| It was actually a wife of an executive on a cruise, not a yacht. It looks like you can get cell connections on a cruise now, but I think it took quite a while. Remember, this "idea" was born around 1990. If you haven't looked, it's actually quite reasonable now to rent an Iridium phone for a backcountry trip these days. If I was taking some boy scouts into the wild for long weekend, I'd definitely consider it in case of emergency. The system was really a great piece of technology; MOT really let the engineers go at it. If it wasn't for the billing and provisioning, you could actually make an Iridium-to-Iridium call anywhere on the face of the earth in some sort of doomsday scenario, since all of the call routing goes between satellites—you don't need a ground station. When I started at MOT, we were working on the broadband followup, Celestri, which turned into Teledesic. Same deal, anywhere on the globe, but around a 1-2Mbps connection, rather than Iridium's 0.002Mb data rate. It was a magnificent piece of engineering with hundreds of engineers working in a fancy new building with plans in place to double the building in a couple years as hundreds more engineers were coming on for the detailed design phases. We were about 9 years from operation and had thousands of pages of architecture and design documents. I think the highest-level system design document was around 500 pages when it was shelved, but there were already some architecture documents running into the thousands of pages. The projected launch costs alone were around $15B; that's not including actually building anything. It was the most expensive commercial project ever undertaken, though after Iridium's disappointing launch, even the most short-sighted executive could see that it was too big of a risk for any company to take. Looking back, it was an amazing experience to be a part of a project that huge. |