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Iridium May Have To Reinvent Itself Again

Posted by Hemos on from the return-of-the-satellites dept.

prgrmr writes "The Washington Post has this article on the latest wrinkle in the Iridium saga. There may be a conflict between new competition and existing contractual obligations for putting up the next generation of sattelites. This could become a milestone for making the service more ubiquitous, or the millstone that finally sinks it."

4 of 88 comments (clear)

  1. Iridium Flares by PK_ERTW · · Score: 5, Interesting
    One of the very cool things about the Sattelites is the Iridium Flares. Basically, they look like a slow moving, super bright shooting star.

    I have had the opportunity to see these first hand a couple of times, and I can say they are super neat. If you are ever out camping, look it up and see if one is gonna pass over head. The above mentioned site has lots of resources on where they can be found.

    pk

    --
    Engineers arn't boring people, we just get excited about boring things.
  2. Re:Maintenance Costs by Coz · · Score: 3, Interesting

    There were two lines of growth there. Motorola thought they could assembly-line satellites and bring the per-unit cost down dramatically; almost all satellites today are custom-made, even the big "families" like the Boeing 601 and 702. Motorola was going to mass-produce identical Iridium satellites and get their per-uit cost down.

    There was also going to be a boom in cheap launch technology. Companies like Rotary Rocket, Beale Aerospace, and Kistler were growing to compete for the business of keeping Iridium, ICO, Globalstar, and especially Teledesic in space. Since all four have scaled back or disappeared, the funding for the new launch technology development disappeared too. If they'd succeeded, the cost per pound to low orbit would have been 20% of the current price - making a large constellation affordable.

    --
    I love vegetarians - some of my favorite foods are vegetarians.
  3. Iridium Costs by RNLockwood · · Score: 4, Interesting

    You may be absolutely certain that the military and other government users don't pay nearly $1.50 a minute. In fact it's les expensive than the cellular costs that I am familiar with.

    I tested the data service by using FTP to move some files this week and got a data throughput of about 4 seconds a kilobyte. The service compresses the data to get this rate. The rate was the same if I zipped the file and then sent it.

    Iridium also provides secure encryption for the military and qualified governmnet users. A nice touch for those that need it.

    --
    Nate
  4. iridium has no competition by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

    in certain situations such as offshore sailing iridium has the best cost/performance. other systems like globalstar don't reach offshore, and inmarsat is too expensive and bulky and requires too much power.