Chapter 1: THE CONSPIRATORS
1. The “Winter White House” had lost the aura of Camelot over the years thanks to highly publicized drinking binges by Senator Ted Kennedy and, most notorious of all, as the place where William Kennedy Smith had sex on the lawn with a woman he picked up in a local bar. (He was acquitted on rape charges in a 1991 trial that attracted national attention.) The structure was a wreck when Castle bought it in 1995, having been left in disrepair by successive waves of Kennedys who were so unsentimental about their famous relative that they hired lawyers to prevent the Palm Beach Town Council from declaring the house a national landmark and making it hard to sell. “It had become almost like a time-share for the Kennedy children,” Castle said. “Seven of them divided it up during the season—the Lawfords, the Shrivers, Caroline, Rosemary.” That meant none of them wanted the restoration expenses attendant on a building declared historic, so they fought the city for fifteen years. When family matriarch Rose Kennedy died in early 1995, the house was placed on the market, which was actually a relief to the city, since that was a better fate than demolition. Castle had seen all the drama within the family as a buying opportunity, telling the Kennedys he would be happy to restore the place to the standards of the city, but only for $4.9 million, not the $7.6 million they were asking for, and the Kennedys eventually took the deal. He then spent five years restoring the crumbling Mediterranean Revival to the way it looked in 1923, when celebrated architect Addison Mizner designed it for Rodman Wanamaker, the Philadelphia department store magnate. It was not one of Mizner’s better efforts, and if it had not been used so often by the First Family, it would no doubt have been torn down long ago. But Castle plunged into the project, surviving some three hundred inspections by the city, even going so far as to leave the presidential bedroom exactly as Jackie had decorated it and to preserve such tiny details as dresser drawer labels handwritten by Rose Kennedy.
2. It would be eclipsed a year and a half later by Enron, which listed $63.4 billion in assets at the time of filing but was still insolvent. The valuations of bankrupt companies are so dicey—do you count what was invested, what was spent, what was owed, or assets at the time of filing?—that several different firms have been cited as the largest flameouts in history. In the 1990s those companies’ valuations were counted in the tens of billions, but in the following decade those numbers would be counted in the hundreds of billions, culminating in the 2008 bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers, widely reported as a $691 billion loss.
Chapter 2: NERDS, NAZIS, AND NUKES
3. Despite the constant rhetoric about satellites as instruments of peace, suspicions that they were actually intended to be used as military weapons pervaded the government. It didn’t help the image of the American program that, at a conference held at the National Academy of Sciences, Vanguard was referred to by the director of the program, John P. Hagen, as the “Naval Research Lab satellite,” only to be corrected by a very junior member of the IGY staff: “The National Academy’s satellite, Dr. Hagen.” Nor did it help that whenever reporters showed up at Cape Canaveral, the result was headlines like “Devoted Navy Men Work Around the Clock at Cape Canaveral to Put Up Vanguard Vehicles”—when, in fact, the vast number of workers in the Vanguard Operations Group were the civilian engineers of the Glenn L. Martin Company, who bristled at the idea that they were hired hands for the military.
Chapter 3: THE SPOOKS
4. This was where the confusingly named Naval Computer and Telecommunications Area Master Station Pacific had been the communications base for the Navy ever since a few days after the Pearl Harbor attacks of 1941, when commanders in the field realized they needed to move their vulnerable radar and radio links into more isolated areas, away from potential combat zones. Wahiawa means “place of noise” in Hawaiian but is actually one of the quietest places in the islands, surrounded by Lake Wilson on three sides, buried between two volcanic mountains, and five miles from the largest Dole pineapple plantation. The only noise occurs in the headphones of the technicians, who listen to coded messages from all over the world, as well as encrypted Iridium phone calls that are routed through a tracking device next door to a cattle ranch into what is officially known as the Enhanced Mobile Satellite Services Gateway.
5. Woodward was really comparing apples to oranges. The UHF Follow-On system, tagged with the sardonic acronym UFO, consisted of eight satellites in geosynchronous orbit and required terminals and ground stations. UFO was indeed designed for “transit and off-station communications,” meaning when ships, planes, and infantry units were on the move, but it was not nearly as mobile as Iridium.
6. The nuclear reactor plant is today the Mohegan Sun resort and casino. When Colussy shut down the plant in the eighties, he was unable to sell the building even after it was declared uncontaminated and cleared for unrestricted uses. Eventually he approached the local Indian tribe, the Mohegans, and asked if it would be interested in using the building for a casino. The chief, a boatbuilder, told him the tribe didn’t qualify for casino ownership. At the time the Mohegans owned an old church but had no money and no land, having recently been turned down by the Bureau of Indian Affairs for classification as a federally designated tribe. So Colussy hired a Washington, D.C., law firm to resubmit their application, noting that one of their burial grounds was on the 240 acres then owned by UNC, and eventually they were approved. He then introduced them to Sol Kerzner, the gambling entrepreneur best known for Sun City in South Africa and the Atlantis development in the Bahamas, and Kerzner worked out a deal with the state of Connecticut to build the Mohegans a highway interchange. Colussy sold Kerzner the building, and it stands today as the main structure of Mohegan Sun. The 240 acres once designated as “Dean’s Chicken Farm” constitutes the Mohegan reservation.
7. The Marine mobile devices in use were the SMART-T (Secure Mobile Anti-Jam Reliable Tactical-Terminal), the UHF TACSAT (a satellite phone that worked off the top-secret Pentagon GEOs), and a high-frequency radio device. All of them had to be activated by the platoon’s radio officer.
Chapter 4: THE DREAMERS
8. HALOSTAR used a manned aircraft flying at fifty-two thousand feet in patterns designed to cover an area of fifty to seventy-five miles in diameter. The test plane, called the High Altitude Long Operation Proteus, resembled a flying catamaran, with the communications payload slung low under the body, and its flights in 2000 set three world altitude records for piloted aircraft, eventually reaching 63,245 feet, or almost twelve miles above sea level. Unfortunately, Angel Technologies never raised the $700 million it would have taken to launch.
9. Aerospace worked closely with the astronauts on Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo, developing data on how the human body reacts to space, and had access to the expertise of Dr. Hubertus Strughold, the “father of space medicine,” one of Wernher von Braun’s colleagues brought to the United States after the war. Strughold had access to data derived from Dachau inmates who had been frozen and put into pressure chambers.
Chapter 5: TREASONS, STRATAGEMS, AND SPOILS
10. Odyssey would become notorious for what was considered one of the most ridiculous patent filings in history. TRW claimed ownership of the medium earth orbit, defined as any trajectory between 5,600 and 10,000 nautical miles from Earth’s surface, and insisted that no one could use that orbit without infringing on its intellectual property. The only other company planning to use MEOs at the time of the 1992 filing was Inmarsat, which was planning to launch ICO Global, and the two companies had been feuding over other issues. Amazingly, the patent was actually granted in 1995, then revoked the same day when Patent and Trademark Office Commissioner Bruce Lehman received a call from Air Force One. To this day no one knows how TRW managed to get even remotely close to patenting a portion of outer space, or who called the President to complain about it, but it was one of only two cases in a hundred years in which a patent was issued and revoked on the same day.
11. To this day the Iridium patent is invalid in Europe, although it’s in full force and effect everywhere else in the world.
12. Teller was an advocate for environmental reform and later asked if he could put a secondary payload on the Iridium constellation—for global ocean-temperature sensing—but the design team turned him down. “We didn’t need an additional bundle of complications,” said Bertiger. “We had to stay focused. What if the secondary payload started sucking power? It could end up screwing up the primary mission.”
13. A quarter of a century later, the $6.1 billion Galileo navigation system was still not operational. The first two satellites were launched in 2011, but the entire thirty-satellite constellation was not expected to be complete until 2019.
14. Asset tracking had been introduced in 1983 by a company called Geostar. The Geostar inventor was a Princeton University physics professor and futurist named Gerard K. O’Neill who had no interest in assets—he envisioned a device that would identify your precise location and send short messages to the police if you were attacked by muggers. Fortunately Qualcomm knew what to do with the technology, introducing OmniTRACS in 1988, a system that could store and forward messages through chips installed in the cabs of eighteen-wheelers. This allowed truck fleets to be monitored so that owners could make sure the trucks never traveled empty. Geostar eventually went bankrupt, and its licenses were purchased by Iridium in 1992.
Chapter 6: ROCKET MAN
15. “Phased array” simply means a radar unit composed of many elements which, when combined electronically, allow it to send and receive signals from all directions without the physical rotation of the antenna. The most famous device equipped with phased-array antennas is the Patriot missile (Patriot is an acronym that stands for “Phased Array Tracking Radar to Intercept of Target”), which was used in the Gulf War to shoot down Scud missiles in flight. The Patriot missile was built by Raytheon, the same company that built the Iridium antennas.
16. Gary Powers’ capture resulted in a sharp curtailment of the CIA’s use of manned aircraft, although the U-2 would remain in service for special assignments into the twenty-first century. Within two months after Powers’s capture, photography surveillance missions had been reassigned to cruise missiles that effectively worked as drones. (Before the missile crashed into the ocean, its photographic film would be ejected and retrieved in midair by a JC-119 aircraft.) Primitive drones had been used in both world wars, but the first modern one was an aircraft that began its life in 1945 when the Army added wings to a Nazi V-2 missile. After many design changes it became the XSM-64, known as the Navaho, but it had so many disastrous tests during 1956 and 1957 that the “Never-go Navaho” was canceled after the nation had spent $700 million on less than one hour of flight time. Even more infamous was the Snark, built by Northrop and introduced in 1946. The Snark could supposedly fly at 150,000 feet at Mach 0.9 speeds, but it had one test failure after another, including an infamous launch in 1956 in which the drone was lost somewhere in the Amazon rainforest and never recovered. With Air Force personnel literally enacting “The Hunting of the Snark,” it was destined to be the last missile of any kind named after a Lewis Carroll creature, especially after techies started referring to the Atlantic coast off Cape Canaveral as “Snark-infested waters.” (The errant Snark was finally found by a Brazilian farmer in 1982.) The Snark program was canceled by President Kennedy in 1961, but it was doomed anyway, because the general staff at the Strategic Air Command hated it. Even after drones proved themselves in combat—especially the so-called Lightning Bugs that were launched from C-130s over Vietnam—the commanders in charge of them continued to despise them. The only drone that ever got any Pentagon support was the AQM-34 Ryan Firebee, and that’s because its only purpose was to be shot down by other planes. The Firebee had thirty-four thousand successful flights in the 1960s—as a gunnery target.
17. For cost reasons, Motorola determined that the Chandler satellite factory should be a 5.3-Sigma operation instead of a full Six Sigma facility. Given what we now know about the durability of the satellites, even this standard was beyond what was needed.
18. An ill-fated INTELSAT launch on February 15, 1996, did end up with a Long March 3B careening into a mountain village, but the extent of the damage was never reported to the outside world. The launch was managed by Loral Space, which was later hauled before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and raked over the coals for allegedly sharing sensitive missile information with the Chinese during the post-crash investigation. Loral’s sin: teaching the Chinese how to avoid crashes in the future by “improving launch reliability.” The committee, chaired by Senator Richard Shelby of Alabama, was equally upset about a post-crash investigation carried out by Hughes Aircraft after a failed Long March 2E mission carrying an Apstar communications satellite in 1995, but that rocket apparently didn’t hit any population centers.
19. Hedy Lamarr, the inventor of CDMA, was an Austrian Jew who was married to the munitions manufacturer Friedrich Mandl when she left him for a career in Hollywood in the 1930s. A decade later she took a 1903 patent by Nikola Tesla describing “spread spectrum” and updated it as a means of wirelessly guiding torpedoes in a manner intended to confuse enemy jamming. She worked out the system on twelve synchronized player pianos with her friend George Antheil, an avant-garde composer, then applied for and received a patent in 1942 for what she called a “Secret Communications System.” Her letters to the U.S. Navy offering it as part of the war effort were ignored, and it wasn’t really employed until 1962, for covert ship-to-ship communications during the Cuban Missile Crisis. It was later used in military satellites but wasn’t used commercially until Qualcomm introduced it in 1988 for its OmniTRACS truck-tracking system. Then, when the first 3G wireless systems were introduced in the late 1990s, they all used CDMA, the “Secret Communications System.”
20. This didn’t mean the other potential competitors went away. A Torrance, California, project called Celstar was a planned $600 million system consisting of a single GEO that would provide bandwidth to existing land-based operators so that their GSM systems would work anywhere. When the Celstar investors were frozen out of the FCC licensing process, they complained loud and long, backed up by small wireless companies that had no other way to achieve 100 percent coverage in the United States. Ultimately they lost their appeals because their project was not global and the WARC frequency allocation had been specifically for global firms.
21. Even though 1610 to 1626.5 MHz was allocated, Motorola built the satellites to use only 1616 to 1626.5, mainly because of WARC footnotes that resulted in tougher restrictions for the lower frequencies. Then, when Globalstar became operational, Iridium had to split that 10.5 MHz of spectrum, so in most of the world the system only uses 1621.25 to 1626.5 MHz. In regions where Globalstar doesn’t operate, Iridium uses the full 1616 to 1626.5.
22. Stamp’s confidence in the Proton proved correct as it became the heavy-lifting workhorse of the entire space industry over the next two decades, resulting in Khrunichev setting up a company in Reston, Virginia, called International Launch Services that eventually captured 30 percent of the world’s business. Oddly, space cooperation between the United States and Russia started to disintegrate in 2014 after NASA cited Russia’s annexation of Crimea as a reason for ending several agreements between the two countries, including agreements that had been in place since 1975. Even more devastating, the Senate passed a bill banning the purchase of Russian-made rocket engines, thereby causing havoc with the launch schedules of Boeing, Lockheed Martin, and the U.S. Air Force. The congressional action essentially ended the life of the American-made Atlas V rocket, because it depended on the RD-180 engine, manufactured by NPO Energomash of Belgorod, Russia. It’s ironic that the “handshake in space” brokered by President Ford could survive an era in which twenty thousand ICBMs were on high alert but couldn’t survive much less dangerous regional disputes over Ukraine. In its half century of service, the Proton has had more than four hundred successful launches.
Chapter 7: FAST EDDIE
23. The FBI was being disingenuous about wiretap arrangements, since it was well known within law enforcement circles that nations within “the family”—England, Australia, and Canada—were often allowed to break the rules. In fact, there were already satellite calls originating in the United States and being processed through a foreign gateway—calls from the American Mobile Satellite Corporation’s “briefcase phone” terminals, which came to Earth in Ottawa. The emphasis on Canada in the FBI legal filings is baffling anyway, since the Canadian gateway would be less dangerous to national security than almost any of the other ten Iridium gateways, and the FBI’s position is even more puzzling now that we know the agency had formed an organization called ILETS (International Law Enforcement Telecommunications Seminars) in 1993 to foster wiretapping across borders among the twenty-one member nations, including Canada. ILETS resulted in “cross-border interception arrangements” that were primarily directed at Internet e-mail but also included satellite phones. This was the first government initiative that routinely downloaded subscriber information, regardless of whether the user was suspected of a crime or not, and that policy would become common in the first decade of the twenty-first century.
24. Four months later Odyssey “merged” with ICO by selling its patents for 7 percent of the company. Roger Rusch, the inventor of Odyssey, would later say the patents were valued at $150 million.
25. Before Celestri, there were two other proposed Motorola broadband systems, one called Millennium, which would have used four Ka-band GEOs, and another called M-Star, which would have used seventy-two LEOs in the EHF (Extremely High Frequency) spectrum. Celestri included both systems and added sixty-three Ka-band LEOs in a massive constellation that would provide every kind of broadband service between the 60th parallels.
26. A Monte Carlo simulation is an algorithm that uses random sampling to take into account every possible outcome of open-ended situations. Through years of experience, Motorola knew that Monte Carlo simulations were always better predictors of cost overruns or schedule overruns than any other method.
27. The combined Teledesic-Celestri system coined a new term. Unlike the Little LEOs, such as Orbcomm, and the Big LEOs, like Iridium, this was a “Mega LEO.” Shortly after the new Teledesic-Celestri constellation was mapped, France’s Alcatel responded with a Mega LEO plan of its own, called SkyBridge, consisting of eighty LEOs at 905 miles up that would offer broadband to fixed terminals. Now that the ACTS satellite had proven how versatile the Ka-band could be, Ka-band projects were sprouting up all over the place. Hughes Aircraft announced it was building a $4.5 billion Ka-band project called SpaceWay as a rival to Teledesic, and AOL would soon join Hughes as a $1 billion partner. Not to be outdone, Lockheed Martin chimed in with a nine-GEO system called Astrolink, budgeted at $3.7 billion, in partnership with Telespazio and TRW. General Electric started looking for partners for a $2.5 billion constellation of seven satellites to be called GE Star, and Loral announced a $2 billion three-GEO system called CyberStar. Thanks to the events of 1998 and 1999, none of these broadband systems would ever be built.
Chapter 8: MAN OVERBOARD
28. The Iridium Annual Report for 1997 actually lists $4.7 billion of “financing,” but it’s unclear whether the word “financing” implies debt. If it does, then the total start-up cost for Iridium would be $7.061 billion.
29. The minimalistic logo, created by Landor Associates of San Francisco, is still in use today.
30. Claircom was a partnership of Craig McCaw and Hughes Aircraft that was acquired by AT&T in 1994 when McCaw sold his cellular empire, and it had captured 39 percent of the market by building out a system of 151 ground stations that could be accessed from the air in North America. In Europe the system used both ground stations and Inmarsat.
31. Iridium was increasingly regarded as a first-aid kit in the event of apocalyptic situations. The Office of Management and Budget studied the Iridium phone throughout 1999 and recommended its use as the “last resort” backup communications device for all government agencies on New Year’s Eve 1999, when the nation was poised for the possibility of massive infrastructure breakdowns. Similar conclusions were reached by the President’s Commission on Critical Infrastructure Protection, which had been meeting for years to deal with the question “What if a cyber attack brings down an essential service like fire, police, medical, banking, or energy distribution?” The answer: use Iridium phones until the services are restored.
32. The Motorola Timeport was quickly followed by the Bosch World Phone and the Ericsson I888, both worldwide roaming phones operating on the GSM standard and retailing for under $300.
Chapter 9: THE WONKS SCRAMBLE
33. Fifteen years later, Lockheed Martin was still building Buchanan’s vaunted Mobile User Objective System. It turned out to be more expensive than Iridium at $7.3 billion and rising.
34. This is not quite as cynical as it sounds. Seven-eighths of the world’s land area is in the Northern Hemisphere.
35. The idea of adapting Iridium for use in parts of the world that were otherwise without telephony stirred the imaginations of futurists and intellectuals who weighed in on an e-mail thread initiated by distinguished science fiction author David Brin. Among them were Bangladeshi telephone visionary Iqbal Quadir, IBM executive Michael R. Nelson, Microsoft chief strategist Nathan Myhrvold, British science writer Oliver Morton, “Father of the Internet” Vinton Cerf, Whole Earth Catalog creator Stewart Brand, and World Bank economists Carlos Braga and Andrew H. W. Stone. The high level of interest is not that surprising since sociologists, anthropologists, political scientists, and economists had been writing about the projected impact of Iridium throughout the 1990s.
Chapter 11: ET TU?
36. Scott Adams, creator of the Dilbert comic strip, was following the drama that summer and penned two panels about Iridium in late July 2000. In one, Dilbert raises his hand to ask a question of the executive announcing the Iridium de-orbit. “Question: Wouldn’t that create dozens of deadly flame balls speeding toward Earth?” asks Dilbert. The answer from the executive: “That’s why we’re aiming for cities that have lots of swimming pools.”
37. The one time Neuberger did work on the Sabbath was the exception that proved the rule. When Colussy and Neuberger were in the process of selling UNC to General Electric, Colussy was suddenly asked to an “urgent” negotiating session with GE chairman Jack Welch on a Friday night. Not certain what to do, and uncomfortable with the idea of negotiating a nine-figure deal with Welch alone, Colussy took the risk of calling Neuberger’s Miami hotel room. After several rings, Neuberger picked up the phone but didn’t speak. Colussy explained the situation. There was a long pause. Finally Neuberger said, “Come to my room, knock three times on the door, and say you have an emergency. Repeat this three times.” Then he abruptly hung up. Colussy did as he was told, going to the room, knocking three times, declaring an emergency, and then repeating the ritualized request for assistance. After the third request, Neuberger cracked open the door and gave Colussy some advice, warning him not to agree to anything Welch wanted. An hour later, Colussy was seated in the hotel lobby, speaking directly to Welch, when he suddenly noticed something out of the corner of his eye. A man was hiding behind a potted plant, making hand gestures to Colussy. It was Neuberger, still clad in his pajamas, on a mission of business assistance that somehow conformed to the rules of the Sabbath but didn’t allow getting dressed.
38. EZ Bank had essentially the same business plan as PayPal, which had been launched in 1999 but didn’t truly take off until 2001. PayPal worked over common Internet connections available to everyone, but Maruani apparently believed that a more secure network was required for banking operations.
Chapter 12: THE FIXER
39. “Syncom” was also the name of a satellite launched by Hughes Aircraft in 1963. The outer space Syncom stood for “Synchronous Communication,” whereas the Wilkins-Jones partnership stood for “Syndicated Communications,” but choosing the namesake of the most powerful of all the first-generation communications satellites would later seem prescient.
40. Wilkins was not alone. Al Gore, while a Senator, once called Malone “the Darth Vader of the cable industry” for his hardball tactics and anti-consumer policies.
41. The first space junk to plop down in a populated area was a 20-pound piece of Sputnik 4, which landed on the center line of North 8th Street in Manitowoc, Wisconsin, on September 5, 1960. Nine years later, five Japanese seamen were hit by falling debris near Sakhalin Island, and that debris was assumed to be from space, but the origin of the objects was never determined. The only verified instance of a human being struck by space debris occurred on January 22, 1997, when Lottie Williams of Tulsa, Oklahoma, was struck on the shoulder by a rumpled metal shard about twice the size of a human hand while walking her dog in O’Brien Park. The debris turned out to be part of a Delta II upper-stage booster. Williams was unharmed, but, more ominously, a 507-pound piece of stainless steel from the propellant tank of that same booster hit the ground near Georgetown, Texas, and a 66-pound piece of the titanium pressurant sphere landed near Seguin, Texas.
Chapter 14: FOUR DEAD BIRDS IN THE SITUATION ROOM
42. Orbital debris is monitored by NORAD because the primary reason for tracking objects in space is to make sure they’re not mistaken for nuclear warheads. The United States and Russia both notify the other country whenever any object reenters Earth’s atmosphere.
43. The main concern for the future was the expected life of the batteries, which was anywhere from eight to twenty-five years, depending on whose data you were using and how many phones were in service.
44. In fact, the island nations of the South Pacific had gotten into the satellite business, but only to apply to the ITU for orbital “slots” that they could then resell. Princess Salote Mafile’o Pilolevu Tuita, sister of the king of Tonga, went so far as to buy a twenty-two-year-old decommissioned COMSAT satellite that had been used for AT&T phone service but had long since become obsolete. The salvaged satellite was never used, as far as anyone could tell, and her company—TONGASAT—ended up at the center of a national scandal, owing $32.3 million she somehow managed to borrow from the national treasury.
45. These recollections by Dan Colussy and Isaac Neuberger were disputed by the Saudis, who say they were never influenced by the prospect of Craig McCaw investing.
46. Money eventually produced a one-page document called “Compelling Reasons Supporting DoD Use of Iridium,” and it circulated throughout Washington as the answer whenever anyone asked, “Why do we need these phones?” It was basically a rearranged version of Dave Oliver’s reasons: 1) the military’s satcom system was maxed out, 2) this was the only system with global pole-to-pole coverage, 3) there was a need to preserve the government’s $200 million investment, and 4) Iridium was the only handheld device that offered Type 1 security, the highest level of encryption.
47. Robyn’s answer put her in the curious position of defending Motorola’s motives to OMB. “The precedent issue concerns me,” she wrote, “but I don’t consider this a ‘bail out’ really. Rather it’s a way to counter Motorola’s incentive to destroy a very valuable asset rather than face the prospect of frivolous (but potentially successful) lawsuits for things for which it is not responsible. . . . Surely it cannot be good public policy to have the creating company destroy an asset for fear that, in our overly litigious society, some clever lawyer is going to figure out a way to hold the company liable for something that it cannot control if the asset is sold.”
48. Rusch was constantly quoted in the press, always identified as a “satellite industry consultant” who believed Iridium was a virtually worthless system that would soon wear out, but the reporters never noted that he was the inventor of TRW’s Odyssey system, a competitor of Iridium that was never built.
Chapter 15: MOOSE HUNTERS, MARINES, AND THUGS
49. The Prince had formed a Curaçao corporation called Baralonco NV in the 1980s to handle investments in the United States, and he chose to switch his ownership to that company instead of Mawarid Overseas Investments Ltd., which had made the original Iridium investment. Curaçao is part of the Netherlands, and the Netherlands is a World Trade Organization partner that is immune from some of the foreign-ownership rules. But the FCC refused to accept Baralonco as a “transparent” entity and kept pressing the company for information, suggesting that the transfer of licenses from Motorola to the new Iridium might be held up, even after Baralonco made all the appropriate disclosures.
50. Among the displaced residents was Globalstar CEO Jay Monroe, whose New Orleans home was directly in the path of the hurricane. Monroe was unable to get any information on the condition of his property, a fact that Iridium chose not to emphasize in its public relations despite Globalstar’s less-than-charitable comments on Iridium’s service reliability four years earlier.
51. The 2003 Kentucky Derby turned out to be legendary in the world of Thoroughbred racing. As Derby day approached, Empire Maker seemed to be the culmination of two and a half decades and hundreds of millions of dollars that Prince Khalid had poured into his Juddmonte Farms, which consisted of eight breeding operations in Kentucky, Ireland, and England. Although Juddmonte had earned the industry’s highest awards for its broodmare stock, the stable had never won a Triple Crown race, much less the Kentucky Derby. So when race day arrived, a small legion of the Prince’s employees showed up in Louisville to watch Empire Maker go off as the solid 6-to-5 favorite in a field of sixteen, with U.S. Racing Hall of Fame jockey Jerry Bailey aboard—only to be defeated by the most unlikely winner of the Derby in its 129-year history. Funny Cide, a gelding purchased for $75,000 by an unknown trainer named Barclay Tagg, was owned by some high school buddies from the little Upstate New York town of Sackets Harbor—their stable was playfully called “Sackatoga”—and they had pooled their resources to rent a school bus to take them the 750 miles to Churchill Downs. Going off at 15-to-1 and winning by almost two lengths, Funny Cide’s victory was considered one of the greatest upsets in Derby history, and the gentle gelding soon became a national favorite two weeks later when he defied the odds again, winning the second leg of the Triple Crown, the Preakness, just a few miles up I-95 from Iridium headquarters. It must have rankled the highest-paid breeders, trainers, and jockeys in the world to be beaten by a horse considered so unlikely to be worth breeding that he was gelded before he ran his first race. The Prince’s racing team pulled Empire Maker out of the Preakness in order to rest him for the final Triple Crown race, the Belmont Stakes, and as race day approached for that grandest of old-money New York pageants, the matchup between Funny Cide and Empire Maker was one of the most anticipated Belmont had ever hosted: the “people’s horse,” the gelding from nowhere, the first New York–bred horse to win the Kentucky Derby, the cheapest horse to win any major stakes race in decades, trying to become the first Triple Crown winner since 1978 by running against the slick multimillion-dollar Arab-owned dark bay colt descended from the best bloodstock in the world. The Sackatoga boys were superstitious, so they again rented a school bus to bring them to Belmont Park, but it rained all day before the race and left one of the muddiest tracks the Belmont railbirds had ever seen. When the horses paraded out of the paddock, the crowd broke into chants of “Funny Cide! Funny Cide!” and jockey José Santos raised his crop to acknowledge the cheers. But when the field of six broke from the starting gate on that cold, drizzly day, Bailey aboard Empire Maker forced Funny Cide to the rail—where the mud was deepest—and stayed on his haunches all the way down the back stretch to make sure he had a dead ride. The mile-and-a-half race, the longest in the world on a dirt surface, took a toll on Funny Cide’s legs, and as he entered the final stretch, he started losing the lead. Empire Maker, racing on the harder-packed dirt, easily swung around him and won the race, but when the jubilant Bailey entered the winner’s circle, the partisan crowd responded with jeers and boos. When the mud-caked Funny Cide rode back into view a few seconds later, the boos turned to cheers. Empire Maker’s trainer, Bobby Frankel, took credit for the race strategy and was honored eight years later when a bay foal sired at Barnstead Manor in England was named after him. That horse, Frankel, became the top rated Thoroughbred in history, winning fourteen races over three seasons in Europe and retiring to stud at the same farm where he was born, covering about 150 mares per season at the record fee of $190,000 per insemination. The next Triple Crown winner wouldn’t come along until 2015, and it was a horse called American Pharaoh—Empire Maker’s grandson.
52. Sky Station had the blessing of the ITU, two dozen strategic partners, and a blue-ribbon board that included former Secretary of State Alexander Haig and Martine Rothblatt, the same regulatory attorney who had been Martin Rothblatt at the time he founded Sirius Satellite Radio in 1990 but was now Martine after a sex-change operation. Another reason Sky Station may have had problems with investors was that it just sounded too darn freaky. While providing broadband, the platforms were also designed to suck up chlorine molecules, working as an environmental vacuum cleaner that “cleans the ozone layer.” And cofounder Rothblatt was active in the cryogenics movement, advocating “xenotransplantation” as a way to achieve human immortality, as well as a scheme to preserve a person’s brain data in digital files and upload it into clones.
53. The Bergen Linux User Group actually tested the Internet protocol for carrier pigeons. Called IPoAC (IP over Avian Carriers), it had an unfortunate 55 percent packet-loss rate. (This endnote will be humorous only if you’re an engineer.)
54. The first polar phone call appears to have been made on May 7, 2001, by two trekkers claiming to be standing on the North Pole. But since the true North Pole is in the middle of the Arctic Ocean, amid constantly shifting sea ice, you can never be quite sure who’s been there and who hasn’t. The other place where a “Guess where I am” Iridium phone call has become traditional is the summit of Mount Everest, a tradition begun by mountaineer Byron Smith and captured in real time on Good Morning Canada.
55. Test pilots Steve Barter and Troy Pennington took off from the Lockheed Martin Tactical Aircraft Systems airport in Fort Worth, Texas, on the morning of August 27, 1999, and made continuous voice calls using a cockpit handset while executing vertical dives, barrel rolls, vertical climbs, and Mach 1.6 speeds at forty-two thousand feet.
56. Yael Maguire, engineering director at Facebook Connectivity Lab, appeared at the Social Good Summit in New York City in September 2014 and described the drones as “roughly the size of a commercial aircraft” flying between sixty thousand and ninety thousand feet. Maguire mentioned a “regulatory risk” in the course of his remarks but didn’t go into detail.
57. The myth that the original Iridium phone was analog, not digital, stuck to the company throughout its life, mainly because every other phone released by Motorola was analog well into the late 1990s. Iridium was actually the first digital device released by Motorola, using a modulation scheme called “quadrature phase-shift keying.” (Modulation is the process by which information is inserted into the radio wave. The original analog modulation schemes—amplitude modulation and frequency modulation—are the actual names of AM and FM. There are dozens of digital modulation schemes.) The confusion also stemmed from the fact that the Iridium phone was a narrowband device that used TDMA instead of CDMA, making it less versatile than some other terrestrial cellular devices.
58. In 1991 Ray Leopold met with Commerce Secretary Robert Mosbacher, the onetime Houston wildcatter and close friend of President Bush père, who was actively promoting initiatives by private industry. Mosbacher wanted to discuss NASA’s Landsat program, consisting of two remote-sensing satellites that circled the planet at four hundred miles up, taking pictures of Earth that retailed to industry for $4,400 per photo. Mosbacher thought that was expensive, especially since the French had launched a satellite that could do the same thing for much less. Since Iridium would be at about the same altitude, couldn’t they just take that over and do it more cheaply? Leopold told him it was a great idea, but Motorola had already made the decision not to put cameras on the satellites. Iridium had skeptical partners who thought the whole project was some kind of secret plot by the CIA, and cameras would only increase suspicion. Mosbacher nonetheless became a major ally of Iridium, helping Motorola later with permissions to cooperate with the Russians and Chinese.
59. Matt Desch disputed parts of this narrative, saying that none of the Iridium partners was that interested in the second generation when he was first interviewed for the job, and each was mainly concerned with tax bills, not the future of the constellation. This version is at variance with eight years of Colussy’s documents, notes, speeches, and e-mails from the years 2000 to 2008, as well as recollections by the parties involved.
Epilogue: TWILIGHT OF THE WARRIORS
60. Several other companies ventured into the Ka-band business, but they all used bent-pipe GEOs and earth stations in the quest to supply the world’s insatiable demand for data. Astrolink, the multibillion-dollar constellation planned by Lockheed Martin, flamed out in 2001, never to be revived. But a Denver start-up called iSky launched a service called WildBlue on the first of two GEOs in 2004, offering Internet at about thirty times the speed of dial-up through small VSAT earth dishes that looked like the ones that delivered satellite television. WildBlue was partly financed by John Malone, the old nemesis of Herb Wilkins, and Malone still retained a 37 percent stake when the company was sold in 2009 for $568 million to ViaSat of Carlsbad, California. ViaSat built out an additional nineteen earth stations, bringing the total to thirty, and launched a third GEO offering service under the trade name Exede Internet in 2011, selling primarily to farmers and other rural customers in North America. Meanwhile, Hughes launched the long-delayed Spaceway project in 2005—two GEOs providing what it claimed to be broadband-on-demand—but before the service could ever be offered, the satellites were sold to News Corporation for its DirecTV service. A third Spaceway bird did finally launch in 2007, offering Internet access similar to the WildBlue system. On the other side of the Atlantic, Avanti Communications Group of London was formed in 2002 to provide broadband for Europe, and after spending $850 million, it launched a GEO called Hylas in 2010. Avanti’s plan was similar to WildBlue, but after four years in business and two more launches, it was struggling to stay afloat, and increasingly its sales were to third-party cell systems trying to provide Internet for businesses forced to survive in areas like rural Libya and Zimbabwe. None of the Ka-band systems are global, and advertised maximum transmission speeds are four times slower than the rates achieved by the ACTS in 1998. Oddly, these systems are mostly directed at the most extensively wired parts of the planet. They’re simply picking up customers stuck in random dead zones.
61. GLONASS, the Russian satellite navigation system, was designed in 1976 in an attempt to match the Pentagon’s GPS, which was funded in 1973 and launched in 1978. GLONASS was finally completed in 1995, although it didn’t always function properly and didn’t attain full coverage of Russian territories until 2010. The twenty-four-satellite constellation was supposed to be part of a worldwide positioning system that would include GPS and Europe’s Galileo system, but in the summer of 2014 Russian and American space officials started feuding over the arrangements for Russian ground stations in the United States and U.S. ground stations in Russia, and it appeared that the consortium was falling apart.