Iridium satellite Concepts

Reentry: SpaceX, Elon Musk, and the Reusable Rockets That Launched a Second Space Age

by Eric Berger · 23 Sep 2024 · 375pp · 113,230 words

out of Elon Musk. So after summoning his best negotiating skills, Desch telephoned the SpaceX founder in early 2009. The chief executive of a satellite company named Iridium, Desch sought to expand his space-based communication network, and as part of that he needed to close a major deal with SpaceX for

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the exact offers his launch competitors made to Iridium, but Musk was confident SpaceX had bid the lowest price to put more than five dozen Iridium satellites into low-Earth orbit. Desch had to be bluffing. “Matt, honestly, no offense,” Musk replied. “We love your team. We love working with you guys

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poster child for monumental failure in space. At the end of the twentieth century, with financial backing from Motorola amounting to billions of dollars, Iridium launched a satellite service that enabled telephone calls via satellite phones. But after a number of management missteps, the company filed for bankruptcy. The court erased $4

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satellites, and a year later took Iridium public to raise money. The most critical part of the $3 billion plan was manufacturing of the satellites, and Iridium chose Europe-based Thales Alenia Space over Lockheed Martin, because Thales offered to help raise additional financing from banks backed by the French government. The

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his career, and the future of a multibillion-dollar company, on this plan. Now there was just one more launch, an Israeli communications satellite, in line ahead of Iridium. “I’m the only person who calls a scrub.” Despite the stunningly successful ORBCOMM mission in late December 2015, the Florida launch team

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come. But in the near term, Musk’s primary goal was increasing the launch rate. There were so many customers, like Matt Desch and his Iridium satellites, waiting to fly. And as spring turned to summer that started to happen, with the Cape popping off missions left and right. Lim, Muratore, and

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hotel was Matt Desch, the Iridium chief executive. He was nervous as hell. Eight years had elapsed since Desch closed the deal to fly his Iridium satellites on the Falcon 9 rocket, and now that day had come. There were only two outcomes. His grand plans could come crashing down into the

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half the price of a Falcon 9. He liked the idea of flying on a smaller booster first, because then he would put just two Iridium satellites at risk. If there was a problem with the satellites in space, the rest of them could be fixed on the ground. Although the Falcon

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and a half later,” Desch said. “We were next in the queue.” Iridium had little choice but to take the return-to-flight mission. Iridium’s original satellites were nearly two decades old, and there were almost no spares left in orbit. With the deal for a Dnepr launch falling through and

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delays to the Falcon 9 rocket after its successive accident, the second-generation Iridium NEXT replacement constellation of satellites was years late in getting to space. Changing rockets also was not a realistic option. Iridium would have had to pay twice the

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Smith, inside Iridium’s control room. Brisk winds the night before had blown down the cable carrying communications and power from the launch tower to Iridium’s satellite. For the time being, Iridium could not communicate with its satellites to know they were healthy. To further Desch’s agitation, the bus driver

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been a fairly staid broadcast. “Each of the ten spacecraft that are onboard right now have a mass of 600 kilograms,” she said of the Iridium satellites. “And when the solar arrays are fully deployed they have a thirty-foot wingspan, which equates to more or less four Shaquille O’Neals.” At

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’ time on launch spaceports for requirements for private vehicle visits to research conducted on resupply of Sabatier process on International Space Station Advisory Committee internet satellites Iridium Isaacman, Jared James Webb Space Telescope JetBlue Juncosa, Mark Jung, Josh Just Read the Instructions, Kellie, Benjamin Kelly, Brian Kennedy Space Center kerosene, densifying Kislyak

The Bin Ladens: An Arabian Family in the American Century

by Steve Coll · 29 Mar 2009 · 769pp · 224,916 words

in public. Perhaps he did not know himself. 33. ONE PHONE, ONE WORLD “IF YOU BELIEVE in God,” an executive of the satellite telephone company Iridium said in 1996, “Iridium is God manifesting Himself through us.”1 At the century’s end, of all the developments in technology and culture lumped under the

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that could function in remote locations. Around 1987, while conducting experiments in the Arizona desert, Motorola engineers conceived the idea that would become Iridium—a network of satellites that orbited at a lower altitude than most others and that could assume the role normally played in telephony by ground-based switching and

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a small office in the Georgetown neighborhood of Washington. Two or three young Arabs with backgrounds in economics worked there, keeping in touch with Iridium headquarters as the satellites were built and launched, and as consumer marketing plans developed. Hassan joined the Iridium board of directors and flew to the United States

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Garden to celebrate their vision. Gore placed a ceremonial call to a great-grandson of the telephone’s nineteenth-century inventor, Alexander Graham Bell. Satellite systems like Iridium’s “complete the telephone coverage of the Earth’s surface that Alexander Graham Bell began more than a century ago,” Gore said when his

The Zenith Angle

by Bruce Sterling · 27 Apr 2004 · 342pp · 95,013 words

down at the Earth for a few precious instants: a flare five times brighter than Venus. DeFanti had extremely personal and very complicated feelings about satellites. Especially Iridium satellites, though spy satellites had always been his premier line of work. He had wanted in on the Iridium project so very badly. He

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major global satellite communications network without him. And then he’d been astounded to see the whole enterprise simply fold up and collapse. These wonderful Iridium satellites, dozens of high-tech metal birds each the size of a bus, beautifully designed, working perfectly and just as planned, costing more per pound than

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were doomed to be de-orbited and flung, one by one, into the black, chilly depths of the Atlantic Ocean. This awful fate made the Iridium satellites very precious to DeFanti. The Most Important Man in the World had known some failures of his own, true agonies of the spirit. He never

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be trouble. Is that what this is all about? This little visit of yours tonight?” “Tom, I love it here in Colorado. I love satellites, I love an Iridium flashing. But yes, Tom. This is an emergency.” DeFanti levered the scope aside. “All right, then spill it.” “Corporate networks are complex and

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brick. Van hadn’t yet had a chance to try out an Iridium phone. The phones were clumsy, expensive, and didn’t work indoors. The Iridium satellite network had gone broke—but at the last minute, the new post-bankruptcy owners had been rescued by the U.S. Defense Department. The U

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owners. I can forward those reports directly to you. That will prove the power of my antisatellite capability.” The spies listened silently to their satellite phones. “The Iridium satellite is not being destroyed,” Mr. Gupta reported at last. “We hear only a faint crackling! We have not even lost our phone connection

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would be very foolish to detonate satellites, for then the Americans would know the truth at once. Think of this fact, though: we could attack Iridium satellites, weather permitting, very stealthily, for years. A reputation for bad technical performance would finish Iridium off for good. Then we could short their stock and

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you begin your so-called satellite attack?” said Mr. Liang’s interpreter. “Our phone line to Beijing is still working perfectly!” “We are attacking that Iridium satellite,” said Tony. “Right now. There is no visible beam. It is a very energy-efficient process. The adaptive beam has to penetrate miles of atmosphere

Exponential Organizations: Why New Organizations Are Ten Times Better, Faster, and Cheaper Than Yours (And What to Do About It)

by Salim Ismail and Yuri van Geest · 17 Oct 2014 · 292pp · 85,151 words

blanket the vast majority of the landscape. Soon enough, however, a more radical but also more profitable solution presented itself: a constellation of seventy-seven satellites (Iridium is number seventy-seven on the periodic table) that would cover the globe at low Earth orbit and provide mobile telephony for one price—no

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Buenos Aires car wash operators. To fully comprehend the sheer acceleration we’re seeing, recall the $10 billion in investment that was lost on Iridium and other satellite efforts in the 90s. Today, twenty years later, a new breed of satellite companies—Skybox, Planet Labs, Nanosatisfi and Satellogic—are all launching nanosatellites

Smart Grid Standards

by Takuro Sato · 17 Nov 2015

. Inmarsat (2012) BGAN M2M, Inmarsat plc, www.inmarsat.com/services/bgan-m2m (accessed 5 January 2013). Iridium (2010) Iridium Short Burst Data Service, Iridium Communications Inc. Orbcomm (2013) Satellite M2M, www.orbcomm.com/services-satellite.htm, (accessed 6 January 2013). 7 Security and Safety for Standardized Smart Grid Networks 7.1 Introduction

The New Gold Rush: The Riches of Space Beckon!

by Joseph N. Pelton · 5 Nov 2016 · 321pp · 89,109 words

links. The alternative is to deploy a constellation of satellites much closer to Earth’s surface. This is the approach taken by systems known as Iridium (66 satellites plus spares) in low Earth orbit or Globalstar (48 satellites plus spares) in a different configuration. These satellites that are 30–40 times closer

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program and adversely affected the schedule for resupply of the International Space Station, plus had a key impact in the delayed deployment of the Iridium NEXT mobile satellite communications systems. Even so there is no doubt that SpaceX is now seen as a world-class supplier of launch services. The latest innovation

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still be in orbit [6]. This was followed in February 2009 by the accidental collision of the Russian Kosmos 2251, a defunct military communications satellite, with an active Iridium satellite to create on the order of 2000 new debris elements [7] (Fig. 7.3). Fig. 7.3A representation of current space debris

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deployed over Earth in some sort of pattern or even random deployment so as to provide planetary coverage by a network of small satellites. Examples of these include Iridium and Globalstar for mobile satellite communications, Terra Bella and Planet Labs for remote sensing, and the planned OneWeb satellite constellation that is optimized

Why Startups Fail: A New Roadmap for Entrepreneurial Success

by Tom Eisenmann · 29 Mar 2021 · 387pp · 106,753 words

providing satellite phone service anywhere on the planet, the venture built upon years of R&D work within Motorola, its lead backer. Before Iridium launched sixty-six satellites into space, Motorola hired several consulting firms to study the market for satellite phone service. Their surveys identified a potential market of forty-two

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on similar solutions will announce their plans, forcing teams to decide whether to take the extra time to match them, or risk a feature gap. Iridium’s satellite phones, for example, were originally conceived in the late 1980s, when terrestrial cellphone service was expensive and had limited geographic reach. But by the

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.). Facts in the next paragraph about GO Corp’s failure are from Jerry Kaplan, Startup: A Silicon Valley Adventure (New York: Penguin, 1994), Ch. 13. Iridium’s satellite phones: Bloom, Eccentric Orbits, p. 180. To illustrate the last point: Frederick Brooks, The Mythical Man Month: Essays on Software Engineering (Boston: Addison-Wesley

How Will You Measure Your Life?

by Christensen, Clayton M., Dillon, Karen and Allworth, James · 15 May 2012

appears, at the surface, as if it’s not necessary. A Spectacularly Big Failure Few companies have launched their product with more fanfare than the Iridium Satellite Network—mobile phones that would allow people to call from literally anywhere on the planet by tapping into a complex celestial network of satellites. Vice

Rocket Billionaires: Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and the New Space Race

by Tim Fernholz · 20 Mar 2018 · 328pp · 96,141 words

economy completely, at least in the minds of the people in the industry. So why not start hurling them into space? The proliferation of satellite schemes—Teledesic, Iridium, SkyBridge, Globalstar—implied rising future demand for rockets to get the satellites into orbit. Eyeing these schemes in the midnineties, as they developed proposals

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rockets, with a robust commercial space industry paying down the costs of development. But that market had simply not materialized. The biggest, most attractive satellite plays—Iridium, Globalstar, Inmarsat, and Teledesic—had all gone bankrupt at the turn of the century as the dot-com bubble popped and Wall Street balked at

Principles of Corporate Finance

by Richard A. Brealey, Stewart C. Myers and Franklin Allen · 15 Feb 2014

know (or quickly learn) that cash returns are not guaranteed. An investment could be a smashing success or a dismal failure. For example, the Iridium communications satellite system, which offered instant telephone connections worldwide, soaked up $5 billion of investment before it started operations in 1998. It needed 400,000 subscribers to

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and repairs. • A telecom CFO worries about the risk that a communications satellite will be damaged by space debris. (This was the fate of an Iridium satellite in 2009, when it collided with Russia’s defunct Cosmos 2251. Both were blown to smithereens.) Notice that these risks are all diversifiable. For example