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The End of The Line for Iridium
slashdoter writes "Motorola said on Wednesday it was finalizing a schedule to
destroy the 66 satellites of Iridium." They have finalized the schedule because they've been unable to find qualified buyers for the satellites. Wow. Billions of dollars coming streaming down into our atmosphere.
Well, it sad to see Iridium go. I've followed is progress over the last several years and thought the concept really had a chance. Unfortunately, market tides and marketing foulups shifted under Iridum's feet, and they fell on their face. Let me tackle a few of the questions here.
The time hasn't come yet.
The time came five years ago even more than now. Iridium could have been used to bootstrap phone networks up in developing countries until regular cellular towers were available. One of the concepts was also a form of "village phone" that was basicly a phone booth with a sat antenna on top.
Expensive bulky phones that didn't work indoors?
The phones did have problems indoors. They really needed a line of site in order to connect up to the sats. It would have worked fine for a roof mounted antenna on a truck, ship, or plane. For some reason, the marketing brain power at Iridium decided to target mobile executives rather than commercial industry. Instead of trying to get a Fortune 500 CEO to carry one in a briefcase, they could have targeted trucking companies who do cross country runs, shipping that is in the middle of the ocean, and airlines who could use a cost effective replacement for those "Airphones" they try and charge $3/minute for. Iridium failed to target the tech to the market is was sufficient for.
Why not just auction the suckers?
Won't work. First, there is a lot of ground support involved. I believe the cost is at somewhere around $1M/day to operate the sats. Next, you have to send up replacements too often. This is not a geosync sat that just hangs out. This is five dozen plus sats in low orbit experiencing constant drag. Within a few years, the first generation sats will start coming home on their own. With a controlled deorbit, you can at least make sure they all end up in the ocean instead of having chunks of metal land in New York and Tokyo.
Iridium completely missed the boat on data service. The system is designed around voice and low-bandwidth pager data. This was a major design flaw with the move to an information society over the last few years. If Teledesic gets off the ground, maybe my faith in these sat clusters will be renewed, but it will take a lot.
The failure of these first generation sat clusters has hurt more than just the sat companies themselves. Several companies were developing new low cost launching technologies intended to support this market. You can write off Rotary Rocket and serverl other companies because they saw their potential customer go away before they were even out the door.
Such is life...
World Beach List, my latest project.
Billions of dollars coming streaming down into our atmosphere.
Remember folks, this is a *good* thing. Radio astronomers all over the world are rejoicing. Yes, it's a huge waste of money. But none of it was your money, so relax (unless you have stock in Mot). It's just another product that didn't work out. Think of them as Edsels in space.
I *will* miss the cool flashes of light as they pass overhead, though. I saw a couple of them in broad daylight - probably mag. -6 or -7.
Admit nothing, deny everything and make counter-accusations.
The Fall of Iridium (coming soon to a sky near you) is vindication of the view that people don't want WIRELESS, they want WIRED, as in max bandwidth. Undersea and underground fiber optic cables, not satellites, are the backbone of the worldwide internet - cheaper to install with much higher capacity. For years communications satellites have been the (sole) monemaker for space activities and provided the spur for further space development. Now that isn't true anymore - and I fear ALL space development will suffer as a result.