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Space

A Eulogy for Iridium 138

Posted by Hemos from the well-written dept.
Feed is running a piece written by Bruce Sterling regarding the destruction of the The Iridium Satellite system. We've also linked the folks who are trying to rescue the system, so take a gander for them as well.
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A Eulogy for Iridium More

A Eulogy for Iridium

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  • Sterling's a poor journalist (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    ...and a worse writer.

    There are NINETY Iridium satellites in orbit, the 66 active, plus spares and others. But no, only 66 satellites are going to burn up. This mantra has been repeated by every clueless journalist out there.

    Accounts weren't disabled last Friday; Motorola's still running the constellation.

    What Russian investment in the system proper?

    'falling into our outer atmosphere like abandoned Cadillacs.' - how many abandoned Cadillacs have done that, exactly?

    'in a real-life vacuum, there can be no Strauss soundtracks. In reality, there was only the near-silent radio crackle of Iridium phone calls.' - near-silent radio crackle?

    Feed paid for that? /. linked to that? give me a break.

    As for the saveiridium people, they're pathetic publicity-seekers. Tried saveiridium.NET ? A different set of same.

    Some semi-accurate information on Iridium:

    http://www.ee.surrey.ac. uk/Personal/L.Wood/constellations/ [surrey.ac.uk]

  • The value of helium 3 is what would get some company to go mine it on the moon. think of how much money one tank full would be worth. One tankful is enough to power the whole US for 1 year. Figure out how much money we spend on oil,coal,nuclear(fission),hydro that is what that one tank load of helium 3 would be worth. As to " who is going to make D-He3 reactors right now" we do have small amounts of He3 on earth. Enough to experiment with,and get the reactors up to commercial viability. The problem ,as always, is that governments and industry have refused to fund the research needed to go from theory to commercial use. Mostly because H-He3 fusion power plants would destroy the world economy which is based around oil. Think for a minute how much disruption there would be if oil became worthless over the period of 1 year.

  • Good riddance? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Wouldn't it be "riddance" rather than "Riddens"?
  • There aren't phones per-se, but they have emergency beacon devices and short wave radio is always an option if you have the battery. There are satillite transmitters as well.

    But, what would she do with a phone anyway? Call the police to get herself picked up? You're pretty much SOL if you're in need of emergency care and no one can reach you physically in a short amount of time.

  • "Sure, I'd LOVE to have an Alpha in my pocket calculator..."

    Actually, many pocket calculators these days are probably about an order of magnitude faster than my first two computers. I wouldn't be suprised if the latest HP's were faster than stock IBM PC's were when they came out. They do have a lot more ram, after all.

  • Could whatever Anonymous Coward produced this kindly consider hopping on over to sci.space.policy and going into the "mind numbing detail" on Iridium's failure? I think they might appreciate it.
  • From the article:

    Those times are quite dead now and deserve a formal burial. Nowadays, most people don't blindly believe swaggering space propaganda, where the glamour of technical accomplishment is fiercely valued over any hint of earthly practicality. (In a word, most people aren't Motorola engineers.)
  • I had a read of the site, and then went to the poll, which is where you really realise just how little clue the organisers have, and how wacky they are.
  • yaright.

    Johnson's Dictionary had only come out in the 1750's IIRC, and the very idea that there could BE a standardized spelling of English words was pretty new. Before no one had cared; it wasn't important.

    But the Americans had no problems with English save for a couple of them like Webster (who was also big on dictionaries) Adams and Franklin. They briefly messed around with significant changes to English, in the hopes of creating the American language which would distinguish them culturally from England. It went over like a lead balloon.

    As for changing everything to German, that was actually a proposal to help accomodate immigrants, many of whom were German at that time. It was also not recieved well.

    Webster did have a significant impact on spelling through his dictionary, but by the 1820's had more or less given up the cause of creating a new language or even significantly standardizing it.

    It still took a while for spellings to really become standard. Improving literacy rates helped a lot. Nowadays, no thanks to radio and tv, we're even losing regional accents. Everyone sounds like a frickin' midwesterner more and more all the time.

  • two four oh oh baud
    on one satellite channel
    oh far too too bad

    ;-)
  • Hollow?

    Who here can name the "last" man on the Moon, without looking it up? I just took the tour at Kennedy Space Center last week, and I don't think I can name one member of Apollo 17's crew.

    To a geek, yes, the Moon is still cool. To Joe and Jane Average, with their 2.3 kids, 2 cars, and 1 dog, it wasn't such a big deal. Never mind that without all those later Apollo and Apollo/Soyuz missions, the DirecTV dish on the roof and the iMac in the den probably wouldn't exist, and the Explorer and Camry in the driveway might as well be a Galaxie and a Valiant. Having only a layman's understanding of the Apollo and Space Shuttle programs leads to the firsts as the only things that stand out: Apollo 11 and STS-1. Been There, Done That.

    The general (meaning non-geek) public was told Iridium would revolutionize communications. It didn't, and now the satellites, and the money to develop and launch them, are going up in the friction-induced flames of re-entry. Compound that by the aftermath of the Mars mission snafus, and you can understand the public perception, echoed by Sterling, that space is turning out to be a letdown.

    Sure, we know better. That's why we're bitching on Slashdot, not reading it in a newspaper and bitching to the room at-large.

    BTW, Cryptonomicon is the latest by Neal Stephenson. Bruce Sterling's latest book was Distraction.

    BTW2, I highly recommend visiting Kennedy Space Center if you are at all interested in space exploration. Standing next to a real Saturn V will give you a whole new appreciation for the acheivements of the Apollo astronauts.

    Every day we're standing in a wind tunnel
    Facing down the future coming fast     - Rush
  • Look -- the human race isn't going to leave Earth for someplace else. Ever. Face it. We maybe could run a few Moon and Mars bases at a tremendous cost and stock them with photogenic astronauts for public entertainment (which really is, after all, the purpose of all the manned NASA misions to date), but colonizing the galaxy as proposed by so much bad science fiction just won't happen. Faster than light space travel is impossible (it is only wishful thinking to believe that Einstein was wrong), and the only alternative, generation ships, wouldn't be boarded by any sane person. Because many of science fiction fans have an almost religious belief in space travel, I think it is extremely brave for a science fiction author like Sterling to say what he did.
  • Oil worthless? Not really. There are so many other uses for petroleum that it's practically a sin to burn it. Which, by the way, is why the U.S. should rely on foreign sources, within reason, so that when they finally give out we still have what's left of our underground and offshore deposits.
  • I believe there was also strong consideration given to making Spanish the official language.
    Of course, the way things are going we may see that happen yet. : )
  • To the tune of "Ghost Riders in the Sky"
    A bunch of satellites fell down one dark and windy day
    The radio astronomers all jumped and said "Hooray!"
    Outdated narrow bandwidth was found to be a flaw
    They're losing too much money, said a fellow named McCaw
    Throw them away, can't save them to-day-ay
    They're Boat Anchors in the Sky
    Boat Anchors i-n-n-n the sky-y-y

    Think I can sell the idea to Weird Al?

  • But that gave people the idea that if they looked like cell phones, surely they must work like cell phones.

    One of the significant problems with the project was that they were trying to get them to work exaclty like cell phones - cell phones in 1989
    that is. The Mot engineers hit that target right on the head. It's too bad that cell phones had moved so far away from that target that Iridium became little more than a technical curiosity.

    Cell phones back then were huge- the Motorola brick phone was the most portable at a couple of pounds, about 4" deep, 3" wide and 8" tall and most of the other phones had a handset with the batteries and other stuff in a separate pack, like carrying a standard Bell 1948 Desk Phone around with you.

    And they didn't work very well indoors or in a car, because the few cells that were out there didn't overlap (so you'd drop going from once cell to the next) and were often quite far apart (so you were probably at the edge of the range to begin with, and walls would block the weak signal).

    Though the Iridium phone I had worked while in the car, the window needed to be down and the antenna needed to be stuck out the window and pointing up (it had a joint so you could hold it normally and still point the broomstick sized antenna up). That made it pretty hard to hear, as you can imagine. They had external car antennas that you'd plug into the phone that apparently made using them in the car a lot easier, but I didn't get one of those (I wasn't paying for it, so I got what they gave me).

  • "Utilise" is spelled correctly. It's just that you're used to seeing the American spelling.

    English. Gotta love it.

    [As an aside, I wonder why American spelling is different than British. Were the news editors and authors in the new frontier all illiterate? Was it some sort of language rebellion, the Independence war not being enough for the colonists? Or perhaps they had speech impediments, and mistakenly pronounced words like "utilise" as "utilize"?]

    --
  • the sky, the sky, the sky is on fire.. we don't need no cell phones let the mother #$@! burn... burn mother #@$! burn...."

    And why, exactly, would I care? If the open-sourcers want a satellite, spend $100 million and launch it from Sealaunch. It's not expensive - you could put six high quality, modern comm satellites in orbit. Better than a deteriorating bunch of substandard equipment left out there. Let it burn! I mean, why not start a "Save the 486!" foundation? Maybe "Keep FORTRAN alive"? Comeon people.

  • Aight, you win. Touche. ;)
  • You know perfectly well what that means - don't deny it!

    I was trying to get some specs for the satellite transmitters and earth-based phone units (after all, they are going to be flooding the market now -- I *have* to check out the hacking potential)

    ... when I encountered This list of two dozen mobile satellite comm services coming on line in 2000 [cellular.co.za] (three are already live).

    I figure others might find this information as interesting as I did.

    __________

  • Rather than destroying the satellites, why don't they just auction them off on ebay?

    ...buyer pays actual delivery costs.

    __________

  • I bet you could push gigabits through the damn things....

    Actually you can push 9.6kb through them. They are lying GSM stations and GSM is limited to 9.6 kb/s data (yes I know there are some funky hacks being worked on that can push this limit slightly).

  • Keep a spare airfare in your bank in case she needs help

    That's a good idea. Along similar lines, if she can get access to an American Express card, she should absolutely do so --- they have the feature of having *no cash advance limit*, which means that if for some reason she has to buy an emergency plane ticket out of the middle of nowhere, she can do so.

    [Sure, she has to pay it back that month --- but she's here, considering how to pay the fee, not there, considering how to get out.]
  • Why has this site suddenly become SterlingDot? Either Bruce is sleeping with CmdrTaco or we're just seeing the tip of some Bruce-on-the-Internet iceberg that indicates maybe his books aren't selling so well, so why not rant and rave online (like Pournelle does).
    --
  • We arn't going to last forever, you know
  • OK, so I guess Bruce Sterling feels the need to declare rockets and space as "uncool" on behalf of computer geeks everywhere.

    Huh? where did Sterling say anything about computer Geeks in his artical? I didn't see it anywhere. The artical didn't say that you shouldn't think rocketships are cool, only that he dosn't think they are, or that most people don't think they're cool ether.

    And the fact is, there not. At least, not anywhere as cool as they were when they started. I mean can you imagen? It would be like having warp drive today. But, eventualy, warp drive would loose its novelty. You mentioned transatlantic cables. When was the last time you downloaded something from europe and thought. "Wow, this is going over a cable through the sea! that's amazing."

  • Cool

    Someone needs to record this so that we have something to listen to while we watch these things roast...

    ;)

  • I especially liked "A Stranger in a Strange Land"

    Yeah. Now we are trying to keep strangers *out* of our LANs instead.
  • There are precisely two ways in which space rockets are incredibly cool....

    (blah blah blah deleted)

    This kind of cynical writing gets on my goat.

    the glamour of technical accomplishment is fiercely valued over any hint of earthly practicality

    Yes, 5 billion dollars was wasted.

    Therefore space research, the efforts of NASA, the Soviet Union's space agencies, the Motorola engineers is merely

    rocket prestige.

    This kind of article leads to this kind of thinking:
    Let's not every go forward, lets not ever do anything new because we might make mistakes. I prefer to sit back, glibly critise, because if I never try, I'll never make a mistake.

    That attitude, that's the real crash and burn. The few flares over the ocean would be nothing if we all followed that line.

    Jamie

  • If you read carefully, I meant that GSM hasn't caught on in the U.S. due to the general stupidity of Americans to accept standards that weren't invented there.

    GSM is of course big in Europe and Asia, which is why it would have been *so* nice if I could get national GSM coverage in the U.S. and in Japan with a single phone. But it doesn't seem likely to happen for short term future.

    At the very least, GSM would have to get national coverage in the US before I could consider it useful. Even my lowly SprintPCS (which is CDMA not GSM) has coverage in most major metropolitan areas.

    Japan is just as bad as the U.S. in not accepting the standard GSM frequencies, which is why there aren't any GSM phones in the U.S. that work in both Europe and Japan. I heard that you could buy them in Japan, but I looked and came up short. Anyone know of any model names?

    Karen

  • My younger sister is going to be traveling all around the world this year, from the Ecuadorian rain forests, to Tasmania and the Australian outback, to good old Great Britian. Alone. She understandably wants some way to call for help in emergencies.

    Inmarsat might work for her. http://www.inmarsat.org/index3.html The phones are a lot bigger, but what she needs already exists. Not cheap though.

    Eric

  • if we had nuke rockets or at least spent R & D developing safe ways of using nuclear power for rocket engines, we'd be halfway across the galaxy by now. chemical fuels arent going to get you anywhere - either now or later. and no commercial ventures are going to explore space - they want returns NOW and they aint gonna get it.
  • Aren't the Iridium satellites the ones that screwed up the observation window for most radio telescopes? I say take em' down then. When they're deactivated we'll have opened up some more "quiet time" for observing the universe...

  • For the love of god, the Open Source Irridium (sic) movement is not a serious effort.

    Read the entire website, poll included, and tell me you honestly believe it is.

    ------

  • Looks like they've fixed the "irridium" typo.

    Not that it changes the fact that there isn't any source there to open.

    ------
  • Um. Good point. Will her grant cover the $3million a *week* to keep it going? Or will her friends help chip in a few million? :)

    I can appreciate your concern for your sister. I have two myself. But she is going to some seriously 'wilderness' places. (Like UK - my home). Cut her some slack, and learn to worry. It's not an adventure if you can get the bus home.

    My (useless) advice: Make sure she knows how to contact the relevant consulate/embassy in every country she goes to. Make sure she gets the right shots before she goes, and then let her go. Keep a spare airfare in your bank in case she needs help. She won't. But please let her go.
  • Rather than destroying the satellites, why don't they just auction them off on ebay?
  • extinction? why do you give a shit.

    where will we run to?
    what will we do?
    why is it so important that we survive?


    --
  • I agree. This is a lame, lame story. Unless these flakes put up some real money then they should shut-up. Worst of all this story has been on slashdot twice... why? Is it that important? Will the website make any difference? (No) So lets drop this crap and cover something useful.

    JOhn
  • Global cellphone access might be an idea whose time hasn't come, but consider an Iridium uplink as an alternative on commercial aircraft to flight recorders. (granted you'd still need recorders over the poles) I believe the baudrate of Iridium actually exceeds flight recorder data rates. Planes could transmit airplane flight characteristics in real-time for ground-based analysis. But more interesting is the possibility of assistance to aircraft in trouble as events are unfolding...

  • Waste (Score:1)

    by Atilla ( 64444 )
    It's hard to believe that however proprietary the Iridium sat network is, nobody is interested in taking it over and use it for something more viable. I bet you could push gigabits through the damn things....

    and damn, why not thrust them towards the moon so they won't burn up in atmospheric layers? maybe some day NASA will send a space janitor craft to pick up the leftovers.

    oh and by the way - gullible? poverty stricken? don't confuse russians with the US government... ;)
  • First off, as a disclaimer, I am a big fan of most of Stirling's work.

    That said, his more recent non-book work sounds way too much like "infomercials" for his books. "For more information, read 'Stirling Book', available at your bookstore for only 'price'". This latest rant, which ignores all space ventures that have succeeded (communications satellites and GPS are just a fad, after all), virtually screams "Rockets aren't cool, because I don't write anything about rockets or space".

    Then again, when you've just written your magnum opus (Cryptonomicon), where do you go? Not to mention getting lost, focus-wise, in the heaps of praise you receive for such a worthy work.

    Then again, maybe this is a little tongue in cheek. Something Stirling is quite accomplished at, after all. I mean, why can't we laugh at a companies miscue, just because space (not even exploration) is involved? Because it's such a waste? Most failed large ventures are. I don't remember anybody crying over the PCjr., but I'm sure some folks at IBM were. If this was Microsoft (Teledesic?), you guys would be falling all over yourselves to pull the re-entry switch.

    Come on, scientists don't do research because it's "cool". And slamming later Apollo missions as "boring" rings extremely hollow. I can't believe the article was completely serious. More of an attention-getting slap in the face.

    Smilodon
    VvvV
  • Hey, I know Neal Stephenson wrote Cryptonomicon, Not Bruce Stirling (I am a fan of both of their books). It was meant to be a poke at Stirling. I was told (by an author) that it was one of the best ways to annoy them (authors). Particularly when you "confuse" them with a well-known work.

    I kind of had visions (I should really stop coding a while before I post this stuff) of Bruce hisownself reading the talk backs and feeling as annoyed as I did by reading his article.

    Oh well, it flopped (the joke), and I've been getting beat up unmercifully by my so-called "friends" about it. There goes that one karma point I earned last month...

    Well, Neal's signature on the cover IS a little difficult to read ;)
  • Point taken.

    Oh yeah, Gene Cernan. Do I get any of those karma points back ;)

    I was think more of the context of the article. I thought it was a "hollow" argument in an article posted somewhere like Feed by a Science Fiction author. I would think at least some of the feed audience would appreciate the space program as something more than an entertainment vehicle for Joe Average.

    It seems like the public's short attention span is a definite problem as well.

    When you visit KSC, come and see a launch! And if you can take the pay cut, submit a resume.

    And Yes (*sigh*), Neal Stephenson wrote Cryptonomicon (see earlier post)...
  • Everyone else seems to be griping that this is KatzDot. ;-)
    --
  • Although they will likely bring them down over the ocean if (when) they do bring them down, I would like to see the actually burning-in-the-atmosphere process. I think it would be really interesting to watch, sort of like million dollar fireworks... Since its mostly lighter weight metals it wouldn't be too dangerous to drop them over the US (unlike that one satellite that came down in the middle of Australia). Now I just have to find my telescope...

    -----------
    #!/usr/bin/perl -sp0777iX+d*lMLa^*lN%0]dsXx++lMlN/dsM0j]dsj
    $/=unpack('H*',$_);$_=`echo 16dio\U$k"SK$/SM$n\EsN0p[lN*1

  • Last I heard, shuttle payloads were about $10,000 a pound.

    A great deal of that expense is tied up in just being the shuttle; i.e. a monopolistic government run program that is a sad example of what goes wrong when designing by committee (but that's another rant). A commercial, competetive space-booster market would (eventually) drive payload costs down, just like prices have gone down on PC's (e.g. my first hard drive cost me $500 used, and had a (then) huge 20M capacity).

    I can't think of any mineral that is even near that expensive.

    Actually, there are some possibilities; deuterium and tritium may be available in (relatively) high concentrations on Mars and are worth more, gram for gram, than just about any precious metal/gemstone. There are other commercial possibilities that people have been pondering on for years; G. Harry Stine wrote The Third Industrial Revolution back in the late 70's, and more recently, Robert Zubrin answered a lot of "why bother?" questions in Entering Space. So, while mining might not be enough to get commercial space exploration going, there are other possibilities. The biggest trick now is to get NASA to facilitate commercial ventures instead of obstructing (yet another rant).

  • I find it ironic that M. Sterling thinks of rockets as way low on the "coolness" scale...

    In the 50's and 60's, transistors were the thing to the average consumer. Imagine, a device that could replace bulky vacuum tubes, yet was smaller, cheaper and had a much lower power consumption. Why, you could build an AM radio that would fit in the palm of your hand! The idea of integrated circuits was around, but not considered necassary for any consumer electronics. Then along came NASA and the Apollo program, trying to fit more and more control and monitoring systems in a smaller space. Five years later, consumers had access to hand-held calculators. Five or ten years after that, consumers could buy their own home computers. From there, computers snowballed, driven by market pressures instead of Federal whim and now we have Jar Jar Binks and Palm VII's and the internet and so on... So those "uncool" rockets that Sterling slams are directly responsible for his royalties.

    From a financial and even technological perspective, Iridium may have been a major failure, but his Luddite attitude is unwarrented. So long as someone learned from Iridium's mistakes, it was not a total waste... Having a big name science fiction writer declare such efforts "uncool" is disappointing.

  • Yeah, nuclear rockets have a lot of potential. But what's really sad is that we had high impulse nuclear rockets in test back in the 60's. A couple of the speakers at last year's Mars Society Conference [marssociety.org] had a number of speakers who were involved in those studies and they all had the same, depressing message; they (and their experience) won't be around forever. If we stall research into nuclear propulsion for much longer, we will have to re-learn everything that they learned 30 years ago 'cause their experience will be retired or dead....

  • There are a number of them. It was sort of amusing, but mostly offensive, to see Sterling bash all work in space on the grounds of Motorola's failure. But I suppose straw-man arguments are always in fashion. Just one example of LEO constellations that work is Orbcomm - they do high-latency data trans, worldwide, mainly for embedded monitoring systems. That's a field just begging for orbital coverage, esp. if you do it cheap. They did. The Iridium sats were technical failures. (I'll back that up, in mind-numbing detail if you like..) The business plan was stupid, or at least poorly timed, what with the advent of GSM. So they failed in the marketplace. Big deal. But don't generalize onto absurd statements backed up by no research what-so-fscking-ever. Space isn't dead; and Motorola isn't, and wasn't, the torchbearer. God. To think Sterling used to be cool.
  • Many good points, however:

    My younger sister is going to be traveling all around the world this year, from the Ecuadorian rain forests, to Tasmania and the Australian outback, to good old Great Britian. Alone. She understandably wants some way to call for help in emergencies.

    This isn't some fat cat on a boat, just a regular person (with a kick-ass grant :-), and a very real nead for global communication.

    So, what options are left?
    --
  • We're more concerned about eg, her being snake-bit 20 miles from nowhere in the middle of the rainforest. This is where a global phone really comes in handy.
    --
  • Congratulations, Bruce- you've just lost all my respect. Which is saying something- I used to be a fan.

    Where do you think all that gee-whiz technology you write about comes from? The computers, the materials science, etc. Guess what: lots of it comes from the space program.

    Call me when you catch a clue.

  • OK, so I guess Bruce Sterling feels the need to declare rockets and space as "uncool" on behalf of computer geeks everywhere, and some who want other people to do their thinking for them have taken them up on the offer.

    Still, in spite of the fact that he's picked Iridium as proof of the end of the space age, nevertheless, GEO comsat use is booming, and terrestrial cellphone use, when you're not in a major metropolitan area, still sucks.

    However, just because an implementation of an idea is bad doesn't necessarily mean the idea is bad in and of itself. The Great Eastern was declared one of the biggest boondoggles in history at the time; however, after that it proved to be very useful in laying the first transatlantic cable. (Which was done by Lord Kelvin, and was one of the reasons he became Lord Kelvin. (Apropos to this discussion, he once said there was no future in heavier-than-air flight, and that X-rays were a hoax.)

    I guess all this goes to show that in this context, "Coolness" is a property based on how much some media personality (or personalities) want you to think something's neat. Do we really need that?

  • PCS is just the name for the spectrum at 1900 MHz. Sprint PCS is actually CDMA encoded but there are also GSM providers in the PCS band.
    --
  • Then, although you can get tri-band GSM phones that work in the U.S., Europe, or most of Asia with just a change of SIM card; these GSM phones don't work in Japan!

    They don't require a change of SIM card; I can use my phone and card on any network that has a roaming arrangement with my provider once I've arranged that with them. Looking at the network operators [gsm.org] listing, I don't see any entry for Japan, so I don't believe the current version of GSM is used there at all. They say that tri-band phones [gsm.org] cover all current GSM networks.

    So I bought another Sprint PCS dual band phone. :(

    PCS is GSM on a 1900MHz band. So there is no such thing as "PCS dual band". There might be phones that can do PCS and some analogue standard, of course.

  • At this point thinking about the Iridium fiasco just makes my head hurt. The only remaining hope I have about these satellites is that they announce the de-orbiting schedule so that Geekcruises can charter a boat to watch 'em light up. Now that would be truly cool.

    Iridium was an unmitigated disaster, and only the first of many "personal communications" satellites that will come whizzing down over the next few years. Globalstar and Teledesic are next.

    That said, it was a very good piece by Bruce.

    - -Josh Turiel
  • Well, he *does* have a point. A lot of the marketing for Iridium focused on the satellites themselves, as if objects in space were cool in and of themselves, rather than simply a mechanism for better phone service. Similarly, NASA's publicity focuses on space shuttles, (nonexistent) space stations, and the like as if these, rather than the scientific knowledge to be gained by using them, were of interest.
  • It had nothing to do with space not being cool or the failure of space technology or because they upset the observations of the world's 5 radio astronomers or anything like that.

    They were way too damn expensive. The calls, (when I was assigned to evaluate the service) was something on the order of $6 US (plus long distance). Which really came down to about 8-10 dollars a minute. That was down by more than half from when they first announced the service. The phones themselves had come down quite a bit and were about comparable to some of the more expensive cell phones. There were units in the thousand plus range, but most of the Kyrocea line were around $250-500 us.

    The phone, while big and bulky, wasn't too bad in size. The voice quality was pretty good, not great, it was essentially cell phone quality. It was hard to aquire a signal lock when inside, but out in the clear it worked like a phone. It didn't work too well in a car, but an external antenna would have helped, and cell phones don't work too well in my car either.

    The system worked. But it cost too damn much. Nobody rich enough to afford them was going to buy them because they didn't get that rich by blowing $500/hour on phone calls. Nobody else could afford them. They were so expensive the only justification I could come up with for using one was for calls that go something like "I'm in the jungle and a blue, red, and green snake just bit me, what do I do?" Had they been cheaper, I could easily see calls like "I'm in the jungle and it's beautiful here, I wish you could see it!"

    There's a price point there somewhere, and I'm betting it's somewhere around twice what people would pay for a cell phone, not 15 times. Then people would be able to buy them when they were doing things where cell coverage is questionable, not just totally unavailable.

    Lowering the cost of launch services is the key to getting costs low enough to reach this price point. Reusable launch vehicles are the way to do this. The problem is, too many people are making too much money throwing away perfectly good rockets to bother coming up with a cheaper, more effective way.
  • Mister Stirling's statement that space has no real uses is amazingly shortsighted. I can think of two very real and very important uses for space, to contrast with Mr. Stirling's silly and insulting reasons:

    1) Survival. All of our eggs are in one basket here. A couple years ago we watched a giant chunk of ice crash with continent shattering force into a nearby planet(Jupiter). Our response? "Wow. Good thing that won't happen to us." (thanks, Terry) Hands up everybody who remembers the pictures of Jupiter *rippling*.
    As somebody pointed out earlier, we are now at the point where we can unleash nearly as much devastation on ourselves. Plus the dangers from things that we simply haven't considered yet. The wider the human race is spread out, the less chance that we'll go the way of the dinosaurs. Even if there isn't a disaster, we'll eventually wear this poor planet threadbare. Which leads us to the second point...

    2) Everything else. The ratio of things here on earth to things not on earth is so close to zero as to make no difference. If we have any curiosity, or any greed, or any desire to expand in any physical or psychological dimension at all, we'll eventually have to expand our horizons beyond this paltry planet. There's just not enough here to keep us going for the rest of time; neither physically nor mentally.

    If the human race isn't planning to be cut off at the knees, it is inevitable that space becomes part of our environment.
  • Difference is only in how buzzy the s/z is, to my ear. The zed version is a "harder" (harsher?) sound.

    I could be out to lunch. After all, as a kid I used to pronounce it "Burger King: Home of the Whooper."

    Most embarassing.


    --
  • Not to sound cruel or anything, but if she's snake-bit in the forest, you can't get to her in time to help.

    The secret is preparation, and (as the previous poster said) contacting a U.S. mission in that country. Tasmania for instance may be wild country, but last I heard Australia had pretty good telecommunications (especially from consulates!)
  • The iridium flares were never a real threat to astronomy. They happen at predictable times, and there just weren't many satellites up there.

    More of a threat to optical telescopes is orbiting stuff in general. I've got a small telescope, and usually once or twice a night I will actually see a very dim satellite cross my field of view. My telescope has a very large field of view, but satellite trails are common enough in large professional instruments that a good number of otherwise good astrophotographs are ruined by them.

    The big hazard from Iridium in particular is that the radio emissions are very close to the frequency of the hydroxyl group (HO) which is an important frequency for radio astronomy. These radio emissions have nothing at all to do with the iridium flare phenomenon.

  • once again bending the subject - I always thought it would be really neat-o for the former superpowers in the post cold war world to get rid of some nukes by retargetting some ICBM's into space ('downstream' of the earth's orbit naturally) and detonate them there for some really spectacular July 4th fireworks, that is, if they are capable of achieving escape velocity and getting far enough away to be safe.

  • Or at most the sun is scheduled to go into red-giant phase in only 4 billions years. We must act fast. This is no time to get complacent or procrastinate. Eventualy the planet Mercury will be engulfed [historyoftheuniverse.com] and the earth burnt to a crisp, if not digested as well. If we aren't planning an escape you may as well give up struggling to survive and reproduce, knowing it is ultimately futile.

    It not just a matter of national pride but a biological imperative that we build a kind of 'Noah's Arc' to hold a surviving ecosystem that can travel around collecting energy, mining planets, etc., not just an artificial satellite but an artificial planet for our distant progeny to enjoy.

    One of these millennia, anyway.
  • People deciding to travel in the wildnerness alone often don't come back. Anyone who's even been on a day hike knows to never go out alone. If she hasn't had any wilderness survival training and isn't going with someone who has you might want to have her write up a will before she leaves. I would suggest for a communications medium she get herself a HAM radio license in the US and pick up a good handheld unit. She can DX signals off the ionosphere pretty well right now and could probably get good range of lower frequencies. A good radio will be a few hundred bucks but it's worth it when you need it.
  • Iridium has to be one of the most expensive communication flops in modern history. The idea was sound, it would be pretty cool to make a telephone call from anywhere on the planet, if it was affordable. I think Iridium could have played things a little better, theres not enough world travelers that can't use local telcoms to keep in touch. I think what they should have done is created an Iridium consortium of several countries with lots of land area but without a dependible telcom infrastructure. These countries could use Iridium as a quasi-nationalized telcom in return for the countries giving some cash to the company. Places like China could suddenly have an effective and pre-existing telephone infrastructure by merely paying a membership fee. Iridium could have easily paid for their satillites and been able to lower the connection fees for their damn phones. By the second satillite generation the Iridium phones would have been as cheap as PCS phones with a service that was only slightly higher.
  • I don't know the details of their current 'fleet' but I'm guessing they were designed for practical inexpensive long-term upkeep and orbit maintenence.

    Imagine what they could do with some extra volunteer manpower, and a few of those IPO millions. Alas, it woul certainly overload the day after it was announced on /.

    Aside from the technical prospects, the symbolism is absolutely not to be overlooked. If I were an IPO or public cause looking for a real show-stopper, I might consider funding...

    Space station L1nus? [that's "L1"]
    The GNU Frontier?

    Heck, I'd settle for Space:1999 OSR2!

    __________

  • I'm sorry, I meant that I thought the AMSAT satellites were undoubtedly designed for cheap ornbital maintanance (and undoubtedly have a more practical orbit than Iridium's decaying LEO)

    In penance for my lack of clarity, I looked up the specifications [amsat.org] for their next satellite (launching in July on an Ariane 5)

    It's interesting reading, but I won't quote it here, to avoid boring those who don't care.

    __________

  • It's a pity they didn't consider turning the control and maintenance of these satellites over to AMSAT [amsat.org], since they're going to junk them anyway. They have the knowledge, expertice and infrastructure to deal with satellites.

    ...could have been real handy having those up there for emergency radio [qsl.net] communications purposes.

    Oh well, guess you can't win 'em all.

    de VE3SLG
  • Much more of a rebellion. The early usanians were quite ambivalent about using English (the language of the oppressor, after all!), there were various movements to make the official language of the country German and even, I think, Hebrew. Nothing actually got done about an official language (it's still argued about today), but that didn't stop Webster, who wrote a big dictionary, from mauling the spelling so centre became center, words ending in -our becoming -or and so forth (including -ise/-ize). His hope was that left-bank English would diverge from the other sort and eventually become a separate language, and he was quite happy to help the process along.

    I'm not quite sure how you'd be able to generate a different pronunciation for -ise vs. -ize, though, so I think we can definitely rule out the speech impediment theory.
  • Stirling's on an environmental anti-CO2 kick (I signed up for his "Viridian" newsletters) and in becoming a fanatic in that regard he feels it necessary to disparage any concept that diminishes the import of global warming etc - humanity's possible expansion beyond this planet he sees as a threat to his pet concern, not as the wonderful opportunity it is.

    I've actually had a couple of exchanges with him by email on the subject - he didn't respond to my last note though, unless this "eulogy" is a response. Pretty insulting stuff, even if you don't read it carefully.

    I'll be the first to say some space efforts have been overhyped. Satellites are unlikely to be a long-run solution for terrestrial communications, when ground-based systems can be built and installed so much more cheaply with such enormously higher bandwidths (4 terabits/sec on a single fiber now!)

    But that shouldn't distract from the enormous potentialities of space exploitation, and mass expansion of humanity beyond this planet. Don't forget that 1000 years ago the first Europeans came to America, but apparently technological and economic improvements were needed to make it more directly feasible; even after Columbus arrived it took another 120 or so years before U.S. history really began. Now some people cross that once fearsome ocean on a daily basis.

    There are a huge number of proposals out there for more efficient ways of getting into space, for living off the "land" there, etc. Currently the Mars projects are the most enthusiastically supported, and are now actually practical. New types of rockets with new materials and designs, non-rocket designs (electromagnetic launching) and even the skyhook/space elevator approaches are making a mass exodus into space look more and more feasible. 500 years from now Stirling's goal could be more than achieved, as Earth can become a galactic park, free of its human burden. But Stirling isn't interested in that solution to his problem.
  • This will mean no more stupid Iridium flares to get in the way of astronomical observations.

    The flares actually weren't the big problem. Astronomers are used to planning around things all the time. The real blow was to radio astronomy.

    Iridium was allocated a block in the electromagnetic spectrum contiguous with the block used to detect hydroxide emissions. When the satellites started broadcasting, there was some leakage into the science community's block... at deafening levels compared to the weak signals astronomers search for.

    An agreement was worked out involving a time-sharing arrangment, but the fact is it was still an amazing limitation on the ability to conduct science. As Wired says, "Science Versus Cell Phones" [wired.com]. Go read that for a good write up, and a google [google.com] search will get you more.
  • Unfortunately, the Iridium project will be looked at by future venture capitalists as evidence of failed non-governmental space ventures.
    It would be spectacular to get a small craft back to the moon. If we found the suspected ore-deposits there, rest assured, everyone and their mother would line up to get there.

    Um, didn't you just contradict yourself in two sentences?

    If there is money to be made, they'll get the birds up there. Iridium took a risk (or rather, their shareholders and creditors took a risk).. it didn't work out. Big deal, lots of stuff doesn't work out. Tons of software companies have come and gone, but that doesn't stop VCs from investing in them.
  • OK, saving Iridium isn't going happen; it failed because it could not fulfill its mission while making a normal profit in the competitive environment.

    But Sterling is taking a cheap shot here.

    It's easy to criticize after the fact, but entrepreurship is about taking risks. Smart entrepreneurs choose their risks to balance rewards,and work to skew the odds in their favor, but risk means the real chance of failure. A little hubris is necessary, otherwise we'd live in a world with no innovation.

    What Streling is saying space is a load of political hogwash. This simply isn't true. The fact is, there are business opportunities in space. People need space based services,either by the government or private sectors. There are people making money in space today, with services like these:

    (1) Racal uses provides real time differential correction of GPS signals for surveying. And no application gets more "down to Earth" than surveying.

    (2) Communications sats. Lots of 'em. Is anybody laying trans oceanic telephone cables anymore?

    (3)Remote sensing and imagery. Not only are there several privte companies with their own satellites, but there are lots of small companies, including mine, which resell images and help a variety of clients make use of them.

    If Sterling had accurately predicted the financial reasons for the Iridium project's demise five years ago, he'd have reason to act self-satisified, but as far as I know he didn't. His analysis is as valuable as predicting yesterday's horse races.
  • What irks me even more than the failure of Iridium (they shot themselves in the foot with their pricing structure, so no tears from me) is the failure of GSM to catch on in a meaningful way.

    My PCS phone died an ignomious death a few months ago, so I looked into alternative replacements. I had really wanted to get a GSM phone, but America hasn't gotten on the GSM bandwagon. There are only a few carriers (Omnipoint being the main one), and those are mostly located on the East coast. No one has good national coverage.

    That was a pain. Then, although you can get tri-band GSM phones that work in the U.S., Europe, or most of Asia with just a change of SIM card; these GSM phones don't work in Japan!

    Seems the brilliant bureacrats in Japan pulled off an American Not-Invented-Here trick with the frequencies, so even tri-bands don't work. Argh!

    I just want a phone I can use anywhere in the world. GSM is so, so close. But until more poles are erected in the U.S. and Japan gets with the program (or phones emerge that can handle the Japanese frequencies), it looks like I'm SOL. :(

    So I bought another Sprint PCS dual band phone. :(

    Karen

    ps. for the person bit by the snake in the middle of Congoland, there's still INMARSAT. Prices are cheaper than Iridium, although you do have to lug a suitcase rather than a portable phone. Does make you look considerably more geeky and james bondy though!

    pps. I heard one of the problems with Iridium is that unlike Inmarsat, which looks like a satellite phone with the briefcase and dish antenna that you have to point in the right direction, Iridium phones looked like cell phones (albeit with big antennas).

    But that gave people the idea that if they looked like cell phones, surely they must work like cell phones. So they tried to use them in conditions they weren't designed for: namely indoors and in moving vehicles. Their performance expectations (of cell-phone like stability, whatever that is) weren't lived up to and Iridium got bad press. This was especially true in the Bosnian conflict, when a lot of Iridium phones were seeded to the press. Many of them abandoned Iridium and used their GSM phones instead.

  • It's been said a million times, but to reiterate:

    Iridium was far too expensive to maintain and use

    This will mean no more stupid Iridium flares [eu.org] to get in the way of astronomical observations.

    Face it, they were an eyesore, and I'm not sad to see them gone.

  • Then, the choice of frequency for transmissions. Slap bang in the middle of a *critically* important astronomical region. I may be wrong, but I think it's a CO band.

    As a radio astronomer, I have to comment: its the OH line. The VLA RFI plot page [nrao.edu] clearly shows Iridium: look under L band...

  • $160 million is the current upkeep, at least according to Motorola.

  • Not to rain on your parade, but until space travel is much cheaper than it is now, no ore is going to get anyone to move. Last I heard, shuttle payloads were about $10,000 a pound.

    Other than gemstones, I can't think of any mineral that is even near that expensive. (And gemstone prices are artificially inflated by cartels.) The moon could be solid platinum, and it wouldn't make economic sense to go get it, without reducing the transpart cost by a factor of a thousand.

    Don't get me wrong. I want to see people on the moon, and on mars. I just don't see how mining is going to get them there.

  • Yes, but does AMSAT have the $160 million per quarter necessary to keep it running? I suspect not...

  • No offense, but 2400 (I've also heard 9600)
    baud per channel is a basically irrelevant
    figure AFAICT. One could design a receiver
    to aggregate transmission and reception across
    multiple channels if really necessary (somewhat
    like multichannel Ethernet aka Ethernet NIC bonding.) The bandwidth per satellite to and from ground is the key question needing an answer to understand the overall economic wisdom of spending $650 million annually (~$10 mil per sat) to keep em in the air.

    --LP
  • Ping time sucks, but while Quake players might care, for wireless phone webbrowsers (the actual target usage,) this isn't much of an issue.

    It'd be odd to "guess rightly" that they have "plenty of bandwidth" when the backers claim that the lack of bandwidth was what made the system not worth keeping up. I'm curious exactly what the bandwidth characteristics of the satellites were.

    And the ramifications if bandwidth was limiting or ping was the deal-killer are rather relevant. One implies that no satellite system at that height or higher would *ever* make sense for Internet access, the other implies simply that a properly designed system might be feasible.

    --LP
  • "Birds are too costly --
    six-fifty mil," they say. But
    what bandwidth per bird?

  • Only problem is we don't have a fusion reactors here to make use of it.
    And who's going to make D-He3 fusion reactors when there's no plant extracting the fuel?
    --
  • I don't think Weird Al would buy it, but I bet you'll have people willing to perform it at filksings. It's just the kind of geeky thing that filkers love.
    --
  • Fireballs sometimes can be heard before they can be seen, and theories about why that happens may be tested as the Iridium satellites burn up.

    http://www.space.com/science /iridium_sound_000328.html [space.com]

    --

  • Space travel isn't about prestige, it's about survival. That's it in a nutshell. As a species, we now have the power to exterminate all life on the surface of the planet. A couple more years, and we'll have the abillity to destroy all life below the surface as well.

    As long as we have this, and as long as there are asteroids passing near Earth, we're vulnerable to extermination.

    Think about it, all of civilization and humanity could be gone in less then 20 minutes. There's more time devoted to advertisements in an episode of ER than it would take to destroy all of civilization.

    Iridium is a debacle, true. But don't assume bad market research in telecommunications means that space is gauche. It's not true, no matter how stylistically you try to liken the de-orbiting behemoths to 'flaming cadillacs'.
  • The reflected sunlight was never a major concern among astronomers. They are predictable, and can only happen near sunset and sunrise, so they are easily avoided.

    Much more upsetting is the radio interference. Motorola promised and promised and repeated their promises throughout all phases of the project, that their amplifiers were nearly perfectly linear, and would not cause interference in sidebands. An adjacent sideband is used by radio astronomers to observe OH radicals in molecular clouds.

    When the first satellites went up, the ugly truth was revealed. The amps were NOT "nearly perfectly linear" after all, and leaked significant interference into adjacent bands, including the OH band. This threatened at one time to basically put an end to observation of the OH band altogether. Negotiations with Motorola and appeals by the IAU managed to get Iridium's signals curtailed or eliminated during certain times of day over important radio observatories. Because of Motorola's false promises, and the resulting limitations they were forced to accept, Iridium could never have fulfilled its potential anyway; at certain times of day, near certain regions all over the world, the satellites were simply out of service. Also, in the meantime, advances in signal processing allowed radio astronomers to better filter Iridum's interference. If Iridium had continued to operate, radio astronomy would have been able to adapt to most of the interference, and conduct observations. On the other hand, the presense of Iridum underscored the value of a radio observatory on the far side of the moon. A side effect of Iridium's demise is that this need is not as pressing - for now.

    In any case, good riddance. I will enjoy watching them fall into the ocean.

  • Globalstar might have a chance (Score:3)

    by copito ( 1846 ) on Wednesday March 29, 2000 @09:54PM (#1161997)
    In the interest of full disclosure, I was involved in a project at Harvey Mudd sponsored by Qualcomm to extend a service test system Globalstar. I do not own any Qualcomm stock (or any other stock for that matter).

    Globalstar has a few things going for it. It's a much simpler technical challenge since the satellites themselves are relatively simple "bent pipe" repeaters unlike Iridium which had a lot of cross links (think cell sites in the sky, not routers in the sky). Per minute charges are usually cheaper and their regulatory battles have been easier because they use the public telephone network for most of the journey of the call. The handsets switch to CDMA/AMPS/Globalstar or GSM/Globalstar as appropriate so they are usable within urban areas.

    In addition, Globalstar has made a big push for fixed installations, such as a payphone in a remote village. This is a huge market which is underserved and overpriced currently.

    This doesn't mean they can't or won't fail.

    I don't know much in detail about Teledesic, but I'm hoping it works if it means that I can someday telecommute while sailing around the South Pacific :-)
    --

  • Re:Iridium was always doomed... (Score:3)

    by CaptainCarrot ( 84625 ) on Wednesday March 29, 2000 @02:17PM (#1161998)
    For useable voice, you *must* have low altidude satellites.
    That depends on what you consider "usable". Even with regular phone lines you get considerable latency on overseas calls, but that doesn't make international long distance unusable. The latency imposed by Iridium certainly would not have been any worse. The low orbits had as much to do with the fact that the satellites needed to be reachable from a handheld unit - low power and no dish - as latency concerns.

    ...they won't last long....
    There are plenty of long-lived low orbit satellites up there. (You've heard of the Hubble Telescope?) The short life of an Iridium bird was a design decision intended, in part, to minimize startup costs. The idea was to spend a relatively small amount on cheap, disposable satellites which could then be continually replaced using funds from operating revenues. Rather than a capital outlay even more enromous than it was, you get a regular expense that you can budget for. Of course, revenues were never as high as Motorola had hoped.

    Your basic point remains though. Iridium was always doomed.

  • Futile Effort (Score:3)

    by Arctic Fox ( 105204 ) on Wednesday March 29, 2000 @12:56PM (#1161999) Homepage Journal
    Unfortunately, the Iridium project will be looked at by future venture capitalists as evidence of failed non-governmental space ventures.
    It would be spectacular to get a small craft back to the moon. If we found the suspected ore-deposits there, rest assured, everyone and their mother would line up to get there.
    Be thankful you are not my student. You would not get a high grade for such a design :-)
  • Well I really don't know what a GPL'd global satellite system would do for all of us. I mean really ... how many of us are tired of running closed source satellite code? I know I am ... my 17 satellites need me to re-code them. Ohhh wait I don't own a satellite ... erm even better I'm going to bet no slashdot readers own a satellite. So their valliant plan to GPL satellites doesn't help me much. Also will this give me a free phone call or free pager?? no ... I'll still have to pay ... and I'll pay the same companies ... so that doesn't help me either.

    Iridum burns ... it doesn't hurt me any. In fact maybe if they do it when we're not facing the sun it would be fun to see.

  • Re:Soon it'll be over, I hope! (Score:3)

    by tesserae ( 156984 ) on Wednesday March 29, 2000 @08:09PM (#1162001)
    it was a very good piece by Bruce

    While I have to agree that Iridium was a fiasco, and that plenty of people are to blame, I have to disagree with your assessment of Bruce's article.

    As much as I like Bruce Stirling for all his nifty science fiction, a quote like "when people realized that the Moon is much less interesting than NASA said it was" simply sucks.

    I don't know where you were, Bruce, but I know that I and a whole bunch of other folks never found the moon "much less interesting." You might have been busy having your diapers changed, but I was in the middle of a college career based on astronomy done with orbital observatories, and when Congress cancelled all the programs, my dreams died along with a lot of other people's. It wasn't lack of public interest, but lack of the Cold War push -- simple science wasn't worth it, while military superiority was...

    Despite this sort of whining, the space program hasn't gone away -- there are still quite a few people who work in it, myself occasionally included. And while there are still mismanaged (and ill-conceived) programs like Iridium, the dream is not yet gone. We just hacked our way back into it.

    Look back in a hundred years, and no one will understand why we didn't do it faster -- after all, we had the technology, all we lacked was the will.

    ---

  • Awww.. DRATS!!! (Score:4)

    by torpor ( 458 ) <ibisum@@@gmail...com> on Wednesday March 29, 2000 @02:39PM (#1162002) Homepage Journal
    Man, I'm really bummed. Space was supposed to be cool by the time I turned 30 (just a few weeks ago).

    There were supposed to be places I could go on the moon to go 'lunar skiing'. Mars was supposed to have artifacts the size of small mountains for me to go hiking over, marvelling at the wonder of ancient lost alien civilizations, all the while humbly considering the revelation of Humanity in Space.

    Mad scientists were supposed to be *allowed* to roam free, conducting Earth-dangerous experiments in the outer orbits on distant asteroids, where nobody would be particularly bothered if a few multimegaton-like nuclear explosions accidentally being set off occurred now and then.

    Meanwhile, back on Earth, peace was supposed to have prevaled. Hover crafts were supposed to be everywhere, heck even hover *belts* were supposed to be purchasable at your local Sports Chalet. Medicine and science, given the wide vista's of space for development and research, were supposed to have cured Man of many ills, among them disease, arthritis, old age, and ... boredom.

    But no, here we are, all gathering around the feable fire of the modern space "program", occasionally warming our hairy hands on the few sparks and flares here and there, laughing like hyena's every time a piece of wood explodes and propels itself from the measly fire, all the while trying desperately to convince ourselves that we are safer just ignoring the deep inky black night of space.

    Drats. I want my Space Civilization, and I want it now, danmit!

  • Bruce Sterling managed to insult: (Score:5)

    by Alex Belits ( 437 ) on Wednesday March 29, 2000 @04:02PM (#1162003) Homepage
    1. NASA
    2. Russians (twice)
    3. Geeks
    4. Amateur astronomers
    5. Hollywood

    , most of whom have absolutely nothing to do with Iridium or its failure. Yet for some reason the real source of the problem -- people who did plain old poor business planning at Motorola -- wasn't even mentioned.

    Did he just write that piece for its "artistic value", that sees the reality as an annoying, unnecessary nuisance? Did he just have nothing better to do, so he had to resort to meaningless witticisms?

  • The REAL 'hacker' satellite network (Score:5)

    by orpheus ( 14534 ) on Wednesday March 29, 2000 @01:47PM (#1162004)
    Please moderate this up. It deserves to be seen by those with an interest in this topic, even if you don't think saving Iridium is practical.

    Before chasing the unfeasible (like S.O.S)., look into AMSAT [amsat.org] These guys have a real amateur satellite system (over 30 satellites, 20 currently operational) going back 30+ years. Their satellites are 'open source' public designs, garage built (none rejected for failing clean room standards) by volunteers and launched by international cooperation in exchange for their collaboration and expertise. They pioneered some techniques used on commercial satellites today!

    Consider contributing your efforts here. This is Linux in space, but with a heck of a track record!

    They are a 501(3)(c) certified not-for-profit, so Iridium could conceivably be donated with full tax benefits (if any). And it they decide Iridium is unsalvageable, then you can be sure that it truly is. They have the volunteer/hacker base of regulatory and technical know-how and experience that most of us obviously didn't believe existed.

    Iridium or not, doesn't his sound like a group you want to join? (I'm currently working on the details of a proposal to test modern era CPUs in space. Most current space-certified CPUs are ancient - pre286)


    (from the web page http://amsat.org/amsat/amsat-na/amhist.html)
    The Radio Amateur Satellite Corporation (as AMSAT is officially known) was formed in 1969 as a not-for-profit, 501(c)(3) educational organization chartered in the District of Columbia. Its aim is to foster Amateur Radio's participation in space research and communication. Since that time, other like-minded groups throughout the world have formed to pursue the same goals. Many of these groups share the "AMSAT" name. While the affiliations between the various groups are not formal, they do cooperate very closely with one another. For example, international teams of AMSAT volunteers are often formed to help build each other's space hardware, or to help launch and control each other's satellites.
    Since the very first OSCAR satellites (OSCAR stands for Orbiting Satellite Carrying Amateur Radio) were launched in the early 1960s, AMSAT's international volunteers, often working quite literally in their basements and garages, have pioneered a wide variety of new communications technologies that are now taken for granted in the world's satellite marketplace. These breakthroughs have included some of the very first satellite voice transponders as well as highly advanced digital "store-and-forward" messaging transponder techniques. All of these accomplishments have been achieved through close cooperation with international space agencies which often have provided launch opportunities at significantly reduced costs in return for AMSAT's technical assistance in developing new ways to launch paying customers. Spacecraft design, development and construction has also occurred in a fiscal environment of individual AMSAT member donations, thousands of hours of volunteer effort, and the creative use of leftover materials donated from aerospace industries worldwide.



    __________

  • Bye, Bye, Miss Iridium Pie (Score:5)

    by shekel ( 27635 ) on Wednesday March 29, 2000 @01:12PM (#1162005)
    Got this from a Motorola buddy who
    got it from one of the engineers there
    (who shall remain anonymous).
    Enjoy,
    Steve

    -------------------------------

    Bye, Bye, Miss Iridium Pie
    By [snip]

    Sung to the tune of:
    Bye, Bye Miss American Pie, by Don McClean

    Long, long time ago I can still remember how the funding made me smile
    And I knew if we had our time that we could make that payload shine,
    And maybe make the launch occur on time
    But '95 made me shiver with every build that we'd deliver
    Bad news in the high bay, I couldn't go one more day.
    I can't remember if I sighed when I read how the lawyers lied
    Something touched me deep inside the day the funding died.

    So bye bye Miss Iridium pie, spent our millions and our billions but we made them fly
    Them good old days have now gone by
    Knowing this'll be the day that it dies
    This'll be the day that it dies.

    Did you write the specs we love and do you have faith in the ones above?
    And did you like the shirts we wore, did you believe in the 3 oh 4?
    Well I knew the facts and I spoke to Jim, cause I was standing right next to him
    They both kicked down the rack and then ran away out back.
    I was a lonely old software hack with a stack of cards and a line of jack
    But I knew I was on my back the day the funding died.
    I started singing:

    Bye bye Miss Iridium pie; spent our millions and our billions but we made them fly
    Them good old boards are way up high
    Knowing this'll be the day that they die
    This'll be the day that they die.

    Well 10 years have now gone by since the gleam got in Bary's eye
    But that's not what was to be.
    When investors sang in the court of law in a place where truth brings on awe
    In a voice that sounds like Craig McCaw.
    And while the team was looking down
    The lawyers stole what we had found; the courtroom was adjourned
    Bankruptcy was returned!
    And while the judge read a book on sharks, the lawyers danced in the park
    And we sang dirges in the dark the day the funding died.
    We started singing:

    Bye bye Miss Iridium pie; spent our millions and our billions but we made them fly
    Some good old boys paid seventy five
    But this'll be the day that it dies
    This'll be the day that it dies.

    Helter Skelter in the summer swelter the cows pies smell and we seek shelter,
    Our cubicles are all in a row, and we go in and pray for snow.
    But we know not how it might go
    Hacker lined up 20 deep. They try to code but need the sleep.
    We all lay down to snooze, but then someone breaks out the booze.
    Pizza comes and we go wild, the peppers fly 'cause it too mild.
    Do you recall what was the deal the day the funding died?
    We started humming:

    Bye bye Miss Iridium pie; spent our millions and our billions but we made them fly
    Them good old rockets reached the sky
    But this'll be the day that it dies
    This'll be the day that it dies.

    In there we were all in one place trying hard to get in space
    With no time left to start again.
    So all be nimble, all be quick, the build is due or we'll be sick
    'Cause coding is the devil's only due
    And as I watched the rocket flare, all eyes left had turned to stare,
    Bloodshot, tired , and burned to hell.
    Smiling sweet in the fiery swell, flames climbed high into the sky and we all clapped 'till I thought
    we'd cry
    Before the funding died. We started singing:

    Bye bye Miss Iridium pie; spent our millions and our billions but we made them fly
    Them good old days are now gone by
    And this'll be the day that it dies
    This'll be the day that it dies

    I met a man who had the "sight:" I asked him if the program might...
    But he just smiled and turned away.
    I went down to the big high bay where I'd seen the payloads years before,
    But the man there said the payloads wouldn't play.
    In the halls the techies sighed, the coders laughed, and the testers cried,
    Not a word was spoken, the stations all were broken.
    And the three things I admire most: beer, cheese, and hot french toast,
    I'll be eating out on the coast, the day the funding dies:

    And I'll be singing:
    Bye bye Miss Iridium pie; spent our millions and our billions but we made them fly
    Those crosslinks work but we don't know why
    And this'll be the day that it dies
    This'll be the day that it dies

    Bye bye Miss Iridium pie; spent our millions and our billions but we made them fly
    Them good old days are now gone by
    And this'll be the day that it dies
    This'll be the day that it dies

  • Iridium was always doomed... (Score:5)

    by chazR ( 41002 ) on Wednesday March 29, 2000 @01:30PM (#1162006) Homepage
    The urban legend is that some seriously rich person was on his yacht in the Carribean, and his wife/girlfriend/mistress suggested that his inability to place a phone call to her mother/boyfriend/pet rabbit reflected badly on his manliness. So he decided to make global mobile telecomms happen, irrespective of cost. This is not the way to start a successful enterprise.

    Enough legends, now some techie stuff.
    At the time that Iridium was being designed and implemented, GSM was taking off. Who cares if their phone doen't work in the Rub Al Khali? It works in Boston/Manchester/Kyoto. Very few rich people live in serious wilderness. Those that do can make their own arrangements.

    With satellites, you make a trade-off between the number, the altitude and the latency. For useable voice, you *must* have low altidude satellites."Do not exceed the speed of light. It's the law." That has two immediate consequences. You'll need a lot, and they won't last long. The upper atmosphere will eventually cause the final 'Iridium flash'.

    Which moves us on to the vandalism of Iridium. The antennae on the sattelites are *incredibly* flat polished surfaces pointing at Earth. So they reflect sunlight *very* effectively. This upsets astronomers. The reflected sunlight flash from an Iridium satellite can do a lot of damage to an astronomical observation.

    Then, the choice of frequency for transmissions. Slap bang in the middle of a *critically* important astronomical region. I may be wrong, but I think it's a CO band.

    I'm sure this will be said again, but cutting the number of satellites must have irked the gods. It's called Iridium because the number of satellites that they were going to launch was the same as the atomic number of iridium. Then they scaled it down the the atomic number of dysoprasium. My Greek is bad, by dysopraxis is 'inability to speak'. Bad decision.

    I apologise for the rant.

  • It's sad, really... (Score:5)

    by br4dh4x0r ( 137273 ) on Wednesday March 29, 2000 @01:47PM (#1162007)
    ... how the posters on Slashdot keep linking to the phony Save Iridium project. Let's take a look at a couple of facts about this obvious scam:

    The web site has no contact information besides email addresses... if they were serious about raising the kind of money necessary for this project, don't you think venture capitalists might want at least a name and phone number?

    This site is full of simple spelling and grammatical errors: "informatiom", "utilise", and my personal favorite "The message board is on it's way". How do they expect to save a bunch of LEO satellites when they can't grasp a fifth grade grammar concept?

    The has a link that works called "Hack Iridium". What exactly do they plan to hack? They have no idea. They ask for t-shirt suggestions under this link. Nothing like a funny t-shirt to raise 170 million dollars!

    I had a chance to chat with these clowns in IRC a few days ago. I started asking for answers to the same points above and what did I get? Informed replies? A FAQ to look at? No. I got squelched. Apparently, actively trying to Save Iridum involves sitting on IRC and saying things like "yo im going to call you know is that cool?"

    It's not hard to see this for what it is: a group of kids trying to get money and attention. Please, hemos, quit posting their utter crap on the front page.

    love,
    br4dh4x0r

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