And when no real buyers seemed to materialize, it looked like Iridium would go down as just a "science experiment." Bankruptcy was inevitable-the largest to that point in American history. Only months after launching service, it was $11 billion in debt, burning through $100 million a month, and crippled by baroque rate plans and agreements that forced calls through Moscow, Beijing, Fucino, Italy, and elsewhere. The only problem was that Iridium the company was a commercial disaster. Iridium the satellite system was a mind-boggling technical accomplishment, surely the future of communication. Light years ahead of anything previously put into space, and built on technology developed for Ronald Reagan's "Star Wars," Iridium's constellation of sixty-six satellites in polar orbit meant that no matter where you were on Earth, at least one satellite was always overhead, and you could call Tibet from Fiji without a delay and without your call ever touching a wire. In the early 1990s, Motorola, the legendary American technology company, developed a revolutionary satellite system called Iridium that promised to be its crowning achievement. The incredible story of Iridium-the most complex satellite system ever built, the cell phone of the future, and one of the largest corporate bankruptcies in American history-and one man's desperate race to save it.
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