I want you to close your eyes for a second. Imagine
you're standing in a wide open field. It's pitch
black. It's the late 1990s, maybe 1998. You're
looking up at the stars, waiting for something
specific. You aren't looking for a meteor, and
you aren't looking for a plane. You're waiting
for a man -made star. And then right on schedule,
down to the exact second, a point of light erupts
out of the darkness. It swells in intensity,
getting brighter and brighter, until for a few
sleeting seconds, it is blazing like a welding
torch in the sky. It's brighter than Venus. It's
actually bright enough to cast a shadow on the
grass around you. And then just as quickly as
it appeared, it fades back into the void. That
was a signature event for a whole generation
of amateur astronomers and sky watchers. You
were watching an iridium flare. Exactly. It wasn't
magic and it wasn't a UFO. It was sunlight hitting
a massive door -sized antenna on a communication
satellite -polished, silver -coated Teflon at
just the perfect angle to reflect the sun right
into your eyes. It was a blazing beacon announcing
that humanity had put a new constellation in
the sky. It is a beautiful, almost poetic image.
But when you look back at the history of technology,
it's also deeply ironic because those flares
were coming from a company that, commercially
speaking, was burning up just as spectacularly
as those reflections in the night sky. That is
the paradox we are unpacking in this deep dive.
We're talking about iridium. And depending on
which business school case study you read, Iridium
is either the biggest punchline in the history
of corporate America, a company that incinerated
billions of dollars and nearly dragged the legendary
Motorola down with it, or it is one of the most
resilient, essential pieces of infrastructure
the world has ever built. And the fascinating
thing is that it is somehow both. We are looking
at a system that cost $5 billion to build, was
sold for pennies on the dollar, literally less
than the cost of a mid -budget Hollywood movie.
And today, if you are crossing the Arctic Ocean
or tracking a tsunami in the Pacific or fighting
a war in a remote region, your life probably
depends on it. And that's what we're going to
dig into. We have pulled a massive stack of reports,
technical documents, orbital mechanics breakdowns,
and historical analyses to figure out how this
thing actually works. We aren't just skimming
the surface here. We are going to look at the
architecture of the sky. How do you make... 66
satellites dance around the earth without crashing.
We will look at the spectacular failure of the
90s, the infamous brick phone, and how the U
.S. military basically resurrected the whole
thing from the dead. And we have to talk about
the collision. The moment two satellites ran
into each other at 22 ,000 miles per hour, that
is a pivotal moment in space history that changed
how we track debris forever. Absolutely. That
is a scene straight out of a disaster movie,
but it was real physics. So let's start with
the basics. The mission here was deceptively
simple. Create a phone that works literally everywhere.
Not just where there are cell towers, but at
the North Pole, in the middle of the Pacific,
in the Sahara. Right. And to understand why that
was such a radical idea in the late 80s and early
90s, you have to understand the geography of
space. At that time, if you wanted satellite
communication, you were almost exclusively talking
about geostationary orbit or GEO. OK, let's unpack
GEO. This is the high ground, right? The traditional
parking spot for satellites. It is the parking
spot. If you launch a satellite. To exactly 35
,785 kilometers above the equator, its orbital
period matches the Earth's rotation exactly 24
hours. To an observer on the ground, the satellite
appears to hang motionless in the sky. Ah, so
that's why my satellite TV dish doesn't need
to move. That's precisely why. You point your
dish that one spot, bolt it down, and you never
have to move it. It's stable. It's predictable.
But for a phone conversation... That distance
is a killer. It's a fundamental physics problem.
They were sending a radio signal up 36 ,000 kilometers
and back down 36 ,000 kilometers. Even traveling
at the speed of light, that trip takes time.
You get a round trip delay latency of about a
quarter to half a second. Which doesn't sound
like much on paper. No, but in practice, it destroys
the cadence of human conversation. You say hello,
pause, wait. The other person hears it, they
say hi, pause, wait. You end up constantly talking
over each other. It's the news anchor delay effect.
Right, where they're awkwardly trying not to
interrupt the person in the remote feed. Exactly.
But beyond just the annoyance, there is the power
issue. To shout a signal across 36 ,000 kilometers,
your phone needs a massive battery and a significant
antenna. You aren't putting that in your pocket.
So it's like trying to have a conversation by
shouting across the Grand Canyon. You need a
megaphone and you need to yell. That's a perfect
analogy. Whereas a radium solution was to stop
shouting and just get closer. They decided to
ignore GEO entirely and go for low Earth orbit
or LEO. And when we say low, we mean drastically
lower. Oh, it's a completely different regime.
We are talking about 781 kilometers up. Compare
that to 36 ,000. It is like the difference between
looking at a city from a plane versus standing
on the roof of a skyscraper. So the signal delay
becomes negligible. It's milliseconds. To the
user, it feels instant. It feels like a landline
or a cellular call. And because the satellite
is right overhead, the path loss, the weakening
of the signal over distance, is much, much lower.
You can shrink the antenna. You can shrink the
battery. You can hold the device in your hand.
But there is no free lunch in physics. I mean,
there must be a catch. If you are that low, you
can't park the satellite anymore. Gravity works
differently down there. That is the tradeoff.
That is the fundamental challenge they had to
solve. To stay in orbit at 781 kilometers, you
have to move incredibly fast to counteract gravity.
Iridium satellites are traveling at roughly 27
,000 kilometers per hour. They circle the entire
planet every 100 minutes. Every 100 minutes.
So if I'm standing on the ground with my satellite
phone, the satellite isn't hanging there. It's
sprinting across the sky. It is zooming. From
the moment it rises above your horizon to the
moment it sets on the other side, you have a
window of about seven to nine minutes. That is
it. Which creates a massive engineering headache.
If I'm on a 20 -minute business call, the satellite
I started talking to has set below the horizon
long before I'm done. Precisely. This is the
core problem of LEO. If you use GEO, three satellites
can cover the entire Earth, excluding the poles.
With Iridium, because they are so low and their
footprint on the ground is so small, you need
a swarm. You need a massive constellation to
ensure that as soon as one satellite leaves your
view, another one is rising to take the handoff.
The call needs to be seamlessly handed from one
satellite to the next like a cell tower handoff
on the highway, but in space. But much faster
and much more complex. And this brings us to
the name Iridium. I love this detail because
it shows how the engineering informed the branding.
It does. It's a great little piece of tech history.
The original orbital calculations done by Motorola
engineers suggested they needed exactly 77 satellites
to cover the globe seamlessly. And 77 is the
atomic number of the element iridium on the periodic
table. Correct. It was this perfect metaphor,
electrons orbiting the nucleus of the Earth.
iridium sounded futuristic premium strong it
sounded like something you could sell it sounds
expensive it sounds expensive exactly but then
the engineers being engineers kept crunching
the numbers they kept optimizing and they realized
they could optimize the orbital planes they didn't
need 77 They could do it with 66 active satellites.
Which creates a branding problem. The element
with atomic number 66 is dysprosium. Dysprosium.
Dysprosium communications. It doesn't quite roll
off the tongue. It sounds like a stomach illness.
Or a sedative. Ask your doctor about dysprosium.
Right. And the word dysprosium comes from the
Greek for hard to get at, which, considering
the bankruptcy that was coming. might have been
more accurate but marketing won out they stuck
with the name iridium it was just better so we
have 66 actus satellites but they aren't just
randomly buzzing around like bees in a jar this
is a choreographed dance how is the sky organized
it is extremely precise Imagine slicing the Earth
like an orange into six wedges. These are the
six orbital planes. Each plane passes over the
north and south poles. In each of those six planes,
you have 11 active satellites spaced out evenly,
following each other in a line. So they form
a kind of cage around the planet. A rotating
birdcage, yes. As the Earth spins underneath,
these planes sweep across the surface. This ensures
that no matter where you are standing, Manhattan,
Antarctica, or the middle of the Pacific, there
is always at least one satellite in the sky above
you. Now having satellites overhead is one thing,
but connecting a call is another. And this brings
us to what I think is the secret sauce of Iridium.
The thing that makes it unique compared to Starlink,
Global Star, or almost anyone else. Enter satellite
links, or ISLs. This is the technical marvel
that defines the system. Most satellite systems
are what we call bent pipes. Okay, explain the
bent pipe. What does that mean? In a bent pipe
system, you stand on the ground and send a signal
up to the satellite. The satellite acts like
a mirror in the sky. It just reflects that signal
back down to a gateway or ground station, a big
antenna farm connected to the fiber optic internet.
But for that to work, the satellite has to be
able to see you and the ground station at the
same time. Correct. And that is the fundamental
limitation. If you are in the middle of the Pacific
Ocean, thousands of miles from land, the satellite
above you cannot see a ground station in California
or Japan. It has nowhere to bounce your signal.
Standard satellites often have gaps in coverage
over oceans and poles. But Iridium is different.
Iridium satellites talk to each other. They are
a mesh network in space. It's incredible. Each
Iridium satellite has four specialized antennas
called crosslinks. It maintains a constant radio
link with the satellite immediately in front
of it in the same plane, the satellite immediately
behind it, and the two satellites in the adjacent
lanes to the left and right. So it's constantly
talking to its four closest neighbors. Constantly.
So if you are in the middle of the Sahara Desert
and you make a call, your signal goes up to the
satellite above you. That satellite software
realizes, hey, I don't see a ground station,
so it tosses your call to the satellite ahead
of it. Or sideways to another orbital plane.
Exactly. It routes the data packet through the
constellation, hopping from satellite to satellite,
bouncing across the globe in the vacuum of space.
It might hop five or six times until it finds
a satellite that is currently flying over a gateway,
say, in Arizona or Norway. Only then does the
signal come down to Earth to connect to the public
telephone network. That is incredible. It means
the network is autonomous. It doesn't care about
geography. You don't need ground stations in
every country. You just need the sky. It allows
Iridium to be the only provider that truly covers
100 % of the planet's surface. Even Starlink,
until they get their laser links fully operational
and ubiquitous, relies heavily on ground stations.
Iridium has had this mesh capability since 1998.
I read about a specific quirk in this mesh network,
though. The seam. This sounds like a glitch in
the matrix. Can you explain that? Ugh, the seam.
Yes. It's a fascinating consequence of the polar
orbit geometry. Remember, all the satellites
are traveling roughly north -south or south -north.
Right. They are flying pole to pole. Well, imagine
looking at the globe. On one side of the Earth,
let's say over the Americas, the planes are moving
north. But on the other side of the Earth, over
Asia, they must be coming back down south. Okay,
that makes sense. Like lanes on a highway wrapping
around a ball. A perfect way to put it. So there
must be a line where the north moving planes
meet the south moving planes. Two lanes of traffic
moving in opposite directions. And they're moving
at 27 ,000 kilometers an hour. So the relative
speed between them is double that. Enormous.
We are talking about closing speeds of nearly
54 ,000 kilometers per hour. The Doppler shift,
the change in radio frequency caused by that
speed, is simply too high for the inner satellite
links to maintain a lock. So they can't talk
to each other across that line. The connection
breaks. Correct. At that seam where the counter
-rotating planes meet, the satellites cannot
talk to their neighbors sideways. They can only
talk forward and backward within their own lane.
The network software has to know where the seam
is constantly and route calls around the zipper
rather than across it. It is mind -blowing to
think about the software logic required to route
a phone call through a shifting spinning grid
of 66 flying towers with a blind spot that moves
across the planet. It was a technological moonshot.
A true marvel of engineering. And that's really
where the Motorola story begins. This wasn't
a startup in a garage. This was Motorola at the
absolute height of its power. Right. This is
the late 80s, early 90s. Motorola is mobile communications.
They invented the cell phone. They are titans.
They were the undisputed kings. And the story
goes that this whole idea started because a Motorola
executive's wife, Karen Berdiger, was complaining
that her cell phone didn't work during a vacation
in the Bahamas. The classic necessity is the
mother of invention. But the necessity was a
wealthy tourist wanting to make a call from the
beach. That is the legend. Her husband, Barry
Burdiger, along with Raymond Leopold and Ken
Peterson, took that complaint and turned it into
a whiteboard sketch. But because it was Motorola,
they approached it with a manufacturing mindset
that the space industry had never seen before.
What do you mean by that, a manufacturing mindset?
Well, you have to realize, before Iridium, satellites
were handcrafted artisanal objects. They were
like Ferraris or bespoke suits. You built one
every year or two in a clean room with a team
of 50 PhDs. Right, they were one -offs. One -offs.
Incredibly expensive, incredibly slow to build.
And Motorola needed 66 -plus spares. They couldn't
build them like Ferraris. They needed to build
them like toasters. They needed an assembly line.
And I found this detail fascinating. They hired
an engineer from Apple. Why? They hired a guy
who had worked on the Macintosh automated factory.
They needed someone who knew mass production.
They set up a literal production line. They standardized
the chassis. At the peak of production, they
were spitting out a fully functional communication
satellite every 4 .3 days. Every four days. That
is unprecedented speed, even by today's standards.
It was the Ford Model T moment for satellites.
And the launch campaign was just as aggressive.
They couldn't rely on just one rocket provider.
They booked everything. could fly. They were
launching on American Delta 2 rockets. They were
launching on Russian Proton rockets. They were
launching on Chinese Long March rockets. It was
a logistical delay. Imagine the coordination.
You are shipping sensitive U .S. technology to
Kazakhstan and Taiwan, managing export controls,
managing launch windows. They launched 72 satellites
in just over 12 months. It remains one of the
greatest feats of logistics in aerospace history.
And it worked. Technically, it worked out. They
got the birds up there. On November 1st, 1998,
the service launches. The Vice President of the
United States, Al Gore, makes the first ceremonial
call. He calls Gilbert Groszner the great -grandson
of Alexander Graham Bell. The symbolism is heavy.
The torch is passed from the inventor of the
telephone to the future of the telephone. And
then crickets. Just silence. Nobody bought it.
The silence was deafening. The phones just sat
on the shelves. What went wrong? They had the
tech. They had the coverage. Why did the business
crash so hard? It was a perfect storm of bad
timing, bad economics, and arguably arrogance.
First, the cost. The handset, the famous brick,
cost $3 ,000. $3 ,000 in 1998 money. That's like
$6 ,000 or $7 ,000 today. At least. And the calls.
Up to $7 a minute. Ouch. So a 10 -minute check
-in is $70. Who is this for? That was the problem.
They thought it was for globe -trotting executives.
But the bigger problem wasn't just the price,
it was the competition. While Motorola was spending
11 years and $5 billion building this space network,
terrestrial cellular networks, GSM towers on
the ground were exploding. They were getting
cheaper, the coverage was expanding into the
suburbs, and the phones were getting tiny. A
Nokia era, the little candy bar phones. Exactly.
People wanted small phones that fit in a pocket.
The Iridium phone was a literal brick with a
thick antenna you had to rotate. And there was
a critical physical limitation, line of sight.
Right. Iridium signals are weak by the time they
hit the ground. They can't penetrate concrete.
You have to be outside. You have to see the sky.
If you are a CEO in a skyscraper in Manhattan,
your $3 ,000 Iridium phone is a paperweight.
If you are in a car without an external antenna
magnet mounted to the roof, it doesn't work.
So the addressable market wasn't everyone. It
was just oil rig workers, deep sea fishermen,
and spies. And there weren't enough of them to
pay back the loans. Motorola had projected millions
of subscribers. By the time they filed for bankruptcy,
they had something like 10 ,000. It was a rounding
error. And the customer service was apparently
a disaster. Oh, a total mess. There is a famous
account by CNN writer David Road. He tried to
sign up to test the system. He got the runaround,
a broken website, no sales reps called him back.
It was a classic engineering company problem.
They built a miracle product but forgot to build
a sales department. So nine months, that's how
long it lasted. Nine months after Al Gore made
that call, Iridium filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy.
It was one of the largest bankruptcies in U .S.
history at the time. We're talking about erasing
$4 billion in debt. Investors were wiped out.
Motorola took a massive, massive hit. And it
got dark. I mean, literally and metaphorically.
Motorola basically said, look, this is costing
us millions just to keep the lights on. If we
can't sell it, we are going to destroy it. They
announced a deorbit plan. They were going to
command the satellites one by one to lower their
altitude and burn up in the atmosphere. Imagine
that. Five billion dollars of cutting edge technology,
fully functional, working perfectly, about to
be turned into fireworks because the business
model didn't work. It would have been the most
expensive display of pyrotechnics in human history.
A five billion dollar bonfire. But they didn't
burn up. Enter the unlikely savior. The Pentagon.
The ultimate user. The one customer you can't
ignore. The US Department of Defense looked at
this system and realized something. They had
special forces in Afghanistan, ships in the Pacific,
operatives in places where building a cell tower
wasn't an option. And critically, they realized
the value of the mesh. Because the mesh doesn't
touch the ground. Exactly. If you are a US operative
in a hostile country, you don't want your phone
call routing through a local phone switch that
the hostile government controls. With Iridium,
the signal goes up and stays in space until it
hits a secure gateway in Hawaii or Virginia.
It bypasses local infrastructure. That is incredibly
valuable strategically. So they stepped in. They
saw a strategic asset about to be destroyed.
They didn't buy the company outright, but they
offered a lifeline. A two -year, $72 million
contract for unlimited airtime for 20 ,000 government
users. It was just enough cash flow to keep the
lights on. It kept the system alive. And this
allowed a new group of private investors to swoop
in. And this has to be the business deal of the
century. It truly is. Dan Colise, a former airline
executive, put together a group. They bought
the entire Iridium constellation, the 66 satellites,
the spares, the ground stations, the control
centers, the patents, everything. What do they
pay for it? $25 million. That is 0 .5 % of the
construction cost. It's like buying a brand new
aircraft carrier for the price of a yacht. And
that completely changed the math. It fixed the
business model instantly. The reason Iridium
failed was the debt service. They had to pay
hundreds of millions in interest payments. The
new company had zero debt. They didn't need millions
of subscribers. They just needed enough users
to pay for electricity and salaries. Suddenly,
Iridium was a profitable business. So they are
back from the dead. They are servicing the military.
They are finding niche markets in maritime and
aviation. But space is a dangerous place. And
in 2009, Iridium makes history again in a way
they really didn't want to. February 10th, 2009.
This is a date that every orbital mechanics engineer
knows by heart. Set the scene for us. What happened?
You have Iridium -33. It's one of the original
first -generation satellites cruising over Siberia
at 789 kilometers altitude. It's doing its job,
routing calls. And crossing its path is Cosmos
2251. What was Cosmos 2251? It was a defunct
Russian military communications satellite. It
had been dead for years, just a 900 -kilogram
hunk of metal drifting in orbit. No propulsion,
no control, just garbage, space junk. And they
occupy the same altitude bands. A LEO is crowded,
but space is big. Usually things miss each other
by kilometers. We have close approaches all the
time. But this time, the probabilities collapsed.
At 16 .56 UTC, they collided. And when things
collide in low Earth orbit, it's not like a car
crash. It's not a fender bender. No. The relative
speed was about 11 ,700 meters per second. That
is roughly 22 ,000 miles per hour. I can't even
visualize that speed. At that velocity, solid
aluminum behaves like a liquid upon impact. The
energy releases explosive. It's pure kinetic
energy. Both satellites were instantly pulverized.
And this created the debris clouds. It created
a shotgun blast of shrapnel, 2 ,000 pieces of
large debris stuff big enough to track with radar,
and tens of thousands of smaller pieces. These
clouds of debris started spreading out into rings
around the Earth, threatening other satellites,
including the International Space Station. It
was the first time two intact satellites had
collided in hypervelocity. It was a wake -up
call for the entire space industry. It was the
realization of the Kessler syndrome, the fear
that one collision creates debris, which causes
more collisions until Olio becomes a wasteland.
It was a terrifying moment. How did Iridium respond?
They just lost a node in their mesh. Did the
calls drop? Briefly, in that region, yes. But
this is where the constellation design shined.
Remember those spares we mentioned? Motorola
had launched extra satellites that were just
parking in orbit, dormant. Waiting for a rainy
day. Exactly. Iridium engineers on the ground
commanded a spare, Iridium -91, to fire its thrusters.
They maneuvered it into the exact slot where
Iridium -33 used to be. It took a few weeks to
drift into place, but they patched the hole.
The network healed itself. That is resilience.
But the clock was ticking. These satellites were
designed for an eight -year life. By 2010, they
were pushing 12, 13 years old. They were running
on borrowed time. Exactly. The batteries were
degrading. The electronics were aging in the
harsh radiation environment. They needed a whole
new fleet. But launching 66 satellites is expensive.
They didn't have Motorola's deep pockets anymore.
Enter the next player in our story. SpaceX. This
is a pivotal moment for both companies. In 2010,
SpaceX was not the juggernaut it is today. They
had only flown the Falcon 9 once or twice. They
were risky. But Iridium needed a cheap ride to
space, and SpaceX needed a marquee customer to
prove their reliability. So Iridium took a bet
on the new kid on the block. Matt Desch, the
CEO of Iridium, took a massive bet. They signed
the largest commercial launch deal ever at the
time, $492 million to launch the new constellation,
Iridium NXT. And this was a massive campaign.
Between 2017 and 2019, they launched 75 satellites,
eight launches. And they had to do something
incredibly difficult, swap out the old satellites
for the new ones without dropping a call. It
has been compared to changing the engine of a
car while driving down the highway at 70 miles
per hour. How do you even do that? How do you
replace a satellite in a working mesh? It's a
delicate slot swap. You fly the new satellite
right up next to the old one, sometimes just
a few kilometers apart. You sync them up. Then
the ground control sends a command to transfer
the identity of the node. The new satellite takes
over the cross links to the neighbors. The old
satellite is commanded to let go. And then what
happens to the old one? Then you fire the thrusters
on the old satellite to lower it into the atmosphere
to burn up. A controlled deorbit. They did this
66 times, flawlessly. And these new satellites,
Iridium, NXT, they weren't just replacements.
They were upgrades. Huge upgrades. They still
do voice, obviously. But they added new capabilities
that transformed the business model. The biggest
one is a payload called Arion. Unpack Arion for
us. This is related to planes disappearing, right?
Precisely. Think about MH370, the Malaysian Airlines
flight that vanished. The public was shocked
to learn that we could lose a Boeing 777. We
all assume that air traffic control watches planes
like a video game, like dots on a screen. They
do, but only over land. Ground radar relies on
line of sight. It only reaches about 200 miles
offshore. Once a plane is over the mid -Atlantic
or the Pacific, it disappears from the radar
screen. The pilots have to radio in their position
every 15 or 30 minutes. Which seems archaic in
the 21st century. It is. So Iridium had an idea.
Every modern commercial plane broadcasts a signal
called ADS -B. It's an automatic squawk that
says, here is who I am, here is my altitude,
here is my speed. And usually ground stations
pick that up. Right. Iridium said, why don't
we put a receiver on our satellites and listen
from space? So now, because Iridium covers 100
% of the globe, there is literally nowhere on
Earth a plane can hide. Correct. The system provides
real -time global flight tracking. It updates
every few seconds, everywhere. It allows air
traffic controllers to see planes over the poles
and oceans. This means planes can fly closer
together safely, saving fuel and time. It is
a revolution in aviation safety, and it rides
on the back of the Iridium mesh. And they also
added CERTUS. Which sounds like a spell from
Harry Potter, but I gather it is broadband. It
is L -band broadband. Now, we have to manage
expectations here. This isn't Starlink or fiber
optic speed. We are talking speeds up to 704
kilobits per second. So early DSL speeds. You
aren't streaming 4K Netflix. No, absolutely not.
But if you are on a ship in a massive storm.
You don't care about Netflix. You care about
reliability. L -band is a low frequency with
a long wavelength. It is incredibly robust. It
punches through rain, snow, and hurricane clouds
much better than the high -frequency Ka or Ku
bands that Starlink or typical VSAT systems use.
It's the rugged, all -terrain vehicle of the
Internet. That's a great analogy. It's not fast,
but it will get the message through. And there's
one more secret feature, STL, satellite time
and location. This is becoming huge. We live
in a world that is utterly dependent on GPS,
not just for maps but for time. Financial markets,
power grids, cell towers, they all sync their
clocks to GPS. But GPS is vulnerable. The GPS
signal is incredibly weak by the time it hits
Earth. It is like seeing a 20 -watt light bulb
from 12 ,000 miles away. It is easy to jam or
spoof. Iridium signal is about a thousand times
stronger than GPS because the satellites are
closer. They developed a way to use the Iridium
signal to verify location and time. It is becoming
a critical backup for national infrastructure.
It is amazing how this thing that was supposed
to be a phone for yuppies has become the backbone
of critical infrastructure. Which brings us to
who is actually using this today. It's not just
the military anymore. No, no. The consumer market
has actually come back around, but not in the
way Motorola thought. It's not about replacing
your iPhone. It's about the companion device.
Right. The gadgets you see at outdoor stores.
The Garmin inReach. Exactly. I suspect many listeners
might have one of these. These are small orange
bricks, much smaller than the original phone,
that connect to your smartphone via Bluetooth.
You use an app to send texts via satellite. I
have a friend who hikes the Pacific Crest Trail.
Yeah. And she swears by the Zolio. It's that
peace of mind, the SOS button. That SOS button
is a direct line to the Iridium constellation.
If you break your leg in a canyon in Utah, you
press that button. The signal bounces off a satellite
780 kilometers up, goes through the mesh, comes
down to a rescue coordination center, and they
dispatch a helicopter. It saves lives essentially
every day. And it's not just hikers. It's changing
the maritime world, too. For a long time, there
was a monopoly there, right? Yes, in Marsat.
They held the monopoly on the GMDSS global maritime
distress and safety system. This is the international
law of the sea. If you're a big ship, you must
have a certified distress system. So if the ship
is sinking, you push the button and the Coast
Guard knows. In 2020, the regulations finally
changed to allow iridium into the club. This
was a big deal because in Marsat is GEO based.
It doesn't cover the polar regions well. And
the polar regions. are getting busier with climate
change. Exactly. As the ice melts, the Northwest
Passage is opening up. Research vessels, cargo
ships, even cruise ships are going further north
and south. Iridium is often the only GMDSS option
that works in those high latitudes. And then
there's the Internet of Things. I didn't realize
how much stuff talks to Iridium. It is massive.
They call it SBD short burst data. It's tiny
packets of information. Think of it like a tweet
from a machine. Give me an example. Tsunami warning
buoys. They float in the middle of the Indian
Ocean. They don't need to stream video. They
just need to wake up once an hour and say, wave
height normal. Or, critically, wave height spiking.
Or tracking a shipping container. Yeah. Or a
polar bear with a collar. Exactly. Pipeline monitoring
in the Alaskan tundra, heavy equipment tracking
in the Amazon. There are millions of these little
modems out there just chirping small bits of
data up to the sky. It's a silent, invisible
pulse of the global economy. It sounds like a
pure success story, but we are living in a complicated
world and global coverage means global coverage.
Which brings us to the geopolitics. Iridium works
in Russia. This is a sensitive topic and it's
important to be clear. Historically, Iridium
had a Russian subsidiary. They had to. To operate
in Russian airspace, you need a license. They
even had a gateway in Izhevsk. The Russian military
and National Guard used Iridium because, again,
it works in Siberia where nothing else does.
Then comes 2022, the invasion of Ukraine. Right.
Iridium, being a U .S. company, had to comply
with strict sanctions. They stopped shipping
equipment to Russia. They cut off the direct
relationship. But the phones still work. The
satellites are still flying over Russia. You
can't turn off the physics of the orbit and you
can't easily turn off the service for a specific
region without potentially hurting innocent users
or emergency services. Plus, there have been
reports investigative journalism in 2023 suggesting
that Iridium devices are still finding their
way to the front lines on the Russian side. The
gray market. Exactly. A third party buyer in
a neutral country buys the handsets and ships
them into Russia. It highlights the double -edged
sword of this technology. It is neutral. The
satellite doesn't know if the person holding
the phone is a Ukrainian defender, a Russian
aggressor, or a lost hiker. It just processes
the signal. It connects to that end of privacy
theme we touched on. You cannot hide from the
mesh. Speaking of not hiding, let's talk about
the future. Because recently there was a lot
of hype about direct -to -device. The idea that
my regular iPhone or Android could talk to a
satellite without a separate box. This is the
Holy Grail, the Star Trek communicator. No extra
dongles, just your phone. And Iridium tried to
do this with Qualcomm, the chip giant. They announced
Snapdragon satellite. It was going to be huge.
And then it wasn't. The deal fell apart in late
2023. And the reason is fascinating. It wasn't
that the tech didn't work. The tech worked fine.
It was a business disagreement about standards.
What do you mean by standards? Iridium uses a
proprietary waveform. It's their own language.
To talk to Iridium, you need a chip that speaks
Iridium. The phone manufacturers, the Samsungs
and Jowmys of the world, didn't want to be locked
into a proprietary solution. They want to use
the 5G standard. 5G NTN. What is that? Non -terrestrial
networks. The global body that sets standards
for cell phones, 3GPP, created a standard for
how phones should talk to satellites. The phone
makers want a standard chip that can talk to
any compatible satellite, not just Iridium's.
So Qualcomm pulled the plug on the Iridium -specific
deal. Did that kill Iridium's consumer dreams?
No, it forced a pivot. And this is Project Stardust.
Project Stardust. It sounds magical. It is their
plan to adopt the standard. Instead of forcing
phones to speak Iridium, Iridium is updating
its system to speak phone. They are developing
a service based on NB -IoT narrowband Internet
of Things that fits the 5G standard. So the idea
is, in a few years, I could have a regular phone,
and if I walk out of cell range, it seamlessly
switches to the Iridium satellite overhead to
send a text without me buying a special Garmin
device. That is the vision for 2026. And because
Iridium has the licensed spectrum, which is gold
in this industry, and the existing constellation
already flying, they have a huge head start over
companies that are just launching satellites
now. They don't need to launch new satellites.
They just need to update the software and the
ground systems. That is a game changer. We are
rapidly approaching a world where no service
just isn't a thing anymore. We really are. We
are closing the last few gaps on the map. So
as we wrap this up, let's zoom out. We started
with a flare in the sky in a bankrupt company.
We ended up with a mesh network that tracks every
plane, saves hikers, and might soon be inside
every pocket. What is the big takeaway for you
here? For me, it is about the density of the
infrastructure we have built above our heads.
We often think of space as out there, separate
from us. But Iridium proved that space is actually
part of our terrestrial economic layer. It is
a utility like the power grid or the water main.
It is invisible. It is always on. And we only
notice it when it breaks or when we really, really
need it. It's the ultimate safety net. It is.
But I want to leave you with a thought about
that no service concept. Go on. We used to go
to the mountains or the ocean to escape. To be
unreachable. With Project Stardust and the integration
of satellite tech into standard phones, we are
effectively turning the entire surface of the
Earth into a single cell tower. There is no off
the grid. Unless you turn the device off. But
the potential for connection is everywhere. What
does it do to the human psyche when solitude
becomes technically impossible? When you are
always just a ping away from the office, the
news, the noise? That is a haunting thought.
We built the perfect communication machine and
now we have to live inside it. Indeed. Well,
on that note, I want to encourage you to do something
tonight. Go outside. Look up. You won't see an
iridium flare anymore. The new satellites have
different antennas that don't reflect the sun
the same way. The flares are gone. But the satellites
are still there. They are. Every few minutes.
One is silently zooming over your head, closing
a link, listening for a signal, keeping the mesh
alive. It's quite a show, even if you can't see
it. It certainly is. Thanks for listening to
The Deep Dive. We'll see you on the next one.