Engineering360: "Iridium: The Audacious SatComm Program That (Almost) Couldn't"

Excellent piece. Thank you!

Good post-mortem article. I lost my kiester on Iridium, largely due to my technical love affair with Motorola. A retired M. engineer friend who was big on the Iridium concept from Day One said the whole array was to be seamlessly integrated on an algorithm-based super-roaming charge into the global cell system such that a cell phone user could opt for the pricey connection when all else failed. He expected that the cell networks would modestly subsidize the Iridium link for subscriber attraction and convenience. Never happened. To this day I continue to be astonished at Motorola's lack of business acumen on this project, yet exhibiting brilliant technical fortitude that came so close to a system with the functional capability to be a commercial success.

I worked at Motorola in Scottsdale at that time and knew Barry Bertiger.

He was a smart guy, but that was a very large project without much of a market back then.

The cost to use the phone was a showstopper (almost).

Great Article! It brought back memories. I remember this program as I personally worked on the program as an engineer at Harris Semiconductor, a company that provided several chips for the program. Harris in the late 80's and 90's produced radiation hardened chips which were required for the program. The iridium chips also used a technology at that time called bumped chips or flip chip. Flip Chip was 60's tech, but not widely used until the 90's. So not only was iridium pushing the envelope in programs, it pushed all the tech underneath, using latest tech in semiconductors. The bumped chip was difficult to build reliably and required lots of work at Harris. Again, thanks for the article, it brought back memories for me, sitting in the lab with bump chips laying around.

In 2003, Iridium dropped calls in Afghanistan all the time. You had about one minute to talk. Once that satellite went over the horizon, it was rare for Iridium to successfully hand off the call to another satellite. The rugged terrain may have played a large part in that because many times you just don't have as much 'sky'. However, if you had to phone home to call for help, it was priceless. Much faster than stopping to set up a SATCOM shot.