Scott, you missed one fun fact. Iridium was originally designed to have 7 orbital planes with 11 satellites in each plane and hence 77 satellites which is the element Iridium. But they then changed the orbit height and so only needed 6 planes for the same coverage (set by minimum elevation angle..) and so only 6x11 = 66 satellites were needed.. So the constellation should be called Dysprosium.
@@alistairurie2902 maybe you could file paperwork for the company under its rightful name and take it over on the grounds that they have been identifying as the wrong element! kidding of course.
Renaming it to Dysprosium would have been a bad idea because it means 'hard to reach" translated from the Latin. This wouldn't have be a good name for a sat phone constellation...
The Iridium situation was much more interesting than described in the video. It wasn't Iridium that threatened to deorbit the satellites after they went bankrupt, it was Motorola. Really, the whole thing was Motorola running a big financial scam that just so happened to involve some very neat technology. They had already extracted enough money from Iridium and partners to cover the costs of developing and launching the system, so were perfectly happy forcing Iridium into bankruptcy rather than continuing to support the constellation. The book Eccentric Orbits: The Iridium Story covers all this and is a surprisingly entertaining read.
Also look for the Sept 2004 edition of Air & Space Smithsonian magazine and look at page 60 " The rise and fall if Iridium " ( And yes, it was the last magazine on the pile I was looking through . ) This also has a Beech Starship on the cover.
Glad you covered this one, Scott. My first job after the Navy was working for Qualcomm as a Field Service Engineer, installing Globalstar ground sites. I installed the South Africa and Nicaragua sites, and did upgrades at the Clifton, TX site, three sites in Australia (Meekathera, Dubbo, and Mount Isa), and the Italy site. I also installed the system that controlled the entire GS network at both the primary command center in San Jose and the backup site in Sacramento.
Another major contributing factor to their downfall was the unexpected rapid globalization of IS-136 TDMA, IS-95 CDMA, and GSM cellar technologies, as well as International Roaming. In fact, more cellular was installed in "2nd and 3rd world countries" in the 90s than first world countries. And that's because cellular was cheaper than installing landline infrastructure, which these 2nd/3rd world countries either didnt have at all, or was extremely limited. People were on waiting lists for YEARS to get a landline installed to their home. Cellular simply killed the business model for widespread use of Sat Phones. They still had their niche market, but it forced the cost per minute to be ridiculously and forever out of reach for the common person.
@@dosmastrify There is only so much RF bandwidth at frequencies not heavily attenuated by moisture or the atmosphere to go around. 5G simply can't compete with the massive bandwidth provided by a direct fiber connection.
Totally agree. During the early research phase of Globalstar (aka Bopsat) one thing I was looking at was to understand that statistics on where people sleep (the real source of population density) is nothing to do with where people might be when they want to call or be called and then what's the chance they are not under mobile coverage. Tricky problem and it is basically the entire potential market of a direct satellite system.
56 kpbs wasn't "terrible" It was pretty fast when it came out, and all you had were BBS and then the early Internet...it's just that data grows to match capacity.
Does make sense. If there is limited bandwidth for their entire service then you really don't want many customers using it all at once. Only those willing to be paying for it are those competing for the bandwidth.
Hah! I was working at Globalstar during the initial launch period, and was there for the Zenit failure. The system had lots of promise, but international roaming happened much earlier than expected, and pulled the rug out from under us. Glad to see the system still being used for SOS services!
The simplicity of the GlobalStar system was actually thought of as an advantage over Iridium at the time. Keeping the sophisticated electronics on the ground meant it was much easier to repair or upgrade them, simpler satellites were (in theory, at least) more reliable, and the downsides of the "bent pipe" approach didn't really matter much in the real world because the vast majority of the customers were located at lower latitudes. Yeah, you couldn't do cool stuff like routing calls around the world over just the satellites, but did anyone really care? Ultimately both of the services failed because ground-based cell networks rolled out faster than expected. Dead spots largely disappeared (at least in places where most people went) and so very few people wanted buy the very expensive phones with the very expensive service, just to get a satellite capability that they would basically never use. Also, the phones were large and bulky, even for the day.
Isn’t a big problem of the bent pipe approach that you need a ton of ground stations all over the globe? With forwarding from satellite to satellite a single ground station is theoretically enough.
@@Mike-oz4cv Sure, but ground stations are much cheaper than satellites (especially with the cost of LEO in the 1990s!) and you don't need all that many of them. For full coverage you need roughly the same number of ground stations as you have satellites, but you can leave them out in areas you don't plan to cover. GlobalStar didn't cover the oceans or places like Africa because there weren't enough customers in those locations to make it worthwhile.
@@personzorz Starlink has the advantage of 20 years of technical advancement over GlobalStar. Launch costs are way down thanks to SpaceX and reusable rockets, and Moore's law means the satellites themselves can be far more capable at lower mass. GlobalStar's costs per phone call were projected to be about half that of Iridium, this was due in part of the "bent pipe" approach. (Also the use of Qualcomm CDMA tech, which made more efficient use of the radio spectrum, so you could get more phone calls into one satellite).
I worked for a large company in the 80's, who rented a transponder 24/7 (at times more than one). They would broadcast video to branches all over the US, which used 4.5 Mb/s. Transponders were good for 6Mb/s, so you had a T-1 sized data path that was mostly used for maintenance and ignored otherwise. But when not needed by the satellite providers (usually about 23 hrs/day) you had this available. The ground sets would strip off the video signal, and many sites had a (company built) card to grab the data path. The uplink was at one of the research locations, and a few sites sent most of their outbound traffic over the satellite, especially that going cross-country. This was before the widespread internet, and most of the corporate traffic was over leased T-1 lines (which multiplexed 24 channels of 56Kb/s, each channel either a data path or a single phone call). Getting bursts of 1.5Mb/s data sped up the entire corporate network significantly.
Apple has Globalstar (GSAT) under it's umbrella now. Launching new gen satellites with SpaceX newt year. LOADED Globalstar stocks!!! Hope you don't miss out.
Watching this on Starlink... I've had to carry an Iridium phone before, it was trash 😂 I also had DirecPC in the 90s, it wasn't bad for downloads but the latency was atrocious, like 1000ms+.
There are still 16 old Iridium satellites in orbit, and though you can no longer track the flares, you can catch one if you're lucky. @dziban303 in the comments told that they saw it, but it was no longer a flare but a flash, which makes sense cause most of the sats had lost their orientation control and are probably tumbling, but also im sure i saw it too. it was some three months ago when i was looking for shooting stars. It was an extremely bright flash, brighter than any star or planet lasting no more than half a second, almost like a camera flash from the sky! Honestly it bugged me for some time, i thought i was just seeing things, happy to know that i am not. Comforting to know that there are still some that are happening.
Looking for Iridium flares used to be a favorite hobby for me. Sadly, the satellite tracking sight I use no longer predicts the flares. I suppose they are still orbiting up there, so if you see a super bright light in the night sky (magnitude minus six to eight) that is moving at the speed of a satellite, it is probably an Iridium.
They were mostly deorbited from 2019 on with the next generation deployed (first generation ones that do the flares) only a few are up there still that the company lost contact with before they deorbited them.
@@elephantsarenuts5161 very likely are tumbling. I am certain I have seen a couple of them, over the past few years, but it is difficult to be completely certain.
@@marsspacex6065 Yeah, I thought I heard about their deorbit capability. And the Gen 2 Iridium were so much more advanced they didnt need the very large aluminum antenna , which reduced their flaring.
I saw an iridium flare last month! I was outside waiting for a different satellite to appear when the flare happened. The only sat in the flare location at the time was an older Iridium bird. It wasn't the longish flare we used to see, just a flash, but very bright. probably tumbling
I remember supplementing my regular internet with DVB-S reception of usenet group content. That was in Europe on an open channel and your client software would just keep the data for the groups you were interested in.
Was in the military when we got orders to head out overseas. We had a case of Iridium phones. My job was to op check. All the SIMs , and they had expired. Folks there who kept them up were gone. They had new SIMS in 6 hours. I hate to think what that cost. We used those things for data, secure fax and voice. I still have one. It a racket how they sell time limited (like 6 months) SIMS.
I'm amazed the military let them work for 6 months. If your sim card gets spoofed.... The military chooses what it gets, companies don't tell it what to accept. The military isn't us.
I was out with my telescope one night in the back yard when i observed a bright flare. At first i thought it was a meteor but it was slower moving than a typical meteor. After doing some searches on the internet i learned about Iridium satellite flares. I found a satellite tracking site called Heavens Above, and sure enough one would have been visible in my location at that very time!
Do you think the communication satellite series might include a Sirius/XM installment someday? Cellular broadband has taken the place of satellite radio for me now, but I was an early adopter of XM back in the day. I'd be interested to hear about the history of the industry.
If Elon Musk and Starlink really develop direct to cell phone service for existing phones, he will become the richest man in the world has ever seen by ten fold
I was running a venture fund and had the deal, said iridium would fail-it didn't work inside a building! But Then in bankruptcy I wanted to buy it for things we were doing like fleet logistics and handheld sync data. $25 million for the whole thing!!! But we failed to raise a new VC fund.
The problem was never lauch capacity, the problem is keeping the infraestructure working and making a profit before going into bankruptcy. The only way starlink can keep going is lots of taxpayers money
@@Awaken2067833758 Keeping the infrastructure working and not going bankrupt goes hands in hands with good launch capacity. You are right that I should've specified that it also needs to be cheap launch capacity (which is usually easier to have if it's your own at that scale). Also, what taxpayers money? You mean when the government pays to launch stuff it wants to be launched? I'm pretty sure starlink is already profitable or near profitable according to space x
A little bit of crazy history: Teledesic - bankruptcy Iridium - went through bankruptcy and was rescued by the Pentagon Globalstar - went through bankruptcy Orbcomm - went through bankruptcy O3b - sold to a geostationary satellite operator LeoSat - project closed Telesat Leo - launches delayed for years OneWeb - went through bankruptcy Starlink - 1st to survive without bankruptcy🎖 Kuiper - launches delayed for years
We used a home satellite internet service for a while in the late 90s, something our local ISP started offering. No idea how it worked technically, but it used a big dish on the roof for downlink, while still using the dial-up modem for uplink, so probably similar to the DirectPC setup. Not bad for the time - I remember using it to download Linux ISOs insanely quickly - but it was never very reliable, and obviously the latency was pretty dire.
there have been numerous variants of satellite based internet since the 90s. Most of them worked by buying surplus capacity on regular communication satellites, so the speeds and prices for the services varied greatly, and typically the reliability was all over the place because if the satellite was busy doing what it was designed for (usually phone calls or television), there was not much, if any, bandwidth left for internet
Yeah I think it was quite big in the rural US where you could be miles from Cable TV and the regular phone network wasnt good enough to support decent download speeds. In the UK the phone network coverage was pretty comprehensive and if you wanted faster than 33/56k and were willing to pay then 128k or 256k ISDN was widely available. Northern Europe and Japan had about 6x as many ISDN users per thousand on average as the US.
@@watcherzero5256This was actually suburban, not rural. Not a great use case for satellite internet today, but residential ISDN was basically non-existent in NZ, no major ISP offered it, and the low density of internet users in those days (even in a city) made satellite viable.
I wish satellite internet had gotten off the ground earlier, it probably would have helped Net Neutrality and forced investment by cable, fiber, and DSL. There are still many areas (including NY and CA) that have monopoly providers with dubious service and no alternatives.
Been changing since Starlink. Multiple areas finally started doing proper upgrades to keep customers. Still no competition for fiber customers. But at least providers are now forced to keep everything reasonable.
I had a brief spell carrying around a company-paid-for iridium handset circa 2002, I recall as soon as I was back from whatever I was doing in the middle of nowhere in the Australian outback it'd be snatched back off me and I'd have to give some justification to the bill I'd racked up on any *actual phone calls* I used it for out there lol. I forget exactly what the wording was like, but I still remember you'd get an american accent voice message to the effect of "Please wait while your call is connected over the iridium satellite network" or the like every time you made or received a call
G’day Scott, I’m a great fan of your unbiased no nonsense reporting of ALL things space. As a matter of interest, as of around mid April, Thuraya service is no longer available in Australia, apparently due to an unrecoverable failure on the Boeing satellite that covers our region. Australians can use their Thuraya phone as a paper weight. It may have been a cheaper option than the alternatives, and I guess that’s the risk you take relying on just one satellite for service. Enjoy your aviating. Cheers.
Was definitely expecting some sweet iridium flare pics/vids. They were the only naked-eye manmade objects that were better viewing than an ISS overhead pass
Wiuld be interesting to see some numbers for Iridium - total cost of development and launches, how much did it cost for the customer and how many customers they actually got
I was working for Motorola when Iridium was introduced. I remember sitting in an auditorium in Austin when management presented Iridium to the employees that would be involved in building it. I remember a video with a guy walking at what looked like one of poles, by himself, when his phone rings and he answers it. I never really understood why they thought they could make money with it. How many customers were in that video?
I worked at Lockheed Austin about the same time. The final assembly was going to happen at the Austin facility before being transfer ti Sanders and the Austin plant eventually closed. Their motto was "Five Days Dock to Dock". It was like an evangelical meeting when I went to Motorola in Schlumberg for a kickoff meeting. I created some 3D CAD models of the satellite using IDEAS CAD software on a $30,000 Silicon Graphucs computer system. Great times while they lasted!
@@MarkSummersCAD I'll second the "great times" sentiment. I was a consultant commuting from Dallas to Chandler for 2 years working on the systems engineering of Gen 1 Iridium (various types of call handovers). Always considered it the high point of my career. The protocol design issues were fun -- in the 48 spot beam layout under a satellite, the inner spot beams had very sharply defined edges in signal and handovers between beams thus had miniscule amounts of time available for a protocol to negotiate anything before the call lost its RF resources as the beam edge passed over. Handing off calls between satellites was more complicated logically, but you had more time to ship a few messages around on control channels. Good times, indeed! To the kids building Starlink: It's inspiring to watch you from the past, keep on amazing us!
Scott, You completely missed Loral Cyberstar. We were building a leo constellation for Datacom. I was there 1997-2000. The only reason why it failed was because in 1999 Bernie Schwartz announced Cyberstar wouldn’t go public. All the engineers bailed looking elsewhere for stock options. I ended up at Cisco.
Interesting subject, and very useful, but I truly worry about so much hardware up there. It really is getting out of hand, and now Blue Origin wants to get a constellation going too 😢
I once used a Spot Tracker powered by GlobalStar to track the flight of a balloon to stratosphere. Undortuntely I did not know, that tracking is started when the tracker is sensing some amount of acceleration. So no data was received until the balloon finally burst.
Scott -Remember, it wasn’t until the late 80s that the Signals were Digitized. Prior to that, signals/ handsets was analog! This held up capacity and the value of putting these satellites up any earlier. I know I worked for Alltel and BellSouth mobility from the beginning of the cellular in industry.
I remember the iridium flare app that would tell you the transit time and intensity and if you found the right one with the right weather at the right location you were in for a truly incredible viewing experience after a few seconds your perspective shifts and all the stars start flying past the satellite and you as you lock onto the satellite you really feel the speed of you and the satellite now with space X I just saw 20 launch and I thought it was world War 3
Did a 2 year tour on an arctic base in the early 2000's. Our only link with civilization were voice calls over Iridium and HF radio. I suppose they have broadband Starlink these days, what a world.
In 2004 I tried to help a friend on his yacht in Brazil download an update on his laptop using his Iridium link. I failed because every time I tried, it lost connection of a packet part way through the download. Iridium was OK for voice and short emails though.
All these satellite constellations were the Macguffin for early NewSpace. Companies like Kistler and the Roton people were developing reusable private launchers to put these birds up quickly and cheaply. The market failed to emerge and those companies failed to get their rockets built. Timing matters in business (and spaceflight). Also those brick satellite cell phones make me think of two things: Drug dealers and Wrestling manager Paul E. Dangerously lol.
20 years ago, a system like you describe for "fast internet" indeed was operational here in Europe as well. It used Eutelsat satellite transponders. The users would connect via a phone modem and receive their downlinks via the satellite. The transmission actually used a PID on a standard DVB-S multiplex, so there could be radio and TV stations on the same transponder. On the specific PID used by the service, IP datagrams were sent just like MPEG streams would be sent for TV. Actually it wasn't encrypted at all! Probably encryption for such "fast links" was not really feasible at that time or would conflict with export regulations. And because almost all traffic was in plain http those days, one could actually eavesdrop on the traffic for the users of that system. There was a program (appropriately named "skynet") that collected all complete TCP sessions and wrote them to files, identifying the content and assigning an appropriate (random) name to each file. Letting that run for a while would yield a large number of files, e.g. BMP, JPG, MP3, MPG etc. As you rightly remark, all the users shared the single bandwidth, which would only be a couple of Mbit/s. So for each individual file, the actual transfer rate was not high at all, not even as fast as a phone modem.
20 years ago, a system like you describe for "fast internet" indeed was operational here in Europe as well. It used Eutelsat satellite transponders. The users would connect via a phone modem and receive their downlinks via the satellite. The transmission actually used a PID on a standard DVB-S multiplex, so there could be radio and TV stations on the same transponder. On the specific PID used by the service, IP datagrams were sent just like MPEG streams would be sent for TV. Actually it wasn't encrypted at all! Probably encryption for such "fast links" was not really feasible at that time or would conflict with export regulations. And because almost all traffic was in plain http those days, one could actually eavesdrop on the traffic for the users of that system. There was a program (appropriately named "skynet") that collected all complete TCP sessions and wrote them to files, identifying the content and assigning an appropriate (random) name to each file. Letting that run for a while would yield a large number of files, e.g. BMP, JPG, MP3, MPG etc. As you rightly remark, all the users shared the single bandwidth, which would only be a couple of Mbit/s. So for each individual file, the actual transfer rate was not high at all, not even as fast as a phone modem.
I manage a number of satellite phones. We used Gloalstar back in their Dark Ages and it was truly dreadful. Between the complexity of their normal operating procedures and timing use of the degraded constellation it was close to unusable. We then had an opportunity to change over to Iridium at very low cost and I jumped at the chance. One still has to drum into people that satellite stuff happens s-l-o-w-l-y but the simplicity and reliability was hugely improved. Globalstar have since upgraded their constellation and found ways of using their constellation for data tasks, like SPOT, that are not as demanding as voice. One of our problems with Globalstar was the 52 degree orbit tilt which, since we operate at around 57 degrees North and in mountainous terrain, meant we often could not register with a satellite. Iridium, on the other hand, being a polar orbiter, or 84 degrees, is more latitude independent, or possibly better at higher latitudes. The same latitude problem arises, but to a lesser extent because they are MEO, with GNSS and SAR satellites since most are on 55 or 56 degree tilt. This explains why GPS says I was walking across Knoydart at 1000mph. 🙄
You should do a video on the Soviet's idea for a response to the star wars program, the 'sunsat' program. There's an article about it in the New York Times from 1987 you can find on Google. They planned to use their new ultra heavy lift boosters to put city-sized solar collectors into geostationary orbit and beam the energy back down as microwaves to pave the way for the industrialization of space and solve the energy crisis. David Graeber talks about this in his lecture "On Bureaucratic Technology and the Future as Dream-Time" as well as how they planned to seed the world's oceans with edible Spirulina to solve the hunger crisis. Stuff like this and other stuff like an automated cybernetic economy really makes you realize how much of futurism like star trek came from the Soviet vision for the future.
Encrypted downlink? I distinctly remember leeching these (or in any case a) downlinks with my scsi equipped nokia sat receiver.. was fun seeing the images scroll by..
Will elon launch a GPS and communications constellation to mars prior to a manned mission to the surface? Maybe martian starlink to do it all plus data?
So which Apple devices can send and receive faxes by satellite to any regular fax, a bit like the one used by Steven Seagal in that train heist movie (where he hooked his Apple device into a mobile payphone to indirectly fax the Pentagon about a hijacked NRO asset)?
I heard iridium satellites originally analogue vs digital. One reason first bankruptcy. Iridium showed its importance when 9/11 occurred with lost land lines after fall off towers. Iridium developed new satellites 2010’s but 2023 got in trouble allowing Russians to use attack on Ukraine. Falcon 9 help launch iridium. Starlink working on laser satellite to communicate with each other so less ground stations needed. Starlink largest world WiFi with over 2 million subscribers in just 2 years. Adapted for boats, and planes. Mobile versions for RV’s now available.
See also: Air & Space Smithsonian Sept 2004, Page 60 " The rise and fall if Iridium " ( And yes, it was the last magazine on the pile I was looking through . ) This also has a Beech Starship on the cover.
Motorola went bankrupt because of Iridium. They had to split the company in multiple ones. Freescale take up the semiconductor división. Another one took the instrument. the name was keep only for the celular business.
Somebody in the 90s: We want money to launch a satellite network to beam broadband internet to the world! Investors: nah, nobody will buy that. That same person in the 2020s: …
When did satellite data become available for journalists. Was there a time where van portable not man portable data was possible? Presumably they would have used geostationary?
in some ways Iridium is why Starlink exists, IridiumNEXT was certainly one of the most important non government contracts for a young SpaceX.
Absolutely loving this series.
🙇♀️💭”.. Wow ..”
Scott, you missed one fun fact. Iridium was originally designed to have 7 orbital planes with 11 satellites in each plane and hence 77 satellites which is the element Iridium. But they then changed the orbit height and so only needed 6 planes for the same coverage (set by minimum elevation angle..) and so only 6x11 = 66 satellites were needed.. So the constellation should be called Dysprosium.
He does touch on the reduced number of 66 satellites at 08:36.
@@gordonrichardson2972 yes but it really shouldn't be called Iridium anymore
@@alistairurie2902 maybe you could file paperwork for the company under its rightful name and take it over on the grounds that they have been identifying as the wrong element! kidding of course.
Renaming it to Dysprosium would have been a bad idea because it means 'hard to reach" translated from the Latin. This wouldn't have be a good name for a sat phone constellation...
@@alistairurie2902 Yeah, but Dysprosium doesn't exactly have the same ring to it.
The Iridium situation was much more interesting than described in the video. It wasn't Iridium that threatened to deorbit the satellites after they went bankrupt, it was Motorola.
Really, the whole thing was Motorola running a big financial scam that just so happened to involve some very neat technology. They had already extracted enough money from Iridium and partners to cover the costs of developing and launching the system, so were perfectly happy forcing Iridium into bankruptcy rather than continuing to support the constellation.
The book Eccentric Orbits: The Iridium Story covers all this and is a surprisingly entertaining read.
Thanks for the tip. Found a copy.
Just bought a copy for 7 bucks. Thanks!
Also look for the Sept 2004 edition of Air & Space Smithsonian magazine and look at page 60 " The rise and fall if Iridium " ( And yes, it was the last magazine on the pile I was looking through . ) This also has a Beech Starship on the cover.
@@bobroberts2371 Wow, I think I remember that cover. I used to subscribe to that magazine.
Big financial scams... so an Elon biznas
Glad you covered this one, Scott. My first job after the Navy was working for Qualcomm as a Field Service Engineer, installing Globalstar ground sites.
I installed the South Africa and Nicaragua sites, and did upgrades at the Clifton, TX site, three sites in Australia (Meekathera, Dubbo, and Mount Isa), and the Italy site.
I also installed the system that controlled the entire GS network at both the primary command center in San Jose and the backup site in Sacramento.
Another major contributing factor to their downfall was the unexpected rapid globalization of IS-136 TDMA, IS-95 CDMA, and GSM cellar technologies, as well as International Roaming. In fact, more cellular was installed in "2nd and 3rd world countries" in the 90s than first world countries. And that's because cellular was cheaper than installing landline infrastructure, which these 2nd/3rd world countries either didnt have at all, or was extremely limited. People were on waiting lists for YEARS to get a landline installed to their home. Cellular simply killed the business model for widespread use of Sat Phones. They still had their niche market, but it forced the cost per minute to be ridiculously and forever out of reach for the common person.
This is why FTP fiber to premises will fail. Just cheaper to use 5G
@@dosmastrify There is only so much RF bandwidth at frequencies not heavily attenuated by moisture or the atmosphere to go around. 5G simply can't compete with the massive bandwidth provided by a direct fiber connection.
Totally agree. During the early research phase of Globalstar (aka Bopsat) one thing I was looking at was to understand that statistics on where people sleep (the real source of population density) is nothing to do with where people might be when they want to call or be called and then what's the chance they are not under mobile coverage. Tricky problem and it is basically the entire potential market of a direct satellite system.
I remember an ad in the Births column of the Rhodesian Herald - ' To John and Mary after 36 months gestation, a healthy telephone line.' Haha!
@@smacksman1 - lol, to some I bet they can remember the day of their first land phone line better than the day of their first child!!
56 kpbs wasn't "terrible" It was pretty fast when it came out, and all you had were BBS and then the early Internet...it's just that data grows to match capacity.
Sat phone calls used to be absolutely absurdly priced, like *$20 a minute* sometimes.
Even in 2023, I pay $1/minute for Iridium service. 😕
Does make sense. If there is limited bandwidth for their entire service then you really don't want many customers using it all at once. Only those willing to be paying for it are those competing for the bandwidth.
@@TheGermanHammerCan't you call through Starlink WiFi?
@@MarcosWassem Yes.
Hah! I was working at Globalstar during the initial launch period, and was there for the Zenit failure. The system had lots of promise, but international roaming happened much earlier than expected, and pulled the rug out from under us.
Glad to see the system still being used for SOS services!
The simplicity of the GlobalStar system was actually thought of as an advantage over Iridium at the time. Keeping the sophisticated electronics on the ground meant it was much easier to repair or upgrade them, simpler satellites were (in theory, at least) more reliable, and the downsides of the "bent pipe" approach didn't really matter much in the real world because the vast majority of the customers were located at lower latitudes. Yeah, you couldn't do cool stuff like routing calls around the world over just the satellites, but did anyone really care?
Ultimately both of the services failed because ground-based cell networks rolled out faster than expected. Dead spots largely disappeared (at least in places where most people went) and so very few people wanted buy the very expensive phones with the very expensive service, just to get a satellite capability that they would basically never use. Also, the phones were large and bulky, even for the day.
Isn’t a big problem of the bent pipe approach that you need a ton of ground stations all over the globe? With forwarding from satellite to satellite a single ground station is theoretically enough.
That's also exactly how starlink works
@@Mike-oz4cv Sure, but ground stations are much cheaper than satellites (especially with the cost of LEO in the 1990s!) and you don't need all that many of them. For full coverage you need roughly the same number of ground stations as you have satellites, but you can leave them out in areas you don't plan to cover. GlobalStar didn't cover the oceans or places like Africa because there weren't enough customers in those locations to make it worthwhile.
@@personzorz Starlink has the advantage of 20 years of technical advancement over GlobalStar. Launch costs are way down thanks to SpaceX and reusable rockets, and Moore's law means the satellites themselves can be far more capable at lower mass.
GlobalStar's costs per phone call were projected to be about half that of Iridium, this was due in part of the "bent pipe" approach. (Also the use of Qualcomm CDMA tech, which made more efficient use of the radio spectrum, so you could get more phone calls into one satellite).
I worked for a large company in the 80's, who rented a transponder 24/7 (at times more than one). They would broadcast video to branches all over the US, which used 4.5 Mb/s. Transponders were good for 6Mb/s, so you had a T-1 sized data path that was mostly used for maintenance and ignored otherwise. But when not needed by the satellite providers (usually about 23 hrs/day) you had this available. The ground sets would strip off the video signal, and many sites had a (company built) card to grab the data path. The uplink was at one of the research locations, and a few sites sent most of their outbound traffic over the satellite, especially that going cross-country. This was before the widespread internet, and most of the corporate traffic was over leased T-1 lines (which multiplexed 24 channels of 56Kb/s, each channel either a data path or a single phone call). Getting bursts of 1.5Mb/s data sped up the entire corporate network significantly.
Apple has Globalstar (GSAT) under it's umbrella now. Launching new gen satellites with SpaceX newt year. LOADED Globalstar stocks!!! Hope you don't miss out.
@@trippyvortex Still cheap
I'm hoping the Island of Stability exists so that Starlink gets an atomic-number name
Watching this on Starlink... I've had to carry an Iridium phone before, it was trash 😂 I also had DirecPC in the 90s, it wasn't bad for downloads but the latency was atrocious, like 1000ms+.
Iridium flares are what got me into astronomy. Was very sad to see my last ones knowing they weren’t coming back
Nope. The flairs were from the Iridium first gen satellites. Iridium Next, the second gen satellites, give no flair.
@@GenMagnus haha that’s why I was sad to know we wouldn’t see them anymore!
There are still 16 old Iridium satellites in orbit, and though you can no longer track the flares, you can catch one if you're lucky.
@dziban303 in the comments told that they saw it, but it was no longer a flare but a flash, which makes sense cause most of the sats had lost their orientation control and are probably tumbling, but also im sure i saw it too. it was some three months ago when i was looking for shooting stars. It was an extremely bright flash, brighter than any star or planet lasting no more than half a second, almost like a camera flash from the sky! Honestly it bugged me for some time, i thought i was just seeing things, happy to know that i am not. Comforting to know that there are still some that are happening.
Looking for Iridium flares used to be a favorite hobby for me. Sadly, the satellite tracking sight I use no longer predicts the flares. I suppose they are still orbiting up there, so if you see a super bright light in the night sky (magnitude minus six to eight) that is moving at the speed of a satellite, it is probably an Iridium.
The iridium flares were nice and bright. I wonder if their orbits are no longer stable or if they're tumbling.
They were mostly deorbited from 2019 on with the next generation deployed (first generation ones that do the flares) only a few are up there still that the company lost contact with before they deorbited them.
@@elephantsarenuts5161 very likely are tumbling. I am certain I have seen a couple of them, over the past few years, but it is difficult to be completely certain.
@@marsspacex6065 Yeah, I thought I heard about their deorbit capability. And the Gen 2 Iridium were so much more advanced they didnt need the very large aluminum antenna , which reduced their flaring.
I saw an iridium flare last month! I was outside waiting for a different satellite to appear when the flare happened. The only sat in the flare location at the time was an older Iridium bird. It wasn't the longish flare we used to see, just a flash, but very bright. probably tumbling
I remember supplementing my regular internet with DVB-S reception of usenet group content. That was in Europe on an open channel and your client software would just keep the data for the groups you were interested in.
Was in the military when we got orders to head out overseas. We had a case of Iridium phones. My job was to op check. All the SIMs , and they had expired. Folks there who kept them up were gone. They had new SIMS in 6 hours. I hate to think what that cost. We used those things for data, secure fax and voice. I still have one. It a racket how they sell time limited (like 6 months) SIMS.
I'm amazed the military let them work for 6 months. If your sim card gets spoofed....
The military chooses what it gets, companies don't tell it what to accept. The military isn't us.
I was out with my telescope one night in the back yard when i observed a bright flare. At first i thought it was a meteor but it was slower moving than a typical meteor. After doing some searches on the internet i learned about Iridium satellite flares. I found a satellite tracking site called Heavens Above, and sure enough one would have been visible in my location at that very time!
Do you think the communication satellite series might include a Sirius/XM installment someday? Cellular broadband has taken the place of satellite radio for me now, but I was an early adopter of XM back in the day. I'd be interested to hear about the history of the industry.
If Elon Musk and Starlink really develop direct to cell phone service for existing phones, he will become the richest man in the world has ever seen by ten fold
I was running a venture fund and had the deal, said iridium would fail-it didn't work inside a building! But Then in bankruptcy I wanted to buy it for things we were doing like fleet logistics and handheld sync data. $25 million for the whole thing!!! But we failed to raise a new VC fund.
I believe the world suffered substantially by letting Qualcomm maintain control of satellite communications in the logistics world.
This just goes to show how much launch capacity is the game changer for a viable service.
starlink : first by an orbital launch company who build there own rockets and engines :) , hard to beat that lol
The problem was never lauch capacity, the problem is keeping the infraestructure working and making a profit before going into bankruptcy. The only way starlink can keep going is lots of taxpayers money
😂
@@Awaken2067833758 Keeping the infrastructure working and not going bankrupt goes hands in hands with good launch capacity. You are right that I should've specified that it also needs to be cheap launch capacity (which is usually easier to have if it's your own at that scale). Also, what taxpayers money? You mean when the government pays to launch stuff it wants to be launched? I'm pretty sure starlink is already profitable or near profitable according to space x
I'd say more than launch capacity it's launch cost. The price SpaceX charges internally to launch the satellites is so ridiculously low.
I remember hacking this Directpc thing, from Vladivostok, in 99 or something. We only got 5-15 minutes a day of connection.
And now you call me an existing customer.....
A little bit of crazy history:
Teledesic - bankruptcy
Iridium - went through bankruptcy and was rescued by the Pentagon
Globalstar - went through bankruptcy
Orbcomm - went through bankruptcy
O3b - sold to a geostationary satellite operator
LeoSat - project closed
Telesat Leo - launches delayed for years
OneWeb - went through bankruptcy
Starlink - 1st to survive without bankruptcy🎖
Kuiper - launches delayed for years
We used a home satellite internet service for a while in the late 90s, something our local ISP started offering. No idea how it worked technically, but it used a big dish on the roof for downlink, while still using the dial-up modem for uplink, so probably similar to the DirectPC setup. Not bad for the time - I remember using it to download Linux ISOs insanely quickly - but it was never very reliable, and obviously the latency was pretty dire.
They offered the same here in rural Austria.
there have been numerous variants of satellite based internet since the 90s. Most of them worked by buying surplus capacity on regular communication satellites, so the speeds and prices for the services varied greatly, and typically the reliability was all over the place because if the satellite was busy doing what it was designed for (usually phone calls or television), there was not much, if any, bandwidth left for internet
Yeah I think it was quite big in the rural US where you could be miles from Cable TV and the regular phone network wasnt good enough to support decent download speeds. In the UK the phone network coverage was pretty comprehensive and if you wanted faster than 33/56k and were willing to pay then 128k or 256k ISDN was widely available. Northern Europe and Japan had about 6x as many ISDN users per thousand on average as the US.
@@watcherzero5256This was actually suburban, not rural. Not a great use case for satellite internet today, but residential ISDN was basically non-existent in NZ, no major ISP offered it, and the low density of internet users in those days (even in a city) made satellite viable.
not uncommon in rural Australia, even now some areas are only served by satellite.
I wish satellite internet had gotten off the ground earlier, it probably would have helped Net Neutrality and forced investment by cable, fiber, and DSL. There are still many areas (including NY and CA) that have monopoly providers with dubious service and no alternatives.
Been changing since Starlink. Multiple areas finally started doing proper upgrades to keep customers. Still no competition for fiber customers. But at least providers are now forced to keep everything reasonable.
I had a brief spell carrying around a company-paid-for iridium handset circa 2002, I recall as soon as I was back from whatever I was doing in the middle of nowhere in the Australian outback it'd be snatched back off me and I'd have to give some justification to the bill I'd racked up on any *actual phone calls* I used it for out there lol. I forget exactly what the wording was like, but I still remember you'd get an american accent voice message to the effect of "Please wait while your call is connected over the iridium satellite network" or the like every time you made or received a call
G’day Scott, I’m a great fan of your unbiased no nonsense reporting of ALL things space.
As a matter of interest, as of around mid April, Thuraya service is no longer available in Australia, apparently due to an unrecoverable failure on the Boeing satellite that covers our region. Australians can use their Thuraya phone as a paper weight. It may have been a cheaper option than the alternatives, and I guess that’s the risk you take relying on just one satellite for service. Enjoy your aviating. Cheers.
Skort Munley! Whaddy'at?! Can't wait to see ya at the Astra awards!
Was definitely expecting some sweet iridium flare pics/vids. They were the only naked-eye manmade objects that were better viewing than an ISS overhead pass
yeah, I've seen iridium flash, it was incredibly bright
I wonder if any of these countries packed on any extra eavesdropping hardware on those satellites they launched for Iridium?
*Anyone else miss:
“Iridium Flares”?*
Wiuld be interesting to see some numbers for Iridium - total cost of development and launches, how much did it cost for the customer and how many customers they actually got
I was working for Motorola when Iridium was introduced. I remember sitting in an auditorium in Austin when management presented Iridium to the employees that would be involved in building it. I remember a video with a guy walking at what looked like one of poles, by himself, when his phone rings and he answers it. I never really understood why they thought they could make money with it. How many customers were in that video?
I worked at Lockheed Austin about the same time. The final assembly was going to happen at the Austin facility before being transfer ti Sanders and the Austin plant eventually closed. Their motto was "Five Days Dock to Dock". It was like an evangelical meeting when I went to Motorola in Schlumberg for a kickoff meeting. I created some 3D CAD models of the satellite using IDEAS CAD software on a $30,000 Silicon Graphucs computer system. Great times while they lasted!
@@MarkSummersCAD I'll second the "great times" sentiment. I was a consultant commuting from Dallas to Chandler for 2 years working on the systems engineering of Gen 1 Iridium (various types of call handovers). Always considered it the high point of my career. The protocol design issues were fun -- in the 48 spot beam layout under a satellite, the inner spot beams had very sharply defined edges in signal and handovers between beams thus had miniscule amounts of time available for a protocol to negotiate anything before the call lost its RF resources as the beam edge passed over. Handing off calls between satellites was more complicated logically, but you had more time to ship a few messages around on control channels. Good times, indeed! To the kids building Starlink: It's inspiring to watch you from the past, keep on amazing us!
Scott, You completely missed Loral Cyberstar. We were building a leo constellation for Datacom. I was there 1997-2000. The only reason why it failed was because in 1999 Bernie Schwartz announced Cyberstar wouldn’t go public. All the engineers bailed looking elsewhere for stock options. I ended up at Cisco.
Interesting subject, and very useful, but I truly worry about so much hardware up there.
It really is getting out of hand, and now Blue Origin wants to get a constellation going too 😢
I once used a Spot Tracker powered by GlobalStar to track the flight of a balloon to stratosphere. Undortuntely I did not know, that tracking is started when the tracker is sensing some amount of acceleration. So no data was received until the balloon finally burst.
Scott -Remember, it wasn’t until the late 80s that the Signals were Digitized. Prior to that, signals/ handsets was analog! This held up capacity and the value of putting these satellites up any earlier. I know I worked for Alltel and BellSouth mobility from the beginning of the cellular in industry.
how much % of that task could we also do by simply use connected airplanes... ?
"Space Porn" Sounds like a great 70's movie.
*Digitizing the signals with/ plus “Data Compression & Error Correction” were the capacity game changers.*
LOL at the Westford comment.
480,000,000 needles in space! 🤦♂️
Now that’s space junk
Just wondering: at what date did Starlink exceed the original planned size of Teledesic?
I remember the iridium flare app that would tell you the transit time and intensity and if you found the right one with the right weather at the right location you were in for a truly incredible viewing experience after a few seconds your perspective shifts and all the stars start flying past the satellite and you as you lock onto the satellite you really feel the speed of you and the satellite now with space X I just saw 20 launch and I thought it was world War 3
A side note to Iridium is that the first collision between two satellites was between an Iridium vehicle and an old Russian satellite in 2009.
Did a 2 year tour on an arctic base in the early 2000's. Our only link with civilization were voice calls over Iridium and HF radio. I suppose they have broadband Starlink these days, what a world.
Bezos should name his sats "Unobtanium" bahaha
In 2004 I tried to help a friend on his yacht in Brazil download an update on his laptop using his Iridium link. I failed because every time I tried, it lost connection of a packet part way through the download. Iridium was OK for voice and short emails though.
I am grateful to Iridium for the safety net they provide while hiking. The Garnin inReach iridium terminal is tiny!
Marine realm guy here .. Mini Vsat is still a thing alongside Iridium (see the Go!) and others like starlink .. fun times
My uncle worked for Motorola in the late 80s and 90s and helped to write the OS for the Iridium satellites.
All these satellite constellations were the Macguffin for early NewSpace. Companies like Kistler and the Roton people were developing reusable private launchers to put these birds up quickly and cheaply. The market failed to emerge and those companies failed to get their rockets built. Timing matters in business (and spaceflight).
Also those brick satellite cell phones make me think of two things: Drug dealers and Wrestling manager Paul E. Dangerously lol.
Mentions of those "brick-sized" cellphones always remind me of "The KLF - 3AM Eternal" music video.
20 years ago, a system like you describe for "fast internet" indeed was operational here in Europe as well.
It used Eutelsat satellite transponders. The users would connect via a phone modem and receive their downlinks via the satellite.
The transmission actually used a PID on a standard DVB-S multiplex, so there could be radio and TV stations on the same transponder.
On the specific PID used by the service, IP datagrams were sent just like MPEG streams would be sent for TV.
Actually it wasn't encrypted at all! Probably encryption for such "fast links" was not really feasible at that time or would conflict with export regulations.
And because almost all traffic was in plain http those days, one could actually eavesdrop on the traffic for the users of that system.
There was a program (appropriately named "skynet") that collected all complete TCP sessions and wrote them to files, identifying the content and assigning an appropriate (random) name to each file. Letting that run for a while would yield a large number of files, e.g. BMP, JPG, MP3, MPG etc.
As you rightly remark, all the users shared the single bandwidth, which would only be a couple of Mbit/s. So for each individual file, the actual transfer rate was not high at all, not even as fast as a phone modem.
20 years ago, a system like you describe for "fast internet" indeed was operational here in Europe as well.
It used Eutelsat satellite transponders. The users would connect via a phone modem and receive their downlinks via the satellite.
The transmission actually used a PID on a standard DVB-S multiplex, so there could be radio and TV stations on the same transponder.
On the specific PID used by the service, IP datagrams were sent just like MPEG streams would be sent for TV.
Actually it wasn't encrypted at all! Probably encryption for such "fast links" was not really feasible at that time or would conflict with export regulations.
And because almost all traffic was in plain http those days, one could actually eavesdrop on the traffic for the users of that system.
There was a program (appropriately named "skynet") that collected all complete TCP sessions and wrote them to files, identifying the content and assigning an appropriate (random) name to each file. Letting that run for a while would yield a large number of files, e.g. BMP, JPG, MP3, MPG etc.
As you rightly remark, all the users shared the single bandwidth, which would only be a couple of Mbit/s. So for each individual file, the actual transfer rate was not high at all, not even as fast as a phone modem.
I manage a number of satellite phones. We used Gloalstar back in their Dark Ages and it was truly dreadful. Between the complexity of their normal operating procedures and timing use of the degraded constellation it was close to unusable. We then had an opportunity to change over to Iridium at very low cost and I jumped at the chance. One still has to drum into people that satellite stuff happens s-l-o-w-l-y but the simplicity and reliability was hugely improved. Globalstar have since upgraded their constellation and found ways of using their constellation for data tasks, like SPOT, that are not as demanding as voice. One of our problems with Globalstar was the 52 degree orbit tilt which, since we operate at around 57 degrees North and in mountainous terrain, meant we often could not register with a satellite. Iridium, on the other hand, being a polar orbiter, or 84 degrees, is more latitude independent, or possibly better at higher latitudes. The same latitude problem arises, but to a lesser extent because they are MEO, with GNSS and SAR satellites since most are on 55 or 56 degree tilt. This explains why GPS says I was walking across Knoydart at 1000mph. 🙄
You should do a video on the Soviet's idea for a response to the star wars program, the 'sunsat' program. There's an article about it in the New York Times from 1987 you can find on Google. They planned to use their new ultra heavy lift boosters to put city-sized solar collectors into geostationary orbit and beam the energy back down as microwaves to pave the way for the industrialization of space and solve the energy crisis. David Graeber talks about this in his lecture "On Bureaucratic Technology and the Future as Dream-Time" as well as how they planned to seed the world's oceans with edible Spirulina to solve the hunger crisis. Stuff like this and other stuff like an automated cybernetic economy really makes you realize how much of futurism like star trek came from the Soviet vision for the future.
Omg a new episode awesome series.
(( I Was SCARED To Say This To NASA... (But I said it anyway) - Smarter Every Day 293 )) what is this ?
I've seen some Iridium passages. Amazing stuff indeed!
Thanks, Scott! 😊
Stay safe there with your family! 🖖😊
And happy holidays!
HOLY DIAL UP TONE BATMAN!
say it with us Scott.
MO-DEM
MO-DEM
You madlad you.
Encrypted downlink? I distinctly remember leeching these (or in any case a) downlinks with my scsi equipped nokia sat receiver.. was fun seeing the images scroll by..
Wow. Looking down through the comments reveals that most of Scot Manley's audience are satellite internet technology experts. 😁
Are yoy going to play ksp 2 ? Love your ksp 1. Your mind is crasy good for the fun and still make it fun to hear 🙌🙏
Global star was horrible at first. They had defective satellites and other issues. I remember my phone was hit and miss half the time.
Will elon launch a GPS and communications constellation to mars prior to a manned mission to the surface? Maybe martian starlink to do it all plus data?
i don't see the point of starlink tbh. and at such a high cost, filling the sky with reflective stuff.
Wouldve been intresting to hear the 2.4kbps audio, as the stories make it sound almost unintelligbe 😅
So which Apple devices can send and receive faxes by satellite to any regular fax, a bit like the one used by Steven Seagal in that train heist movie (where he hooked his Apple device into a mobile payphone to indirectly fax the Pentagon about a hijacked NRO asset)?
Edit: nvm top comment mentioned the book nice
17:29 lol hope this has a good name, flying cardboard or something
Sounds like Wyoming is finally getting internet access.
Iridium flares got me interested in space and rocketry many years ago
I miss the iridium flares, so cool to ask the wifey to look up there will be a bright spot.
Decoding satellite traffic was very easy btw.
The ping of satellite interest was painfully slow! 😂
I thought Iridium flares were off the solar panels, not antennas.
I'd pay 15 a month for no bs 30mbps today! 4k needs 25
I hope we get news or update Ukraine rocket company
Why are relevant comments being actively deleted?
Good background video, thank you!
Great coverage of topic , thank you Scott
Scott you say modem so funny. is it a Scottish thing?
I heard iridium satellites originally analogue vs digital. One reason first bankruptcy. Iridium showed its importance when 9/11 occurred with lost land lines after fall off towers. Iridium developed new satellites 2010’s but 2023 got in trouble allowing Russians to use attack on Ukraine. Falcon 9 help launch iridium. Starlink working on laser satellite to communicate with each other so less ground stations needed. Starlink largest world WiFi with over 2 million subscribers in just 2 years. Adapted for boats, and planes. Mobile versions for RV’s now available.
I remember staring at the DirectPC display at CompUSA the day I went in and bought my USR 56K modem.
That book on your desk is currently available from Amazon for £1,499.89.😪
Company I worked for had DirecPC, yeah it was a weird arrangement. But prior to cable modems, that download speed was amazing 😅
See also:
Air & Space Smithsonian Sept 2004, Page 60 " The rise and fall if Iridium " ( And yes, it was the last magazine on the pile I was looking through . ) This also has a Beech Starship on the cover.
Motorola went bankrupt because of Iridium. They had to split the company in multiple ones. Freescale take up the semiconductor división. Another one took the instrument. the name was keep only for the celular business.
I remember thinking we were all going to have satellite phones. Only a couple people I knew did.
Somebody in the 90s: We want money to launch a satellite network to beam broadband internet to the world!
Investors: nah, nobody will buy that.
That same person in the 2020s: …
I dont expect Starlink to make back its investment either. They are launching 100x the hardware for the same service
SpaceX will use its Starlink satellites to broadcast a new network using T-Mobile's mid-band spectrum.
Very cool. I had no idea. Thank you.
Interesting video, thanks!
When did satellite data become available for journalists. Was there a time where van portable not man portable data was possible? Presumably they would have used geostationary?
Fun Fact: I worked with a guy at Motorola in the late 1980's who left my group to go work on Iridium.
I had a friend that had directpc the download speed was mind blowing at the time. This was back when playboy would put nude picks online.
Hey Scott! Love your channel!
Happy Holidays from Boise, Idaho!!