. Something must be done, and the call to the OSS community goes out.
2. The network links many computers all over the place. It's got distributed.net-ish tendrils all over the place: banks, schools, the Federal Reserve, etc. Then it starts to think (or act) on its own. Something has to be done. It's Big Government vs. Open Source.
3. The governments of the world fear the hacker group's satellite network (maybe it's used for cracking large military ciphers or some such). They send Delta Force spacemen up to physically sieze control of the satellites. But some ex-Livemore Labs guys have installed discarded Reagan-era Star Wars lasers (or whatever defense system you like: railguns, particale beams, etc) and fortified the network. Battle ensues.
4. The SETI people, hurting for cash, use the network for finding aliens. They find the aliens, and these aren't the E.T., pull-my-finger kind of little green men. They're pissed. The aliens think the network is some cybernetic organism, and they feel threatened. They attack, and Open Source comes to the rescue (plenty of good ways to do this, hopefully using GNU tools of some sort).

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

The need for a clue stick

[Kaa]

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

Here's what you have to do to run Iridim

[tyresias]

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.

These people don't know much about Iridium

[Airdevronsix Icefall]

From the web site:

Iridium, unable to find other suitors, asked the bankruptcy court to approve a plan that would crash the Iridium satellites into the atmosphere and let them burn up, potentially causing a rain of molten metal across the globe and one heck of a tax write off for all involved.

Anybody that could write this paragraph isn't competent to run a satellite network (not that many of us are, but most of us aren't claiming we can.) They don't know much about either the economics or the mechanics of the business.

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.

Lifespan

[ucblockhead]

If I recall correctly, these satellites only have a lifespan of about ten years. Just getting the deal through and putting together some useful application is going to put you in the second half of this lifespan. After that, to keep going, you've got to start launching new ones. Seems to me that anyone trying to make money would find it easier just to start from scratch. (And anyone not doing it for money is simply not going to have the cash to continue after that point.)

Insanity

[MaximumBob]

I'm sorry, but these people are insane. Why are they saving Iridium? Basically, because it's there. It's had 7 billion spent on it, and they figure, "Well, it'd be a shame to see all that money go to waste. We'll spend another $650 on it." It seemed like a good idea when the project was started, but it's already obsolete over a huge chunk of the globe. I'm not alone in the fact that I'll probably never go anywhere where my only option for internet access is a 9600 baud satellite hookup.

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)

Ownership of saveiridium.com

[AllegroCEO]

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.