The Iridium Museum | Hacker News Reader

The Iridium Museum

iridiummuseum.com

44 pointsfortran7729 comments

Iridium is a reminder of the sheer might of Motorola at their peak and also the sheer folly of their management.

The constellation was literal decades ahead of its time, they were mass-producing satellites before the concept of a mega-constellation was even on anyone's radar. Pretty much everything about it was technically amazing.

Unfortunately it was probably a contributing factor in putting Motorola under.

There is probably a timeline where Motorola doesn't collapse and space tech is accelerated by multiple decades as a result.

“There’s probably a timeline where” = “wouldn’t it be fun to imagine if things were different and turned out differently?”, but with a gossamer covering of adulthood, right?

> Unfortunately it was probably a contributing factor in putting Motorola under.

What do you mean by this? Motorola is alive and doing reasonably well.

Dude Motorola doesn't even exist anymore. At its height Motorola had 150,000 employees. After it imploded in 2011, Lenovo bought the mobile brand name and what was left is now Motorola Solutions, a telecom company with 18,000 employees that's losing a billion dollars a year. I don't see how a company that's fifty thousand dollars a year per employee in the red can be doing well.

>what was left is now Motorola Solutions, a telecom company with 18,000 employees that's losing a billion dollars a year.

Fyi... I just looked up the 2020 10-K and 2021 2Q results for Motorola Solutions and it says they are profitable. $949 million in earnings in 2020.

It looks the other company spun off as Motorola Mobility cellphones was losing money in 2011.

https://sec.report/Document/0000068505-21-000008#:~:text=The....

https://newsroom.motorolasolutions.com/news/motorola-solutio...

As another commenter pointed out, you are misinformed regarding Motorola Solutions' profitability.

As far as 150,000->18,000 employees, that's primarily because Motorola spun off/sold off so many business units (ON Semi, GD Decision Systems, Freescale, Continental, Cambium, Zebra, and of course the split with Motorola Mobility). Most of these spinoffs exist today and are successful. As to whether spinning them off was a good idea or not, I can't really say, but the idea that Motorola has imploded or ceased to exist is just wrong.

That's Motorola Solutions.

The Motorola of old was broken up in 2011, into Motorola Mobility (for consumer products, including phones) + Motorola Solutions (professional products) + a cell network division which was sold to Nokia Siemens Networks.

Motorola Mobility is the one most likely known by the average person. It was bought by Google in 2012, then sold on to Lenovo in 2014. Its main legacy these days is the Moto line of phones.

The Motorola you are familiar with is a shadow of its former self.

It was an absolute titan in it's heyday, they basically created the modern electronics manufacturing ecosystem (especially in China). Developed a huge number of products across a whole number of industries. They were dominant in radio but were also damn good at all sorts of things, designed their own CPUs (some of the most loved CPUs of all time actually), the Apple Lisa and Macintosh both ran on Motorola CPUs, hell even the Next Cube used a Motorola chip.

A modern equivalent would be Apple, except only if Apple was about 10-20 years ahead of everyone else.

The collapse of Motorola was very much on the scale of present day Apple going bankrupt.

This was way more impressive to me than the invention of the internet IMHO.

Does anyone know of a good collection of literature that attempts to study how management and leadership of hugely successful organizations ends up getting corrupted to the point where the organization collapses?

This seems to be the fate of just about every corporation that's ever existed. They either collapse, or get absorbed by the state.

Then again, the state seems to be just another kind of organization that is subject to the same fate.

I’d recommend reading Eccentric Orbits, but it’s just the iridium story

This is a fun blast from the past.

My dad was one of the "original six" engineers that worked on Iridium within Motorola, so my 90s childhood was filled with Iridium posters and satellite footprint tracking software.

I've mentioned it previously here when talking about SpaceX and Starlink. Iridium launched with satellite-to-satellite links. None of this "bent pipe" stuff where the satellite can only route between itself and a ground station in its same coverage area. As long as you could talk to an Iridium satellite, your data could be routed _in orbit_ to its destination along those inter-satellite links.

Iridium was nothing short of an engineering marvel. Your dad must be a pretty badass engineer.

Clearly there is a difference between the things you need to do to deliver text messages and telephony and the things you need to deliver useful internet connectivity.

You cannot deliver meaningful over the ocean coverage without it, Starlink was designed to have sat to sat routing, using optical links, which is.. somewhat nonsensical.

You arguably can't build something like Iridium or Starlink without it - the thing that.. makes me question Starlink was the choice of optical sat to sat links.

There are other issues with minimum spot beam sizes that make me wonder if Starlink can make money, but that choice alone made me ask a whole bunch of questions right out of the gate.

Nothing in the museum about the collision of an Iridium satellite with a non-operating Russian satellite in 2009[1]. The collision was big news in the space community at the time and got people thinking about Kessler syndrome [2] more seriously.

[1]. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_satellite_collision

[2]. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kessler_syndrome

I saw the mention of that event on the museum homepage actually, and it links here: https://www.iridiummuseum.com/exhibits/building-a-sustainabl...

Back in 1999, I was working with for Motorola and knew some people working on Iridium. When Iridium declared bankruptcy, there was serious talk about deorbiting the entire constellation and smashing all the equipment in the test labs, as is the fashion in bankruptcy write-offs.[0]

I managed to get someone to rescue a test phone from the lab for me. He could have gotten fired for it, but he gave me Accelerated Life Test Unit 1, a first gen handset[1]. It came with a battery, the little tripod for holding the phone when tethered to a laptop for blazing 2.4 kbps satellite data, but no simcard.

It sits on a shelf at my parents' house.

[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2000/04/11/business/iridium-bankrupt...

[1] https://i.imgur.com/CQEhNEy.jpg

Eccentric Orbits is a really great book about their history, especially the near de-orbit with lots of fun tidbits about their fundraising and US gov response.

https://www.amazon.com/Eccentric-Orbits-Iridium-John-Bloom/d...

I will say that calling my family from the middle of the Atlantic Ocean on Thanksgiving is what I consider the hardest flex so far in my life. There are large swaths of this planet where internet and phone service simply does not exist and I am grateful that a boondoggle such as Iridium exists at all. And the DoD agrees they are a major investor, somehow.

We had the commodore come aboard our destroyer and he needed to make a call (we were either in “river city” or had IP issues) so my a senior chief said to me “go find out where this works” and handed me the iridium. When I got topside he was already waiting for me and I said “This might take a minute, sir” (not expecting him yet). We walked all around the ship as I dialed the number in different spots until it went through. Was very awkward as he stared at me during each attempt and looked progressively more annoyed. It was always a bad time when we had to pull that thing out but it got the job done!

My only experience of Iridium was watching heavens-above.com-predicted Iridium flares. Watching carefully in the hours after dusk, you'd see a faint moving dot get brighter and brighter, all the way up to magnitude 8 at times, and then fading away. Lasted about 20 seconds, and very cool.

This is also a museum of 90s website design ;)

Meaning that it loads quickly, doesn't mess up scrolling or history, has no paywall or obnoxious popups etc etc... ?

I worked on the Iridium website (via an agency I worked at) in 2001 -- it was quite the upgrade from their old site at the time, but still had the narrow, center aligned design of the 90's. Unfortunately that homepage remained their homepage for almost 6 years after that.

You say that like it is a bad thing!

It's lightweight, has the information I need with no spammy advertisements.... yet has a quirky, slightly fun design. Looks good to me!

EDIT: And best of all, it isn't optimised for a sodding 15 x 7 cm screen!

It probably works well over low bandwidth satellite internet.

They didn't even try to hide the fact that they're stuck in the 90s.

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