Iridium Saved?

Ekeron writes: "Spaceflightnow.com reports that: 'The U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of New York today approved the bid of Iridium Satellite LLC to purchase the operating assets of Iridium LLC and its subsidiaries. Iridium Satellite LLC will continue to provide commercial satellite communications to the U.S. Government and plans to re-launch affordable satellite communications services to those industry segments that have a particular need for satellite communications (government, military, humanitarian, heavy industry, maritime, aviation, adventure) within 60 days.' Get the full story at: Spaceflightnow."

Comments

Space Junk

[brianvan]

It's nice that people want to save Iridium... and Mir too, for that matter... but...

This is kind of a pack rat mentality with satellites, don't you think?

I mean, I see all these Slashdotters who don't want to see all these satellites end up in the Pacific Ocean somewhere, but can we actually think of a good use for any of these things? Probably not. Mir is/was useful, but it's old, slightly dangerous, and about to become obsolete by the ISS (or any other future projects like it). On the other hand, Iridium was practically useful to almost no-one, although their sale now indicates that someone thought of something it could do...

And it does have a substantial cost to government/commercial agencies to keep track of and control these things in orbit. "Sentimental value" means pretty much nothing to taxpayers and stockholders...

But... more importantly... we have to realize the concept of sunk costs, and we must make practical decisions for the future... that is, do we spend money keeping these satellites up, or do we use that money for better satellites down the line?

In this particular case, it would have been interesting to see Iridium make it as a company. But if they didn't, and we had to de-orbit the satellites, why boo-hoo about it? It's a responsible decision. And no one's going to be operating a ham-radio network or something like that off of all those very expensive satellites, so unless someone's got a great use for them, why bother?

The upside is that we get to see more Iridium Flares... (if someone remembers what I'm talking about, there's a website for it, but I forgot the link...)

Another Fedex?

[Baldrson]

People who invested in the creation of Federal Express lost that money for the most part. It's an unfortunate fact that pioneers have an enormous mortality rate.

Iridium could go on to be as successful as Federal Express -- it just didn't meet early expectations and while that isn't death for business in the long run, it is highly damaging for the early participants.

Of Course Iridium Will Be Saved...

[LHOOQtius_ov_Borg]

Nobody likes the idea of a bunch of unused satellites... Government and industry groups will keep trying to find ways to prop-up an Iridium company because they want all those satellites...

The government never has enough satellites, really, maybe this is the first reverse pork: government somehow conned industry into pissing away a whole lot of money on something for them for a change ;->

But seriously, I think the original Iridium tried to move too quickly into too broad of a market. They frittered away a lot of money on ads and PR to people who had no use for the stuff, and didn't concentrate on a smaller, specialist market that could actually use the system.

The military likes to subcontract to commercial providers, and will probably be happy to have unsecure comms moved off their proprietary network. Humanitarian? Most groups have no money, but the UN does... So do shipping companies, and constant contact with your vessels (whatever they may be) can cut costs drastically by allowing for more precise dynamic rerouting of whatever your cargo is through your system. The adventure industry is also quite wealthy - hey, I bet Survivor III producers will sign up immediately ;-)

You and I may not need this service, but some people do, and maybe Motorola, in addition to lack of focus, just put the wrong people on selling it...

I wonder who those bankers are...

[spellcheckur]

It absolutely baffles me who would finance this buyout. Unless they have some magic powers, or some secret agenda, they should be in for a ride.

In early 1999, I visited Motorola and spoke to some of their engineers. One of them laughingly referred to the Iridium (or "Satellite Series Phone") division as the place where "old engineers go to die." I didn't exactly understand what he meant until I actually used the equipment.

Don't get me wrong, it's a great idea, I, personally, believe there is some (albeit limited) market for direct-to-satellite communication, but it's only as good as the implementation. Has anyone else actually used iridium? It's miserable!

Besides being big and clunky, there are fundamental problems that haven't been addressed.

• Satellite handoff is still shaky; in areas where as little as 10% of the sky is occluded (the world ain't flat... most of you have hills or buildings blocking some part of the sky), you can miss handoff. Some of the pass times for the satellites are about 2 minutes... I had a phone at my disposal for about six weeks, and it was rare that I was able to make a call longer than 30seconds. Usually I'd get through "I'm using Iridium, so if I get cut off..."
• It seems the handset designers failed to build in any multipath rejection. Even when the signal quality was high, calls routinely had an echo or ended up garbled. I'm no expert on the topic, but one of my friends who designs GPS equipment says that MPR is pretty-much a straightforward process that was clearly ignored.
• Service is subject to the hiccups of the "local" telephone service. For political reasons, Iridium put one terrestrial downlink on each continent. As part of their licensing agreements with all of the countries, calls have to be routed through the nearest downlink. Calls go up, they come right back down. I was in the Himalaya and my calls went up and down... to India! More than once, disturbances of the land lines in India blacked out central Asia for hours on end.
• Iridium won't do data, at least not well. Each sattellite connection has a maximum of 2400 baud... and only if you route through the US downlink (which, if you were paying attention, means that you have to be in North America). Once upon a time, a long time ago, the Mot engineers were trying to build a data module to allow multiple connections and load balancing, but I don't think it ever materialized.

And the economic challenges:

• Globalstar, a competitor is on the verge of closing its doors from lack of clients. How does dividing a client base of essentially zero generate revenue?
• Back when Iridium first declared bankruptcy, the original loaning institutions feared that they may have to pay more to deorbit the satellites. It sent the debt price for Iridium LLC to nothing. Not only did investors go to $#!^, the banks were now liable for the costs of keeping the birds up or bringing them down. Whoever bought it must have assumed those liabilities...
• The constellation reqires maintenence. Even if they don't have any (or much) initial cost left to recoup, the satellites have a 5-15 year lifespan. Starting in about 2003, they're going to have to start replacing birds if they have any chance of maintaining service.

It seems to me that Iridiums "assets" are inferior, expensive equipment, with a limited lifespan and big price tag. What do they have of real value? Military contracts and communication licenses with almost every nation. The real question: do those assets offset the liability assumed by the constellation. It will be interesting to see what Iridium Satellite LLC will do with the contracts.

Keep watching /. My bet is that we see another "Iridium Crashes" headline soon.

On another note, the (already suffering) Globalstar (GSTRF) didn't change on this news.

Nobody seems to care about this one.