It's a shame that all satellite ventures of this sort look to the Iridium failure, and do not follow through with their plans. I worked for Motorola at the Iridium operations center. Motorola's satellite construction and launches worked great. In fact they set several records for number of satellites launched in a given period of time. The hardware worked great and operations were smooth. Iridium was a BUSINESS FAILURE. The technology provided by Motorola worked but Iridium could not sell the service to enough people. They were marketing to the rich jetset crowd, when they should have been marketing to international corporations and governments. Sadly they realized this too late, and the idea of worldwide satellite communications for the masses died.:(
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It's a shame that all satellite ventures of this sort look to the Iridium failure, and do not follow through with their plans. I worked for Motorola at the Iridium operations center. Motorola's satellite construction and launches worked great. In fact they set several records for number of satellites launched in a given period of time. The hardware worked great and operations were smooth. Iridium was a BUSINESS FAILURE. The technology provided by Motorola worked but Iridium could not sell the service to enough people. They were marketing to the rich jetset crowd, when they should have been marketing to international corporations and governments. Sadly they realized this too late, and the idea of worldwide satellite communications for the masses died. :(