Maybe I Should Give Iridium A Shot

摘要

Obsessed fans of this column, assuming any such exist, will recall that I once bemoaned the plan by bankrupt Iridium LLC to deorbit its constellation of satellites. That struck me as just plain mad, along the lines of knocking down a perfectly good building because nobody wants to pay the rent you have to charge for the penthouse to make the whole thing profitable. A working system of 66 communications satellites, plus eight in-orbit spares, doesn't exactly grow on trees. And it's not as though burning the things up in the atmosphere a few months into their service lifetime was going to let Iridium get its deposit back.