Cryptogon - February 12th, 2009

So, an Iridium satellite just happened to collide with a defunct Russian military satellite…

You’re about to learn how the sausage gets made, and, before we begin, you should know that it’s not pretty.

I don’t know the whole story about Iridium, but it has got to be one of the spookiest tales of them all.

In November 1998, Motorola activated the Iridium communications network, a constellation of low-earth orbit satellites that provides wireless telecom and data services to any location on the planet. The cost to build the system? About $5 billion. By August 1999, unable to sign up enough customers — because of extremely high handset costs and per minute usage fees — Iridium was facing bankruptcy.

Full story

This entry was posted on Friday, February 13th, 2009 at 1:23 pm and is filed under Advanced Tech. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.