Its Iridium satellite-based global phone system switches all calls in the sky without using any ground stations, an impossibly difficult task.
Just ask Motorola, whose Iridium satellite phone network is in bankruptcy.
Wave Gliders collect enormous amounts of data and crunch the numbers distilling 4 gigabytes of raw data to a kilobyte of relevant information a client wants, for instance and then activate their Iridium satellite link to beam the result to servers on land.
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Earlier today at an event hosted by TS2 Satellite Technologies in Warsaw, Iridium Communications, a satellite communications company based in the Mclean, Va.
Yet this summer saw the bankruptcy of Iridium, a satellite-communications project with a similarly long-term ambition.
In addition, the company owns about 2.5% of Iridium, a satellite-telecoms venture led by Motorola, and shares in several lucrative natural-resource joint ventures with foreign firms.
That is, until US satellite company Iridium decided to sell real estate on a portion of its next-generation global satellites, which are set to go into orbit starting in 2015 and be fully operational by 2018.
The mobile satellite services provider Iridium has ordered 81 spacecraft to upgrade its global network.
McCaw also has intellectual property rights to a system that connects low-orbit satellite systems like Iridium with midaltitude projects like ICO.
Two years ago, a drifting and powerless Russian satellite smashed into and destroyed a commercial satellite operated by Iridium Communications Inc.
Last fall he was ready to unveil it as a 288-satellite system very much like Iridium.
Cut out of Teledesic and with Iridium bankrupt, Motorola quietly folded its satellite communications division.
Ten months into service, Iridium has few customers for its global satellite network and expensive phones.
They could soon be enjoying vast new fortunes, showered from above by cheap satellite-based digiphones from Iridium, Qualcomm, Teledesic and others -- each phone with an Internet address.
That seems to have escaped the backers of Iridium and ICO Global Communications, two satellite-phone ventures that have landed in bankruptcy court after spending billions of dollars on technology without sufficient regard to who would pay for it.
Schwartz also will have to contend with other satellite networks that may survive the Iridium effect.
Of the four mobile satellite services companies now active, two, Iridium and ICO Global Communications, are in bankruptcy proceedings.
"I spend every waking minute being 180 degrees opposite" from Iridium, says Andrew Radlow, marketing chief at Airtouch Satellite, Globalstar's U.S. provider.
The last major space debris collision was in 2009 between Iridium 33, an operational U.S. communications satellite, and Cosmos 2251, a decommissioned Russian satellite, Kelso said.
IRIDIUM'S FALLING ORBIT has caused some people to question the whole satellite phone industry.
While few were looking, Motorola has developed a smaller, more useful Iridium handset and is said to have also made software modifications that improved satellite call quality.
Satellite phones may bring to mind military operations (in fact, Iridium supports U.S. installations world-wide), but the stripped down functionality of the inReach SE brings the technology to a price point better suited to adventurous civilian travelers.
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Memories of Iridium's financial implosion in August will stay fresh, so why would anybody want to buy shares in a satellite telecom provider?
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