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Iridium Hardware May Burn 290

Posted by timothy from the $5-billion-blaze-of-glory dept.
Someone from PenguinRadio was one of the first contributors to write about what may be the ultimate fate of the Iridium network: "For those who were wondering what would happen to all the Iridium satellites that are floating around in space, reports out today say they will be brought down into the atmosphere in a massive burn out. The flames should be just about as cool as watching $5 billion in cash burn in a big bonfire pit, which, coincidentially, is how much it cost to put them up." Or $7 billion, depending on who's counting. Divided by 66 satellites, that equals one very expensive meteor shower.
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Iridium Hardware May Burn More

Iridium Hardware May Burn

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  • Re: Mars Orbit? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Send them as decoys with the next Mars lander
    With enough alternate targets for the Mars Aerospace Defences the real lander just might make it.

  • Conspiracy theorists never let simple facts stand in the way of illogical reasoning, do they?

    Even a small return does make sense on the surface... except that when they put the satellites up, they had to submit a proposal for how to bring them down should the Iridium service fail. If you read the linked article, you might have missed the quote "...Wednesday, the court-imposed deadline to find a buyer or face a windup of operations." If a buyer doesn't show up, they have no choice in the matter.

    The simple fact is that without a buyer who will then be obligated the maintain the satellites and control them to maintain their orbits, which is important to their operation in the first place, they become free-floating useless space junk which we have enough of already.

  • And I thought Lyndon LaRouche (sp?) was a nut!
  • They already do act in a way similar to GPS. The resolution isn't very good, but the billing records indicate a Location Area where the call is made. We don't define many Location areas smaller than a U.S. state. I think there could be a lot of useful applications combining Iridium Data service with GPS. The major criticism is that the speed is only about 2400bps.
  • well... motorola maintains them. There are some rumors that General Dynamics was looking to partner with Crescent Communications, and run the system for quite a bit less.
  • doesn't matter. the iridium sats were placed into a particularly low orbit b/c of the technical difficulty in making a handheld phone that can punch up to orbit. and even so, the handsets are friggin' giant.

    iridium was always going to burn, and the sats were always going to have to be replaced on a pretty frequent basis. instead, they'll burn and will not be replaced. but they would not be very useful for anyone who they were donated to for very long.
  • actually, let's please not drop things on Microsoft. satisfying as it might be, I live way too close to feel safe about it. (but no, I don't work for Chairman Bill)
  • Funny thing is, there has always been and still is a Delta II/Iridium
    launch scheduled for 11 July 00 here at Vandenberg.


    Check Here [af.mil]


    Guess it isn't happening now...


    --Ben

  • I thought the idea was that they would burn up...

    altought that would be an interesting way to go.
  • Forgive me if I'm naive, but couldn't they lease out the satellites? You would think that the onboard computers would have some sort of software that could be modified to support generic data transmission. It just seems to be an awful waste of natural resources to burn these up. I'm not talking so much about investors' money but more about all the environmental damage caused by the mining of the materials used on these things. Please not that I'm not talking about "open sourcing" them, which is a pretty impractical idea if you think about it. I'm thinking more along the lines of leasing them to major long-haul telcom carriers, governments, etc.
  • Reminds me of Max Headroom, when the Zic-Zac coperation schedules their yearly satellite burndown ;)
  • I think someone out will think of some business idea with these satalites something so obvious you don't even won't think out it

    http://theotherside.com/dvd/ [theotherside.com]
  • The Ocean (pick one) is REALLY big.
    There are not all that many boats out there at any given time.
    There are only 66 satellites, they will probably burn up completely on re-entry.

    Go buy a lottery ticket, you'll figure it out.
  • If they're going to de-orbit them just because
    they went bankrupt and don't wan't anyone to
    possibly benefit from their bankruptcy, I'd
    call that being a dog in the manger. If I was
    them, with a anarchistic streak, I'd open the
    channels and the encryption and say "Have at it!",
    letting all and sundry have use of the band-width.
    Maybe then someone would realize their value!
  • Hey, they're not GPS satellites, they're bankrupt
    communication satellites. Why would their
    positions be "super-critical" ? Downgrade the
    operational criteria, and donate control to some
    worthy group. OR do some real science with them.
    Hydrazine Thrusters? Put them into minimum energy
    trajectories to the permanently shadowed Lunar
    craters and watch the splash. With 66 successive
    events, you're going to determine (with good
    statistical probability) whether there's ice there
    or not. I'm sure some scientist could think of a
    use for a iridia (?) or two.
  • This article here [cnet.com] seems to say otherwise.

    Personally, I think it would be an AWEFUL waste of an established satellite network to just burn it up. It's not like it costs money to just have them orbit for a while.

    ---------
  • At the very least I guess that could result in a record number of fake bids...
  • I have a serious question for slashdotters here: do you really think the world would be a better place if Bill G. wouldn't have been born?

    Absolutely.

    Perhaps not dramatically better, but one less jerk is always a net gain.
  • First, I'm sure its not alone in this. Iridium only had 66 + 11 spare satellite. There are a lot more satellites and other bits of junk up there. Not to mention the planned launches of more satellite constellations as well as more satellites.

    Second. The hardware was difficult to upgrade. The software was very upgradeable and was done so many times. Most stellite communication is not compatible and Iridium phones (at least some models) could be converted to use the cell network of you choice by simply inserting another card into the phone.

    Second part two. The problem with stupid satellites you can only bounce the signal to a ground station that the bird can see. Necessitating many ground stations. Iridium only needs one since the call can be routed in space. (which it is despite another posters comments to the contrary). So it is a design trade off and as such a matter of opinion. All satellites have a limited lifespan. Space is a harsh environment and eventually manuvering fuel and batteries are used up.

    Third. Stupid economics did apply. It was expensive, although not as expensive as I've seen stated. $2000 for a phone. Minimum of $5/min for a phone call. For a while iridium phone to iridium phone calls were free.

    Fourth. The quality was not there at the begining.
    It has improved a lot. You can tell its a staellite call, but it sounds good.
  • It seems such a waste to just de-orbit and burn such a network. I do not know the asking price for thier fleet of satellites, but you think somebody would have jumped at the offer, after all, look at what this is, a global communications network, in place and ready to go, all you need to do is pay Motorola a few hundred million a quarter to keep them up. You think at least Microsoft would have bought them so they could beam out messages of kindness and benevolence to all the unsuspecting proles below, all while using the same network to co-ordinate thier anti Linux armies, spy on everybody, and direct thier Big Brother bombers and Victory battleships to take over the world.

    Seems a shame....

  • ...is that MS-12 is scheduled to launch July 11 from Vandenberg. See? :)

    Mission Config Launch Date Launch Location
    MS-12 7920-10 11-JUL-2000 SLC-2W
  • No, kids dying of cancer is sad. Iridium's flameout is more pathetic than anything else.
  • In my humble opinion, it was obvious that Iridium would fail. What audiance are they targeting? There are maybe 50,000 people in this world that need around the world coverage in places like Antartica(I'm probably grossly overestimating). The places where rich business people do business is in places where there is already sufficient coverage by Cellular and or some form of digital wireless. CDMA, TDMA, and the european equivalent (I forget it's name, GSM I think) are in each of the major cities. So, who where they thinking would want this service? It's said to see 5billion go to waste on this. Total gross mismanagement on the side of Venture Capitalists, and market research specialists. Just because we live in a boom economy, doesn't mean people will want to spend a few grand on a phone, and a grand a month on phone service, just so they can have the novelty of calling from the north pole. Well, at least the major satelite launching firms got a boost of capital from the business.
  • Indeed - somehow I would guess a massive ground support infrastructure would be required to keep 66 satelites in sync... Motorola's charging like $120 million+ per unit of some time (you can tell I forgot, can't you) for what has to be some pretty spiffy services...
    'Twould be kinda cool to donate them to groups as massive tax write offs or something
    /Indeed
  • Actually, if they destroy them, it's a tax writeoff. I heard that they could writeoff 1/3 the value of the satellites if they were destroyed.

    So they are still worth money even if they are destroyed.

  • gee that must put you somewhere in the brentwood/franklin/I-65 area. :)

    elijah
  • I hope they synchronise it to music. Or something. Actually, that'd cost money and they have none.

    I'll be happy just to be able to find out if there are any going down over my part of the sky at night so that I can see them. Well, it probably won't be any more exciting than a meteor shower. Hrm.

    And I just saw a magazine article last month saying how good Iridium was and that you should get an Iridium phone if you can afford it.. hehe.. suckers.

  • I'm sure there are plenty of people in assorted businesses who already considered Iridium. Phones for private/business planes. Mineral resource exploration/mining. Worldwide shipping. Remote phone booths.

    And indeed, there are some last-minute Iridium bidders [cnet.com].

  • If they can get them to re-enter at the same local time all over the globe (10 PM Eastern, 10 PM Central, 10 PM Mountain...) they'd be able to announce it and get a lot of attention. Not that Iridium would be able to do anything with the publicity after burning up all the assets other than their name...

  • Satellites really don't anything to stay up there? What? Hello?

    While it's true that if the sats were left alone they would continue to orbit for 15 to 20 more years before the earth's gravitaional anomalies and the atmospheric drag at their low altitude would deorbit them naturally. However, to keep them usable communications sats requires 24x7x365 attention. They must be tracked and any orbital deviations corrected (that's why they have hydrazine thrusters on them in the first place). Their health must be monitored to make sure they are functioning correctly. They have to be turned to keep a low profile when a known piece of space debris approaches, and safed when a solar flare is detected.

    I would not be surpised if Iridium's satellite operations budget was more than $1 billion/per year - that would not be a lot for 66+ setellites.

  • The last magazine in my stack of Wireds before the subscription finally ran out is dated "October 1998" with the cover story "Iridium launches the global phone" Big, long story about how neat Iridium is. Heh.

  • Might make a nice collector's item. Not everyone has a $5K phone. It's also something you can point to as an example of an obviously bad idea next time your boss/coworkers come up with something similarly bad.

  • Um, you were boycotting them because they were blocking your view? "Down in front!"

    Lets put it more clearly. Iridium was interfereing with studies in a radio band protected by international treaty. They KNEW that it would before they launched, and they COULD have avoided the interferance by more careful planning and design.

    To turn things around, how do you suppose Motorola would have felt if after launching all of those satellites using a band actually licensed to them (and causing no interferance on other bands), the radio astronomers decided that they needed to try to phone ET for all but 4 hours in the early morning (Call for ExtraTerrestrial Intelligence?), and by doing so, completely wiped out iridium communications?

  • Is this some kinda new math?

    It's IRS math. The same math that can make a $10 a year raise cost you $200 a year in taxes.

  • if $10 per year puts you into a new tax bracket, it's at most $10 that's taxed in the higher bracket.

    Actually, the tax schedule is jagged ,though not significantly in most cases. I understand that there are more pathelogical cases than the quick example below. The situation is also much more sane now than it has been in the past.

    Let's see, (from 1999 tax table for form 1040A): If Form 1040A, line 24, is - At least 48,900 But less than 48,950 And you are Married filing jointly, Your tax is- 8,103.

    Next line: blah,blah,blah, 48,950 - 49,000 = 8,117.

    So, if I made 48,940 last year, and 48,950 this year, I loose $4

    That's just the first example I came to on a very simple tax form. (That is, grab the booklet, flip to the tax table and choose a line at random). There's also the fact that a satellite system that is in orbit and theoretically useful is an asset (as far as IRS is concerned) even if nobody is actually going to buy it and operating it looses money. If it plunges into the atmosphere, it is a total loss of a $5,000,000,000 asset and can be written off. Don't just take my word for it, check out the various articles about Iridium.

  • it's just that it dosen't follow from your argument, see?

    I wasn't meaning to make a full scale argument or proof, just pointing out at a high level that once the IRS and taxes become involved, loss is gain and gain is loss. So they gain plenty by loosing. In the same sense that an individual can actually loose by gaining (at a much smaller scale). If IRS math made any sense, it would recognize that a 5B satelite system that looses money and can't be sold to any sane company is a liability, not an asset.

  • If they de-orbit the satellites, they'll do it over empty ocean. That is not cool from the point of view of seeing them burn up, but I guess the advantage of most likely not killing anybody kind of takes precedence here.

    What should happen is that some TV network should get a plane to fly out there at high altitude where they can get some great footage of a burning-up satellite. I'd love to see that! I might even turn on my TV, which I haven't done for a while. (and not because I left it on :)

    I think it would work. A plane doesn't cost that much to fly around in. Iridium could even recoup some money on it if they sell the TV rights or something. (well probably a couple million, which is chump change compared to what they're in the hole by, but it's a lot to me :)
    #define X(x,y) x##y

  • What they really needed to do was develop a better marketing plan. They should have produced a ton more handsets but made sure 4/5 of them were defective. The should have set the price at $100 per handset and sold the airtime for $1/min. Offer a premuim service for $500/handset and $20/min. Everyone but the premium customers get the message "Were sorry but all satellites are currently busy. Please stay on the line and the next available satellite will assist you." They have to stay online for 15 min to get a connection and get auto-disconnectd after 5 min. Push out lots of press reports saying ,"After being bombarded with much more demand than expected we are currently in the process of upgrading our service." ala` AOL style.
  • Who said anything about the Army? There are four other branches of the "Armed Services," smart guy. Certainly you learned that one in basic. Anyways, you're still wrong, but I'd just like to point that out.

    Here [spacedaily.com] they use them in Bosnia.
    Here [wirelessweek.com] they are used by the ARMY Corps of Engineers.
    Here's [surrey.ac.uk] the CEO of Iridium saying "We have crystal clear communications. With the freedom to use the Iridium phones in helicopters and Army trucks, and area of total devastation and no electricity.
    Here [gcn.com] is a story about the DoD reserving Iridium satellite time. Perhaps you would like to chew on the line "The Army, Navy and Air Force are testing ways to integrate the Iridium satellite network into their communications plans" for a while. It's in the first paragraph.
    Here's a conspicuously obvious one titled "Army to Use Iridium Pagers." [aerotechnews.com]

    It seems like with a little research (little meaning like, 20-30 seconds) would've shown you how wrong you really are. I suggest you do just that before posting next time.


    --
  • My thoughts exactly, especially when one potential buyer, historically, has absolutely hemorraged money for things like this: the US government. Iridium phones are crucial to military peacekeeping operations where there is no established phone network, a la Kosovo. The Armed forces own 3000 Iridium handsets which would be a pretty hefty investment to lose. They even built a $14 million base station in Hawaii for Iridium service. They are very dependent on this and I wouldn't be surprised to see them buy it. Also, the State Department owns an additional thousand Iridium phones. Between them I think that we will likely see an offer. I mean, come on... compared to the R&D and production costs for the F22, even a fscking satellite constellation must look like small change.

    --
  • Who said anything about the Army? There are four other branches of the "Armed Services," smart guy.

    But...

    Let's take 'em in turn:
    • Navy: already have access to satellites, as well as AWACS and other theater communications equipment.
    • Air Force: Hell, these guys RUN the military space program.. Isn't the Space Command USAF?
    • Marines: While probably more technologically backward than even the Army (hey qloki & winslow ;) they've got sharp folks who can do telcom, even the reservists ;)
    • Coast Guard: sheesh, these guys are so close to the US they should already be in analog cellular range ;)


    Iridium might have been more expedient or cheaper depending on circumstance, but the US armed forces are not going to be affected, readiness-wise, by iridium tanking.

    If anyone from the Pentagon is reading this, how about taking any money you're thinking of spending to buy Iridium and put it into salaries and living expenses for your people? Otherwise you're going to continue losing tech-trained personnel to the private sector in droves.. A USAF tech captain IIRC gets like $38k/yr for like 8-10 years experience doing sysadmin..

    "The beatings will continue until morale improves."

    Your Working Boy,
  • Here's a company that's strapped for cash. Because of bankruptcy, they'd prefer to sell the satellites to work off some debt, but instead they decide to destroy everything.

    (???)

    It seems to me that if you're looking for money, you can probably find any number of people who'd be willing to buy it. I mean, let's face it, selling the satellites for $2.00 a piece would be far more economical than crashing them into the ocean at 4000 degrees fahrenheit, since you wouldn't have to pay the technical staff to make sure that the satellites didn't land on Jesse Helms. (Or at least not on purpose, anyway)

    But then again - the article said "Barring finding a 'qualified' buyer" - whatever that means. I'm sure you've probably got to have some pretty heavy duty terrestrial hardware to keep the things functioning correctly, but come on.

    I wonder if we can call Bruce Perens and his ham radio buddies and convince them to buy the satellite array for amateur radio. :)

    But seriously people, please point out what I'm missing here - it seems to me like there couldn't POSSIBLY be a way where destroying them all would be the most economical thing to do for Iridium. What gives?

  • Just an idea - but it may be that getting PR out of it isn't possible. I don't know very much about the mechanics of how things get torched in the atmosphere, but if I were this company, I would want to plonk these satellites in the middle of the ocean, as far from land as possible. That way, if they don't completely disintegrate, they hit the water, and nobody dies.

    If you crash them into the ocean miles and miles from anyone, it may be that you would not really be able to see them. Besides, who knows where they orbit the earth? It may be that they'll be swandiving straight into antarctica, in which case we surely won't see them. (Although the people on the southern tip of south america might have a shot)

  • Operations cost is *far* from irrelevant to amateur radio satellite operations. Even with "free" labor the cost of ground-based support systems are a *very* significant factor. There has been a lot of weeping in the amateur community about $5B of LEO comms satellites getting smoked, considering how we sweat blood to get stuff on-orbit, but no serious proposals to take the Irridium birds over. For more about satellites and amateur radio see AMSAT [amsat.org]

    Another issue is that I understand the Irridium birds are a serious problem to astronomers, especially radio astronomers.

    The amateur satellite community has it's attention on "Phase 3 D", which is an amazing, sophisticated piece of engineering, 100% ham radio. It's slated to ride an Ariane 5 to a highly eccentic sun-synchronous orbit, perhaps as soon as July.

  • Enter iridium. The telephone version of the internet. Individuals now with the power, for the first time, to bypass local controls and place calls directly, to anyone, anywhere on the planet, without paying local 'access fees', without being tracked, without being monitored.

    I'm not sure where you got the idea that Iridium is an instrument of freedom and individual privacy. The reality is that Iridium greased the political skids for its system by making deals with many governments and government controlled telecommunications companies to set up local Iridium gateways where traffic could be monitored by police and intelligence agencies. It was rather clever, coopting possible opposition by giving interconnect franchises to governments who would otherwise have felt threatened by the system.

  • (Instead, use relatively dumb and cheap satellites and keep the complex processing in a handful of distributed ground stations. Sure, you'd have to use two satellites each call, but reducing the complexity and weight of each satellite would save lots. And upgrading the system in the future would involve ground station upgrades, instead of satellite replacements).
    Hate to argue, but unless the specs for iridium have changed... that is exaxtly how they worked. And that is a design flaw,IMHO. If all of the switching were performed in space, then signals could have been direct to nearest downlink teleco, instead of the convuluted ground base stations, plus the many Iridium companies which exist to manage them.
    Good riddence. I talked to Iridium in 1992 and told then that unless they could do a 64k uplink/128k downlink they were sunk.
    Bah.. such a waste!!!
    Well, Moto is now the official BONEHEAD of the millenium.
    Pan
  • you'll probably just get out about halfway to mars and then just go into a really elliptical orbit around the sun. don't think there's that much fuel in those things. firing to earth is a HELL of a lot easier; just aim a _little_, fire a _little_, and gravity just does the difficult work for you. and think about it, even if you DID get outside the solar system somehow, space is REALLY large and REALLY empty. the chances of coming across anything are almost nonexistently small.
    ----

    On March 17, 2000, the motorola corporation set the boosters on its 66 Iridium satellites to fire into deep space, into which they flew at random, travelling further and further through the limitless empty void..

    By random coincidence, iridium satellite #37 did, about 7.8 billion years later, reach something.

    COMMANDER YYYYT: What's going on? why have we stopped?

    ENGINEER ALTWK: We are having minor fluctuations in the quantum integrity stabiliser. I have slowed us to General Relativity speeds for about fifty seconds to give it a chance to cool down.

    COMMANDER YYYYT: What's broken? Is this bad?

    ENGINEER ALTWK: There's no problem. Probably just needs more stasis fluid. It can wait until port, we won't have to stop again.

    COMMANDER YYYYT: Alright.

    Suddenly there is a deafening thud, and the ship is jarred a bit. The shielding light blinks softly for several seconds.

    NGLB: What the hell was that?

    Altwyk reaches for the external sensors and sets them in pictoral projection mode. The screens focus on a wad of metal, battered, twisted, and dented from the effects of time, with two jagged, decaying panellike things sticking out, slowly spiralling away.

    ENGINEER ALTWK: An asteroid.

    NGLB: Damn, for an asteroid it looks pretty wierd.

    COMMANDER YYYYT: I've seen wierder.

    ENGINEER ALTWK [into intercom] Resuming travel speeds. Disassociation to commence shortly, please sit down.

    And thus ended Humanity's final contact with the universe.

  • So.. (Score:2)

    by Tarnar ( 20289 )
    ..Who's gonna be selling the debris on ebay? :-)
  • I think this will be remembered as an era of waste. That is really sad that they are just going to let those things go into the atmosphere. Imagine how these could be used in education. A college with decent funding could take one of these satellites and do really neat things with it and really learn lots to boot. Shoot, they might even make something useful out of it. Imagine attending a college and getting hands-on experience with satellite technology. Now *that* would be neat.

    Motorola charged hundreds of millions per year to keep those things running. But what were they really charging for? All the money probably went to well-paid man power and the rest to profits. A university could probably run one of these at a relatively low cost. And even better, the company would receive huge tax breaks for donating the satellites.

    Perhaps a university could experiment with different ways to utilize aging technology. They wouldn't have to use it for the purpose it was intended. I'm sure for what these things cost, they must have some sort of flexibility in terms of programming them to do different things from Earth.

    So... how do I get ahold of these guys to give them the idea of donating them to education? :)

    --SONET
  • IIRC, Iridium satellites are noisy on the electromagnetic spectrum and impede radio astronomy. There are something like 60-odd of them and they're not geostationary so they swoop by on a regular basis. (They were parked in LEO to save money.) This means that most radio telescopes worldwide have to plan around the timing of the overhead Iridium passes. Lots of people were displeased by this commercially-devised obstacle to scientific inquiry.

    I am not an astronomer or a physicist: corrections, amplifications are welcome. I forget which part of the EM spectrum, in particular.
  • ...you might wish to get your money back for that Iridium phone you bought!
  • Instead of letting them burn up, they should sell them on Ebay! Maybe that could erase their 4.4 billion dollar debt.
  • But it does go to show how capitalism works.. Sometimes mistakes happen and lots of effort gets wasted. But things aren't kept artifically alive beyond their time. It shows that the market works.
    It's difficult to conjecture that capitalism works from this particular instance. It lends argument that stupidity cannot continue indefinitely, but that is true of any system.

    Life is perpetual change, regardless of your economic system. ;-)

  • There are something like 60-odd of them and they're not geostationary so they swoop by on a regular basis. (They were parked in LEO to save money.)

    This is completely bogus. Does *anyone* here bother to understand the facts before posting thier ill-informed opinions.

    There is a VERY GOOD technical reason why Iridium satellites are in LEO - and it's quite simple: You want them low to avoid tha time-of-flight problems that plague geostationary satellites. (I used to do geosync satellite protocol tuning - TCP/IP wasn't even capable of dealing with geosyncronous delays until the RFC 1323 enhancements became commonplace. (It took Sun forever to put these in Solaris.) The delays are on the order of thousands of milliseconds - that's right, whole seconds. More bandwidth only hurts the problem. The only things you can do that really help are: 1) shorten the communication path, or, 2) speed up the signal. Mr. Einstein says you can't do the second even if you want to. ;-)

    It's true that LEO birds are cheaper because they don't need the expensive boosters to geosync (23,000 miles is *way* the heck out there - nearly 3 Earth diameters!), but the chief reason Iridium birds are in LEO is to achieve reasonable signal latencies.

    It's a shame Iridium got the moey first and dd it wrong, because the concept is excellent. Iridium just underestimated bandwidth requirements of the network by a couple of orders of magnitude, which put a serious crimp in their pricing model.
  • Most people have no idea how difficult this is. In fact, this stuff really *is* rocket science!

    The moon missions had to hit a date/time-specific moon corridor that was only about 10 miles wide with a velocity tolerance of only about 100 mph. There was one mid-course correction that they could use to finesse position within the corridor, but they had to have hit it in the first place. Think about it for a second, and you'll realize those are *very* tight tolerances, in context.

    (BTW: the figures above are from the Ranger missions. Apollo may have used slightly different paths, but the physics is pretty much the same regardless. This is one of the reasons it was such a miracle that we got Apollo 13 back at all. I used to do a lot of work at JSC in Houston, and several of the oldtimers who worked on 13 told me that Mission Control intentionally aimed the capsule along the steepest allowable side of the flight path, so that if something went wrong, it would result in the astronauts being vaporized rather than skipped off into space to asphixiate, which was viewed as being as bad for PR as it would be for the astronauts.)
  • phrase meaning "inability to talk".

    This is not a joke. Look it up.
  • Nice try, conspiracy boy. There's a very public and compelling reason to burn the sats. The IRS. Assets that are floating around in orbit ready to be turned back on or sold at some later date, aren't *nearly* as deductible as assets that have been reduced to a fine dust floating in the Indian Ocean. Someone would have to come up with a lot more than 5% to make it worthwhile to sell Iridium.
  • I wonder if they have enough fuel to put it into
    a "slingshot" orbit to send them to Mars.
    Use them as Mars orbiters for future missions.
    That would be an instant hit with Nasa! :)
    heck Nasa should just buy 'em!
  • Can't these satellites be connected somehow to the GPS system that is already in place?
    These puppies aren't in geosyncronous orbit, they're much closer in. (That's why their orbit isn't stable, and why you can reach them with a low powered handset.) They zoom across the sky pretty fast from a ground-baszed perspective; geosyncronous sats (like the one you point your satellite TV dish at, or the GPS sats) always seem to be in the same place in the sky. So I don't see how these could be useful in the GPS.
  • If Motorola hadn't blown all that money on Iridium, would we now have G4 chips that could exceed 500 MHz? Or StarTacs that were credit-card size? Or embedded PowePCs that demolished all competitors?

    I don't know enough about how Motorola's internal divisions work, but it seems that saving 5 billion in one sector means the others have more $$$ to play with.

    Besides, we all know the NSA secretly bought out the system and is using it to read your email from space. The voices in my head tell me it must be so. :-]

  • To calculate man-years.. What I did was I divide the total economic output of the US by its population. (9 trillion divided by 300 million). I then multiplied in a fudge factor of 3x..

    Roughly for every $100,000 spent, that's the economic output of a full individual for a full year. And 5 billion is 50,000 times that. Of course this counts all of the production used, from the cleaners who cleaned the floor where the rocket fuel for launch was refined, to the engineers who designed the chips in the birds.

    Another way to look at it is that its about one half of .1% of one years worth of economic output of the US.

    (Some armchair economics follows)

    My belief is that there's only one real fundamental shortage, that of human labor. There are enough atoms of iron, uranium, alluminum, iridium, and everything else in the earth's crust to satisfy almost any demand that's short of building a dyson sphere. Anyways, I sorta like to convert currency from units of dollars into units of human labor. So the CDR I burned today cost $.71 or required about 6-30 minutes of human labor to build. (including the price of the raw materials, the amortized cost of the manufacturing equipment, the cost of the materials to build the manufacturing equipment, ....)
  • Its sad that a beautiful idea just came too late to work.. Its sad that the result of 5 billion dollars (over 50,000 man years) of work is being scheduled to be burned to ash in the atmosphere, barely a year after it went public. (Iridium first opened for service Nov 98)

    But it does go to show how capitalism works.. Sometimes mistakes happen and lots of effort gets wasted. But things aren't kept artifically alive beyond their time. It shows that the market works.

    The people who put their dreams and time into iridium will go on to other projects and create new ideas and give us technological progress.

    Its sad, but life must go on. The only thing that is unchanging is death.

    Life is perpetual change.

  • I can't believe nobody has suggested the obvious:
    1. Spend the next 3 months nudging the satellites around a bit, so that:
    2. On July 4th, they all kiss the atmosphere 3 minutes apart;
    3. Over the most densely populated areas of the U.S.;
    4. On their way to not-dense areas if they don't burn completely;
    5. Between 11PM and midnight, local

    The U.S. government should cheerfully pay, oh, $100 million, (under 45 cents/citizen) for the best fireworks display in history to celebrate Independence Day 2000.
  • Searching google for ITU and iridium I found:

    The ITU [itu.int] = International Telecommunication Union (with a *.int domain name, ooh, aah) has a broken search engine on its site so I can't do an internal search for "Iridium". I'm sure there's something good on there, though.

    Some FCC [fcc.gov] (United States, Federal Communications Commission) stuff [slashdot.org] on Iridium authorization.

    The Netherlands Foundation [www.nfra.nl] for Research in Astronomy had some stuff in an old newsletter [www.nfra.nl] about Iridium and radio interference.

    Thanks to "astrophysics" [slashdot.org] for mentioning the ITU again.

    --

  • A Related Los Angeles Times article [latimes.com] says pretty much the same thing. The guy trying to buy it apparently lives in a community about 10 minutes from where I live.

    I'm posting at 1, so moderators, you don't have to mark me down as redundant due to the similarities of the articles, but since I'm addressing you, you shouldn't moderate me up either. (I hope saying that doesn't make me a troll or flamebait. Doh... now I'm trying to get marked up as funny. Bleh, do whatever you want:)

    --

  • An anonymous coward wrote:

    ... I'm assuming that you're talking about either a) spectrum assignments or b) the optical flares. If a), go complain to the ITU (and/or boycott it with a vengance).

    Optical astronomers are getting screwed over because they have to make a lot of effort to avoid pointing their telescopes at Iridium satellites while the sun might be reflecting off of the satellites, or else risk damaging their equipment. Some [eu.org] people [assa.org.au] are having fun observing the "iridium flash" phenomenon, but many astronomers are annoyed.

    --

  • Has Motorola actually said they're going to burn Iridium up, or is it just delaying an announcement that they have sold the system?

    --

  • Perhaps it's far fetched, but maybe NASA could figure out a way to scrap the hardware for the space station, I mean, it takes quite a bit of money and fuel to raise those satellites, they're packed with communications equipment, high quality solar panels, and other miscellaneous parts that are valuable, why not make an effort to use them?
  • as far as my understanding goes, iridium was actually a more *expensive* than many local exchanges. In poorer countries with telephone monopolies, Iridium was waaaay to expensive for the local population to afford. In countries where lots of people actually could afford Iridium, cheaper alternatives existed - namely cell and PCS phones.

    Iridium went under the old-fasioned way: it ran out of money because not enough people bought it's product.
  • Sometimes I am truly astounded that we got to the moon and back. Not because we couldn't build the rockets, but because the guidance and control is so complex.
    You've got that right. I work in a military communications satellite program, and as far as I'm concerned our OA guys have the hardest job in the house. Not only do they hvae to take all ther factors you mention into consideration, but during launch ops they have to do it in close to realtime - not that there's always somehting to be done about it if things go wrong, but it's certainly important to know that things are going right.
  • Cause those aliens from ID4 will be annoyed when the arrive and realise that they can't use our own satellites against us :P.
  • > Anyway, I'm assuming that you're talking about either a) spectrum assignments or b) the optical flares. If a), go complain to the
    > ITU (and/or boycott it with a vengance). If b), then you'll probably need to create a substantial amount of new international law
    > before you can do anything about it (again, assuming I'm not missing something, as IANL); feel free to. =)

    Both. On a: It's my understanding that Motorola agree to respect the restrictions put forth by the ITU, but then changed it's mind. So I think boycotting Motorola is more appropriate than the ITU. On b: I know there's not much I can do, but boycotting Motorola seemed like at least something.
  • US$5 billion.

    Who will cover the tab ?

    The same people who provided the money in the first place. Investors.

    Who are the investors ?

    Joe Bloggs walking down the street has an insurance policy and a retirement fund. Anyone want to guess how much of the capital traded on Wall Street and Nasdaq originates with the Joe Bloggs of the world ?

    Now, which is better ?

    * Destroy the products built with community money because no immediate return is forthcoming, ensuring net loss for company and net loss for the community that invested in the company.

    * Make the products built with community money available to the community in the hopes that there will be at least some future return ?

    - antoine
  • An internet connection in the middle of the atlantic or in middle of the sahara. That would be 31337.

    d00d, the DOD already has their own 1337 global satellite net. they 0wn j00.
    --

  • What if one of them hits a boat or something?
  • I don't think the bits of metal and stuff are just going to disappear.
  • What if one of them hits a boat or something?

    The boat would sink!

    Somehow, I don't think they will make it that far.

  • As with NASA's faster, cheaper, flatter missions, the lesson is: if you're going to spend the money to launch something, it had damn well better be worthwhile!
  • If someone were to buy those satellites and put them to good use, this would be a bad move. Unfortunately, the only offer was from the United States Department of Defense, and they have since retracted their offer. It is a shame to see them go, tragic actually...

    However,

    NASA is applauding the decision to scuttle these satellites. If they were to stay up in the air, they would be unused space debris, which complicates missions and is potentially dangerous. This move is actually strategically removing potentially dangerous debris, not just destroying valuable equipment so others can use it for a bargain...

    Altruistically, they could just lower the offering price to something trivial, but businesswise, this would be a bad move. The company that bought it would be able to offer the service that they designed, for a fraction of the cost, and edge out their potential future market.

    Que sera sera...


  • Why burn them for a couple of seconds worth of flares...?
    I think we should actually send them out to deep space (providing they have enough fuel to get out of gravity)...this would definantly last longer.

    There's a greater chance that maybe if anything is out there, will find a Satellite floating around...track it's path back to earth etc etc..
    don't know if that's good or bad...

    Maybe our space travel in the future..we'll find these old satellites again somewhere....and put them into our museums for our future generations...

    Just a wild thought...
  • yeah, but he only did that to turn heads away from y2k induced windows lockups/law suits while he remotely rebooted your computer (he CAN do that you know...)
  • First of all, it gets pretty costly to keep Iridium up and running. An article here [socratek.com] shows just how much Iridium pays Motorola to operate and maintain it. 129 million per quarter on the low end!!

    Anyway, is there a date set for this "massive burnout". It would be pretty cool to see. It's not everyday you witness the intentional destruction of hundreds of millions of dollars worth of equipment.

    It also seemed a little weird that they are still selling the service online on the Iridium web site.

  • They should have claimed Y2K 'problems' and ditched them over new year's eve and claimed the insurance.
    "Yeh, we dunno what happened. I guess they all turned around, aimed themselves at the same location, fired their boosters, and crashed. Ahh those crazy Y2K bugs. *sticks hand out*"

    Or they could perform a pretty cool UFO invasion scare.


    Everyone seemed to forget to ask these four very important questions...

  • Real reason. Direct global comm scared many govt's (Score:3)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 16, 2000 @06:42PM (#1196650)
    Maybe folks in the free world don't appreciate their ability to contact anyone, any time, via a wide selection of LD carriers for the cheapest cost. In many nations, the phone company is still a gov't owned and run monopoly. Gov't sets the prices, gov't controls whom you may call. Gov't can tap their own lines to listen in as they see fit. Enter iridium. The telephone version of the internet. Individuals now with the power, for the first time, to bypass local controls and place calls directly, to anyone, anywhere on the planet, without paying local 'access fees', without being tracked, without being monitored. Scared the crap out of local govt's. No doubt, international pressure motivated the dicision to drop iridium. But no, that was not enough. A bankrupt iridium could be bought by someone else. They wanted it destroyed, and the failure to scare other companies from trying a similar global phone plan. This was pure politics, at its worst.

  • Deja Vu All Over Again (Score:3)

    by lildogie ( 54998 ) on Thursday March 16, 2000 @06:07PM (#1196651)
    Millenia from now, will our era be marked by a thin, global era of iridium?

    Just like the dinosaurs......

  • Re:Continue the boycot? (Score:3)

    by TheQuestion ( 124286 ) on Friday March 17, 2000 @04:34AM (#1196652) Homepage
    I for one say CONTINUE! at least until the death of these frequency leaking noise makers!

    Here [rzmws10.nfra.nl] is a report from the The Committee on Radio Astronomy Frequencies (CRAF) of the European Science Foundation (ESF). It has more details on the interference with Radio Astronomy (particulary the work of the VLA and the VLBA (Very Large Baseline Array).

    I visited the VLA last year, and was saddened to hear that Iridium seem to care so little about the outright damage they were doing to the scientific observations of these hard working scientists. This report speaks of limiting their observations to low traffic hours, giving them only about 4 hours a day! This is terrible. Radio astronomy doesn't require darkness like visual astronomy, so under normal conditions, observations can take place 24x7.

    So, if it were up to me, I'd continue the boycott.

    ?

  • Re:Simulataneous Article (Score:4)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 16, 2000 @07:07PM (#1196653)
    Iridium is/was developed about 50 feet from me at work. There is no savior. Motorola/Iridium held out hope that the Pentagon would buy it, but they refused. The last day anyone could purchase it was Wednesday. It's too late.

    No one is developing for it anymore; and the general sentiment among the engineers is "it's about time".

    I suggest this story [mercurycenter.com] instead.

    The thing about the Iridium is that it was such a huge and obvious mistake. They wanted to allow international buisness travelers to have a phone that they could take with them around the world. Instead of just making dualband and triband phones, they spent 7 billion dollars to launch satelites and to market $5000 phones, $3000 pagers, and phone calls at the low-low price of $40/minute. PLEASE!

    And once it became obvious that it was crashing hardcore, Motorola (the largest investor in Iridium LLC) kept throwing money at it.

    Now here's the best part. Motorola wasn't the only one to throw billions at a DOA idea. There were no less than 4 other direct competitors to Iridium. All of which have either already met, or are currently meeting, a bitter end.

    On the upside, I should be able to get one of those phones for ultra-cheap!

    --
    Anonymous for Obvious Reasons

  • Re:Great PR (Score:4)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 16, 2000 @08:08PM (#1196654)
    I found this very sweet applet [nasa.gov] a while ago.

    It shows a 3d image of the earth's artificial satellites, and lets you select from lots of satellites. Gives you a real idea about how crowded our space really is. Also shows you how hard it must be to keep all those satellites from crashing... I don't know if Iridium's satellites are listed here, as I don't know their callnames...

  • The disaster that was Iridium... (Score:4)

    by jht ( 5006 ) on Thursday March 16, 2000 @07:01PM (#1196655) Homepage Journal
    Iridium was a huge mistake from almost day one. Cellular technology already had become pervasive, and there are other satellite-based communications systems readily available (albeit just as pricey as iridium was). Essentially, Iridium was designed to fill a market need that really didn't exist (people working in remote places not served by existing cellular), at a price that only a few users could afford.

    Unfortunately for Motorola and their partners, the Iridium team had fully drunk of the kool-aid and didn't see their market evaporate even before they were operational. Besides that, Iridium phones suffered from serious technical limitations, and the network that they designed didn't factor in data becoming the killer app for wireless. By 1995 or so it was clear that the Iridium market as envisioned did not exist.

    If they could have gone back to the drawing board, it might have been possible to redesign Iridium into something viable, but there was too much financial pressure to get into production, pretty much mainly due to all the money Motorola sunk into the venture. As it was, they scaled back from 77 satellites to 66 due to financial issues.

    Sadly, by the time it was in deployment, the marketplace had saturated virtually all the populated earth with cellular technology at a fraction of the cost. The exclusive market for Iridium was pretty much the two Poles and a few desolate places like the Sahara. Ships have alternate means of satellite communications.

    Oh well. They'd be really pretty to watch when they come down... Maybe the Geek Cruises people could throw an "Iridium cruise"?

    - -Josh Turiel

  • And good riddance... (Score:4)

    by SEE ( 7681 ) on Thursday March 16, 2000 @07:16PM (#1196656) Homepage
    First, because it interfered with astronomy.

    Second, because it was a stupid design -- launching a hard-to-upgrade system of 66 highly specialized orbiting telephone switchboards which needed to be replaced every ten years and are incompatible with any other satphone service or other use.

    (Instead, use relatively dumb and cheap satellites and keep the complex processing in a handful of distributed ground stations. Sure, you'd have to use two satellites each call, but reducing the complexity and weight of each satellite would save lots. And upgrading the system in the future would involve ground station upgrades, instead of satellite replacements).

    Third, because it was stupid economics -- the market for the service is people who can't use cell phones where they are, but can afford to pay higher fees than with a cell phone. But any market where the cell phones can make money will sooner or later develop a local cellular system. So you have a serivce that appeals only to people who are by definition marginal markets, but which costs billions to maintain.

    Steven E. Ehrbar

  • Iridium Flares - Links to Pictures (Score:4)

    by B.D.Mills ( 18626 ) on Thursday March 16, 2000 @08:00PM (#1196657)
    Here is a time-lapse image [nasa.gov], here is another [nasa.gov], and here is a web site [eu.org] with several more images.

    Typically, a flare lasts about ten seconds or so.

    --

  • Simulataneous Article (Score:4)

    by angst_ridden_hipster ( 23104 ) on Thursday March 16, 2000 @06:20PM (#1196658) Homepage Journal
    Curiously, this article [cnet.com] on news.com, written within ten minutes of the article referenced, makes it seem that there may be a savior for Iridium.
  • And I'm sure the $3000 cost of the handsets had nothing to do with it, or the very high per minute cost of using the service. European users can pretty much travel throughout Europe and use their GSM handset with no problem. There just wasn't a big market for this service. The Iridium technology is pretty much useless for anyone else since it's obvious that it isn't profitable in it's primary function, and it doesn't handle data well enough to be used for any Teledesic-type of wireless Internet functions. Craig McCaw (of Nextlink, Nextel, and Teledesic fame) was probably their last hope, but he recently decided against bailing them out.

  • Iridium Flares - See Em While You Can (Score:4)

    by jonwiley ( 79981 ) on Thursday March 16, 2000 @07:29PM (#1196660) Homepage
    If they re-enter the atmosphere, the Iridium satellites will make quite a show. However, they are well known to already put on a show.

    The Iridium satellites have large reflective dish antennas that, when hit at the right angle by the Sun, produce spectacularly bright flares in the sky. Sometimes the flares are bright enough to be visible by daylight.

    To figure out when and where these flares will be visible in your area, visit Heavens Above [heavens-above.com]. There you can plug in your location and receive data which will tell you where to look.

    So far I have seen several. The flares are usually short-lived, much like the company that spawned them.

  • Continue the boycot? (Score:4)

    by astrophysics ( 85561 ) on Thursday March 16, 2000 @06:34PM (#1196661)
    I (along with many astronomers and others bothered by Iridium's disregard for science) have been boycotting Motorola and Iridium. Should we continue the boycot?

    Once the satelites are burned up, they are no longer impeeding science. But it's not like they admitted the error of their ways and have decided to do the ethical and socially responsible thing. I think I will end my boycot on the basis that they are at least destroying them rather than leaving them around as space junk that interfere with optical astronomy and future missions.

  • Re:Open Source Iridium (Score:5)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 16, 2000 @06:32PM (#1196662)
    Why don't the open up the network,

    Bandwidth. Or lack thereof.

    make everybody in the world pay $1 for the company,

    How? Threaten to rain terror from the skies unless every last person on the globe pays? Besides, a buck may not seem like much to you, but in many countries that is a fairly large sum of money.

    and have free satellite access for anyone who wants it?

    It's hardly free if everyone has to pay a buck, is it? Also, while that might defray the launch costs, and maybe some of the R&D costs, if it's a one-time charge it ain't going to cover the operating costs.

    I bet I could write a perl script to keep the birds flying...

    I bet you couldn't. If spacecraft dynamics was easy, everyone and their grandmother would do it. It's not easy.

    It's one thing to compute a few simple conics using a point mass model. It's something else to accurately account for perturbations due to other celestial bodies, solar radiation pressure, atmospheric drag (yes, the atmosphere extends that high), and zonal gravitational harmonics (fancy way of saying that the earth is bulgy and not uniform). Throw in the coupling between spacecraft attitude and spacecraft orbit (and we'd really like to keep our antenna pointed at the earth), and you have a very nasty non-linear problem. Trying to control all of this, and maintain a desired orbit, is non-trivial to say the least.

    Sometimes I am truly astounded that we got to the moon and back. Not because we couldn't build the rockets, but because the guidance and control is so complex.

    Al

  • They deserve it for calling it Iridium! (Score:5)

    by snicker ( 7648 ) on Thursday March 16, 2000 @06:17PM (#1196663) Homepage Journal
    I mean, after dropping the # of satellites from 77 to 66, they really should have been calling it Dysprosium. But would they listen to me? NO.

    I have no idea why that bothers me so much.
    *snicker
    (sour grapes maybe?)

  • 66 COMMUNICATION SATELLITES - NO RESERVE ***HOT*** (Score:5)

    by drivers ( 45076 ) on Thursday March 16, 2000 @07:08PM (#1196664)
    Starts at $5,000,000,000.00
    Quantity 66

    Seller (Rating) motorola001 (0)
    Payment Visa/MasterCard, American Express, Discover, Money Order/Cashiers Checks, Personal Checks
    Shipping Not applicable

    A REAL COLLECTORS ITEM. COMPLETE SET. ONE OF A KIND. LIKE NEW CONDITION. HARDLY BEEN USED.

  • What I really want to know... (Score:5)

    by SaxMaster ( 95691 ) on Thursday March 16, 2000 @06:12PM (#1196665)
    Can I send a little money to Iridium so they can precision-drop one of their birds on the location of my choice? Somewhere in Seattle, preferably. (grin)

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