1996:
Motorola Satellite for Iridium
"One World … One Telephone"
This satellite is the heart of a space-based communications system called Iridium, conceived, designed, and built by Motorola. Inaugurated in November 1998, under the auspices of Iridium LLC (a "startup" company formed by Motorola), this complex space system allows callers using handheld mobile phones and pagers to communicate anywhere in the world-a first in the history of telephony.
This simple rundown, though, hides a "Hollywood" story. Iridium was the boldest and most expensive private space initiative yet undertaken — a test of the post-Cold War notion that markets might replace government as the drivers of space exploration and development. Its development unfolded like a larger-than-life script — a tale of big ideas, big money, boundless optimism, clever achievements, and then reversals of fortune, heartbreak, collapse, and, rebirth. In 1988, Motorola engineers Ken Peterson, Raymond Leopold, and Bary Bertiger conceived the Iridium idea: a digital, wireless telephone and paging service that covered the entire Earth — a feat made possible by a constellation of 66 satellites in low-Earth orbit. No one had ever used low-Earth orbits for a communications system, nor attempted to master the numerous technical challenges of building, launching, and operating 66 satellites as a telephone network in the sky. As a supranational enterprise, Iridium had its own country code — like the U.S. or China — and had to overcome the technical and bureaucratic hurdles of meshing its system with phone networks around the world.
In the 1990s, the end of the Cold War created strange bedfellows. Communist China and Russia, the United States' Cold War archenemies, joined the venture as investors, as did other countries and corporations from around the world. Wired, the go-go magazine for technological enthusiasts, dubbed the undertaking the "United Nations of Iridium" and wryly noted (with reference to Superman), "It's a bird, it's a phone, it's the world's first pan-national corporation able to leap geopolitical barriers in a single bound." After the collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989, Iridium emerged as a potent symbol of the role of communications in transcending national borders and connecting people around the world — part of a technological vanguard that heralded liberal democratic values and a global shift toward market economies. Through satellites and the Internet, new streams of information ran through and over political boundaries, whether individual nations welcomed it or not.
In November 1998, after much hard work, many innovations, and the expenditure of billions of dollars, Iridium started service. The system worked (with a few glitches), allowing users with a phone a bit bigger than a cell phone (detractors described it as "brick-sized") to call Antarctica, Mt. Everest, or Washington, D.C., with equal ease. Expectations were high that Iridium would catch on in a world in which people could not seem to get enough "anytime, anywhere" communication.
But a mere nine months after its debut, Iridium filed for bankruptcy. There were too few customers to pay off the enormous investment costs. Motorola prepared to de-orbit the satellites and incinerate them in the Earth's atmosphere. But then a government rather than a private market voice pushed to save the system — the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD). DoD participated in planning for Iridium and was an early customer — and for good reason. The system's global coverage served the far-flung geographical needs of the military services. DoD encouraged a new group of investors to buy the bankrupt enterprise. Under the reborn company, called Iridium Satellite, DoD has used satellite telephony extensively in operations in the post-September 11 wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
This satellite was the first of the Iridium series built by Motorola, probably manufactured in late 1996. The company donated it to the Museum in 1998.
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