called starlink. 12k sats in total. 4.4k in ka- and ku-band. 7.5k in v-band. inter-sat will be optics-based above 10k ghz.
This Naive Moron don't know the business.
His Tesla also going bankrupt. Dotard also bankrupted 6X!
Motorla's Iridium was 1st such space Internet by Ang Moh = filed Chapter 11 Bankruptcy when not even fully deployed 66 iridium satellites!
Then came the MicroSHIT Bill Gates' Teledesic planed 840 satellites, Bill Gates also Pok Kai for this plan and scaled back to 288 satellites, also can not fund it! In the end all failed, just left with dozens of useless space junks! GlobalStar also failed and bankrupted their 48 satellites! So far Ang Moh all ass luck with space Internet satellites!
https://www.airspacemag.com/space/the-rise-and-fall-and-rise-of-iridium-5615034/
The Rise and Fall and Rise of Iridium
Iridium’s constellation of 66 comsats was a technological triumph but a business disaster-until an executive and a computer geek found salvation in the Pentagon.
By Craig Mellow
Air & Space Magazine |
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September 2004
6100149
IT WAS 11:30 ON A FRIDAY NIGHT IN 2003 when Mark Adams got a call at his home in suburban Virginia. The Alaska Rescue Coordination Center was on the line, looking for a pilot missing in the vast northern forests of the state. The flier had been carrying a telephone serviced by Iridium, a global satellite network for whom Adams is the chief technical officer. In 2000 Iridium had come within a whisker of disappearing itself, but it lived to transmit again, thanks to the magic of Chapter 11 bankruptcy.
The Alaskan pilot wasn’t so lucky. Iridium has staff on duty 24-7 to support the technical operations of the system, and though Adams spent several hours that night coordinating an effort to identify the approximate location of the flier’s last transmission, by the time rangers found the man, he was dead. Since that Friday night call (which Adams got because a friend associated with the Alaska Rescue Coordination Center just happened to remember that he worked at Iridium), Adams, 40, has aided in a dozen successful rescues, most memorably one of a pilot with engine trouble off South America’s Cape Horn. Thanks to Iridium, the pilot arranged an emergency landing on a snow-covered speck of an island in the far south Atlantic. The derring-do is a small part of the chief technologist’s work. But for Adams, an MIT research engineer with a Bill Gates anti-haircut who when asked to give a visitor driving directions goes to a white board, it symbolizes the lurch his life took four years ago toward adventure and the outer envelope of information science.
The unlikely path Adams’ life has taken resulted from a few folks taking a second look at the greatest dog ever launched into space and having the chutzpah to offer its receivers half a cent on the dollar. And from knowing enough people in the Pentagon who were bent on keeping Iridium as a unique battlefield resource, the worth of which has been proved daily for U.S. troops stationed in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Surely you remember Iridium, Motorola Corporation’s $5 billion low-Earth-orbit debacle. Planned in the mid-1980s, the system was archaic by the time it was deployed in 1998, offering global communications from a brick-size, $3,000 phone at charges from $6 to $30 a minute. “The Iridium business plan was locked in place 12 years before the system became operational,” says Dan Colussy, the veteran aviation executive who masterminded Iridium’s buyout and now reflects happily on it next to his pool in a particularly lush section of Palm Beach Gardens, Florida. “The idea was that a businessman would carry this thing around the world in his briefcase and dial home from Paris or London. Of course by the time it got up, nobody needed it in Paris or London.” Colussy stepped out of retirement and into Iridium’s destiny in 2000; he was a small investor in old Iridium, and thought it “a terrible waste to let this unique technological marvel just die.”
Motorola, itself one of the big players in the cell phone revolution that made Iridium obsolete, should have known better. So should many of its partners, like Telecom Italia and France Telecom, each of which poured hundreds of millions into building 18 Iridium gateways, or ground-relay stations, around the globe. The project plowed on nonetheless and opened for business, eating up another $1 billion in operating costs during its first year.
By August 1999, Iridium was bankrupt. And by the fall of 2000—when Colussy was shuttling between the U.S. secretary of defense’s office, Lloyd’s of London, a member of the Saudi royal family, and Iridium’s principal gateway, in Tempe, Arizona, to paste his deal together—Motorola was threatening daily to let the whole satellite network crash back to Earth. “All the software to bring it down had been uploaded,” Colussy recalls. “I know because we later hired the guy who was in charge of it. He just had one button to push, and he was waiting for the call.”
The call never came. Iridium flies still, six groups of eleven 1,412-pound satellites orbiting Earth every 100 minutes, guided from the basement of a featureless two-story office building in Leesburg, Virginia, which houses a bank of Sun computers as long as a football field. Two or three techies lounge in a room next door, making sure a wall full of monitors bleep the way they are supposed to.
Is maintaining the grand celestial miscalculation worth it? At an investment of $5 billion, of course not. But at $25 million, plus an undisclosed amount Colussy and his partners agreed to invest after the purchase, it may very well be.
Iridium and Globalstar, a satellite phone competitor that also went bankrupt, though with a somewhat smaller loss, were a triumph of engineering over common sense. “People have realized by now that the way to go into the satellite business is to start localized so your initial investment is low,” says Max Engel, who follows space communications for the consulting firm Frost & Sullivan. “XM Radio, for instance, which I have in my car, uses just two satellites. Iridium’s system was based on building [for] the whole globe, then wondering whether you were going to have any customers.”
Iridium’s architecture locked it into massive upfront costs. The project was the world’s biggest deployment of low-Earth-orbit satellites (known in the trade as LEOs), which hover a mere 483 miles above our heads, compared to 22,000 miles for geostationary satellites (GEOs). A LEO network’s proximity to Earth all but eliminates the half-second signal lag users of geostationary communications experience, an advantage Iridium counted on as a great selling point for its telephone service. But the lower altitude of LEOs shrinks the service footprint of each satellite. From 22,000 miles up, one geostationary satellite can fan out communications to a third of the world; each Iridium LEO satellite, on the other hand, reaches just 1/66 of the globe, so any one or two are usually useless without the others in the constellation.
http://www.zdnet.com/article/teledesic-backs-away-from-satellite-push/
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Teledesic backs away from satellite push
Money proves an uncrossable barrier for the would-be spacemen of Bill Gates' global satellite network company
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Rupert Goodwins | October 3, 2002 -- 09:27 GMT (17:27 GMT+08:00) | Topic:
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After twelve years and "hundreds of millions" of development dollars, high-speed satellite network company Teledesic is suspending activities and has gone into hibernation until the international markets pick up.
The first two satellites of the thirty-satellite constellation have been effectively abandoned in their Italian factory. In a statement, the company said that it wouldn't be prudent "to continue the substantial capital expenditures required to construct and launch the satellites consistent with the timing required to meet FCC and ITU regulatory milestones."
Teledesic's network, funded in part by Bill Gates, a Saudi prince and Boeing, was to have provided global Internet access and other digital services at speeds of up to 720mbps.
The original $9bn plans had called for 840 refrigerator-sized satellites in a dense, laser-linked mesh some 500 miles above the Earth by the year 2000. More recent and more sober plans had substantially downgraded the network, but in the end the commercial failure of other public-access systems such as Iridium at the height of the dot com boom made the success of Teledesic during the digital recession seem even more like science fiction.
"Our decision to suspend our activities results from an unprecedented confluence of events in the telecommunications industry and financial markets," said Craig McCaw, co-chief executive of Teledesic. His fellow co-chief executive William Owens added: "Teledesic's global licence for 1GHz of non-geostationary satellite spectrum with international ITU priority is widely viewed as a significant regulatory achievement that is not likely to be duplicated".
The company says it will now substantially reduce its staff as it evaluates what to do next.
https://www.quora.com/Who-funds-bankrupt-satellite-companies-such-as-Iridium-Globalstar-Teledesic
Who funds bankrupt satellite companies such as Iridium, Globalstar, Teledesic?
1 Answer
Ivan Vidyakin, Have been running a satellite phone and equipment business since 2005
Answered Feb 24 2013
None of these companies have been funded by the government. Teledesic is defunct and doesn't have any operations. Iridium and Globalstar maintain operations and provide their service to commercial and government customers.
Iridium Satellite. After a group of private investors purchased the defunct Iridium in 2001 for about $25 million, the company has been operating since then and has been profitable for the last few years. Although initially a long-term service agreement with the US government helped Iridium reliably generate cash flow, the government didn't directly fund the new Iridium. Currently direct government service revenue constitutes just about 21% of Iridium service revenues (although more service is purchased by government users indirectly via Iridium's commercial service providers).
Iridium is a publicly traded company, listed on
NASDAQ (exchange) (IRDM). Net income in Q3 2012 was $17.8 million. It is currently building the new generation satellite constellation to be launched in 2015-17.
Globalstar (company). Globalstar never ceased operations. After filing for bankruptcy in 2002, the company was re-organized and got under control of an investment company Thermo Capital Partners LLC. The new Globalstar has been financially troubled since 2006-07 when most of its first generation satellites experienced degradation of service due to effects of radiation in space. As a result, Globalstar's
Satellite Phone Service has been hardly available, but the company, although unprofitable, managed to stay afloat in part due to success of its personal satellite messenger SPOT. They managed to fund building and launching the new satellites (the last 6 were launched in February 2013), which will let Globalstar fully restore their voice and data service by summer or fall 2013. Financial prospects for Globalstar are still uncertain, since the company will have to spend a lot to acquire a sufficient customer base.
To summarize, the initial projects failed in part due to high expectations, lack of specialization, lavish spending and unwillingness of their huge parents to support the ventures after initial problems. The new companies (especially Iridium) managed to find their market niche and focus on it, fully exploiting the existing infrastructure (which they didn't have to build initially).
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