NASA's Odds For Iridium De-Orbit Casualties

Posted by timothy on Sunday December 10, 2000 @06:36PM from the numerology dept.

Super_Frosty sighted (and cited) this story running on Yahoo! which says, in part, "U.S. space scientists put the odds at nearly 1 in 250 that debris from the proposed burn-up of the world's first global satellite telephone mesh would hit someone on Earth. The prospects of a casualty from the now-averted mass 'de-orbiting' of the system known as Iridium were spelled out in a previously secret study by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration." Isn't it nice that this has been put off for a little while? (Oh, and what were your favorite Lotto numbers again?)

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You know your business is in trouble... by nakaduct · 2000-12-10 13:57 · Score: 5

... when a given person is more likely to be hit in the head with a piece of your infrastructure than to actually buy the service you're selling.
What were the odds of a random person being an Iridium customer? 100-million-to-one?
cheers,
mike