Word: iridium
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...Iridium is now a consortium whose major shareholders include Motorola (which kept a 20% stake), Lockheed Martin and Sprint, plus Germany's Veba AG and Russia's Krunichev State Research Production Space Center. The joint venture was supposed to go live on Sept. 23, but then software glitches led officials to disclose that they will delay until Nov. 1 what amounts to the final roll of the dice in its $5 billion gamble to revolutionize telecommunications--or become the best-publicized flop in history. The announcement nudged its stock price on the NASDAQ exchange down...
Boosting heavy chunks of metal that high is expensive, however, and Iridium and its brethren are trying to fly into space on the cheap, relatively speaking. They rely on so-called low-earth-orbit satellites that zoom just a few hundred miles above the planet's surface. They're cheaper to launch since they weigh less; and since the satellites are closer to the ground, devices with small antennas and comparatively small battery packs can reach them. Most important, signals can go up and return with no perceptible delay, which is vital for voice communications. But more of them...
...Iridium's chief competition for a piece of this pie-in-the-sky is Globalstar, based in San Jose, Calif. The company, which will build a rival constellation of 48 satellites 879 miles up, was founded by Loral Space and Communications and by Qualcomm, a leader in cellular technology. Its European partners include France Telecom, Daimler-Benz Aerospace and Britain's Vodafone Group. Globalstar's plan is much less expensive than that of Iridium, which has built intelligent satellites that route calls among themselves, sometimes halfway around the planet. That kind of smarts makes for a system that's more...
Coming second is Globalstar's chief drawback. Its service is not scheduled to kick off until 1999--a year behind Iridium's schedule. And this month Globalstar ran into a potentially more serious snag. Minutes after a Ukrainian-built Zenit-2 rocket carrying 12 Globalstar satellites thundered skyward from the Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on Sept. 10, its engine failed. The 460-ton rocket fell back to Earth, showering debris across southern Siberia and driving Globalstar's stock down 40% overnight. The $190 million payload was covered by insurance, but the disaster delayed the system's debut even further...
...arrangement with existing cellular dealers turns out to be a serendipitous marriage of marketing and technology. Without resellers, customers would be few, and without cell technology, service would be limited. At first Iridium planned a purist, sky-to-ground approach that would have cut out the local cellular-network middlemen. But that wasn't very feasible in the glass-and-steel canyons of bustling cities, where customers would be out of the line of sight of the heavens and service would be spotty. (Imagine explaining to an irked CEO that his pricey new handset won't work from his office...