Iridium Communications - History

History

Iridium SSC, Iridium communications service was launched on November 1, 1998. The first Iridium call was made by then-Vice President of the United States Al Gore. Motorola provided the technology and major financial backing. The logo of the company was designed by Landor Associates, and represents the Big Dipper. In 2008, as part of a rebranding campaign the wordmark would be de-capitalized.

The founding company went into Chapter 11 bankruptcy nine months later, on August 13, 1999. The handsets could not operate as promoted until the entire constellation of satellites were in place, requiring a massive initial capital cost running into the billions of dollars. The cost of service was prohibitive for many users, reception indoors was difficult and the bulkiness and expense of the hand held devices when compared to terrestrial cellular mobile phones discouraged adoption among potential users.

Mismanagement is another major factor cited in the original program's failure. In 1999, CNN writer David Rohde detailed how he applied for Iridium service and was sent information kits, but was never contacted by a sales representative. He encountered programming problems on Iridium's Web site, and a "run-around" from the company's representatives. After Iridium filed bankruptcy, it cited "difficulty gaining subscribers".

The initial commercial failure of Iridium had a dampening effect on other proposed commercial satellite constellation projects, including Teledesic. Other schemes (Orbcomm, ICO Global Communications, and Globalstar) followed Iridium into bankruptcy protection, while a number of other proposed schemes were never constructed.

At one stage there was a threat that the Iridium satellites would have to be de-orbited; however, they remained in orbit and operational. Their service was restarted in 2001 by the newly founded Iridium Satellite LLC, which was owned by a group of private investors. Although the satellites and other assets and technology behind Iridium were estimated to have cost on the order of US$6 billion, the investors bought the firm for about US$25 million.

On February 10, 2009, Iridium 33 collided with a defunct Russian satellite, Kosmos 2251, 800 km over Siberia. A pair of large debris clouds was created.