Iridium: The $5 Billion Satellite Bankruptcy That Came Back to Life

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In the late 1990s, amateur astronomers synchronized their watches to catch Iridium flares, flashes of sunlight off satellite antennas that could outshine Venus. The hardware behind them was a marvel. To let a handheld phone reach space, Motorola placed its satellites in low Earth orbit about 485 miles up, where each one races by at roughly 17,000 miles per hour and stays in view for about seven minutes. The plan called for 77 satellites handing calls to one another, which gave the company the name of element 77. The final design needed only 66, but dysprosium did not have the same ring.

This episode follows the whiplash that came next. The network cost roughly $5 billion and switched on in late 1998, just as pocket cell phones took over. Its one pound, $3,000 handset could not work indoors, and the company went bankrupt in 1999. Bought for pennies on the dollar, the constellation found its true customers among soldiers, sailors, explorers, and war reporters, survived a collision in orbit, was rebuilt in flight, and ended up as a quiet backbone of global tracking and safety.

• To build spacecraft fast, Motorola hired the engineer behind Apple's automated Macintosh factory. At peak production in 1997 and 1998, a new satellite came off the line every 4.3 days.
• On February 10, 2009, Iridium 33 collided over Siberia with the dead Russian satellite Cosmos 2251 at about 22,000 miles per hour, creating more than 2,000 large pieces of trackable debris.
• Engineers filled the gap with a spare from a lower storage orbit, waiting for the Earth's equatorial bulge to rotate its orbital plane into alignment before raising it into the grid.
• Between 2017 and 2019, SpaceX Falcon 9 rockets launched 75 new satellites built by Thales Alenia Space, each taking over from a 1990s original before the old one was deorbited.
• The new satellites carry Aireon receivers that track aircraft over open ocean, and in 2020 Iridium was certified for the global maritime distress system, ending Inmarsat's monopoly. In June 2026, Rocket Lab announced it was acquiring the company.