Download Eccentric Orbits: The Iridium Story AudioBook Free
The incredible story of Iridium - the most intricate satellite system ever before built, the mobile phone of the future, and one of the greatest commercial bankruptcies in American history - and one man's eager race to save lots of it. In the first 1990s, Motorola, the famous American technology company, developed a ground-breaking dish system called Iridium that promised to be its crowning success. Light-years before anything previously placed into space, and built on technology developed for Ronald Reagan's "Star Wars", Iridium's constellation of 66 satellites in polar orbit designed that irrespective of where you were on the planet, at least one dish was always overhead, and you simply could call Tibet from Fiji without a hold off and without your call ever before touching a wire. Iridium the dish system was a mind-boggling technical accomplishment, surely the continuing future of communication. The one problem was that Iridium the company was a commercial catastrophe. Only calendar months after starting service, it was $11 billion in debt, using up through $100 million a month, and crippled by baroque rate plans and agreements that forced telephone calls through Moscow; Beijing; Fucino, Italy; and somewhere else. Bankruptcy was unavoidable - the greatest to that point in American history. So when no real buyers appeared to materialize, it looked like Iridium would go down as just a "science experiment". That's, until Dan Colussy acquired a crazy idea. Colussy, a previous head of Pan Am now retired and focusing on his golf game in Palm Beach, heard about Motorola's plans to "de-orbit" the system and decided he would buy Iridium and in some way turn around one of the biggest blunders in the annals of business. In Eccentric Orbits, John Bloom masterfully traces the conception, development, and launching of Iridium and Colussy's tireless work to avoid it from being damaged, from meetings along with his motley trader group to the Clinton White House, the Pentagon, and the search for customers in special ops, shipping and delivery, aviation, mining, search and recovery - anyone who need a durable phone by the end of the Earth. Impeccably investigated and wonderfully informed, Eccentric Orbits is a rollicking, remarkable tale of scientific achievement, business failure, the military-industrial complex, and one of the biggest deals of all time.
