[HN Gopher] The Iridium Museum
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The Iridium Museum
Author : fortran77
Score : 35 points
Date : 2021-10-27 23:38 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.iridiummuseum.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.iridiummuseum.com)
| yardie wrote:
| 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.
| dtgriscom wrote:
| 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.
| JoeDaDude wrote:
| 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
| lowkey_ wrote:
| I saw the mention of that event on the museum homepage
| actually, and it links here:
| https://www.iridiummuseum.com/exhibits/building-a-sustainabl...
| jonathankoren wrote:
| 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
| labria wrote:
| This is also a museum of 90s website design ;)
| throaway46546 wrote:
| It probably works well over low bandwidth satellite internet.
| elliottcarlson wrote:
| 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.
| GoodbyeMrChips wrote:
| 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!
| wdfx wrote:
| Meaning that it loads quickly, doesn't mess up scrolling or
| history, has no paywall or obnoxious popups etc etc... ?
| jpgvm wrote:
| 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.
| jdonaldson wrote:
| This was way more impressive to me than the invention of the
| internet IMHO.
| dave78 wrote:
| > Unfortunately it was probably a contributing factor in
| putting Motorola under.
|
| What do you mean by this? Motorola is alive and doing
| reasonably well.
| causi wrote:
| 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.
| dave78 wrote:
| 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.
| jasode wrote:
| _> 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=Th
| e....
|
| https://newsroom.motorolasolutions.com/news/motorola-
| solutio...
| jpgvm wrote:
| 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.
| T-A wrote:
| 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.
| aksss wrote:
| "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?
| henvic wrote:
| They didn't even try to hide the fact that they're stuck in the
| 90s.
| akozak wrote:
| 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...
| diek wrote:
| 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.
| jpgvm wrote:
| Iridium was nothing short of an engineering marvel. Your dad
| must be a pretty badass engineer.
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