He just had one button to push, and he was waiting for the call.” “I know because we later hired the guy who was in charge of it.
“All the software to bring it down had been uploaded,” Colussy recalls.
secretary of defense’s office, Lloyd’s of London, a member of the Saudi royal family, and Iridium’s principal gateway, in Tempe, Arizona, to paste his deal together-Motorola was threatening daily to let the whole satellite network crash back to Earth. And by the fall of 2000-when Colussy was shuttling between the U.S. The project plowed on nonetheless and opened for business, eating up another $1 billion in operating costs during its first year.īy August 1999, Iridium was bankrupt. So should many of its partners, like Telecom Italia and France Telecom, each of which poured hundreds of millions into building 18 Iridium gateways, or ground-relay stations, around the globe. Motorola, itself one of the big players in the cell phone revolution that made Iridium obsolete, should have known better. Of course by the time it got up, nobody needed it in Paris or London.” Colussy stepped out of retirement and into Iridium’s destiny in 2000 he was a small investor in old Iridium, and thought it “a terrible waste to let this unique technological marvel just die.” “The idea was that a businessman would carry this thing around the world in his briefcase and dial home from Paris or London. “The Iridium business plan was locked in place 12 years before the system became operational,” says Dan Colussy, the veteran aviation executive who masterminded Iridium’s buyout and now reflects happily on it next to his pool in a particularly lush section of Palm Beach Gardens, Florida.
Planned in the mid-1980s, the system was archaic by the time it was deployed in 1998, offering global communications from a brick-size, $3,000 phone at charges from $6 to $30 a minute. Surely you remember Iridium, Motorola Corporation’s $5 billion low-Earth-orbit debacle.
troops stationed in Iraq and Afghanistan. And from knowing enough people in the Pentagon who were bent on keeping Iridium as a unique battlefield resource, the worth of which has been proved daily for U.S. The unlikely path Adams’ life has taken resulted from a few folks taking a second look at the greatest dog ever launched into space and having the chutzpah to offer its receivers half a cent on the dollar. But for Adams, an MIT research engineer with a Bill Gates anti-haircut who when asked to give a visitor driving directions goes to a white board, it symbolizes the lurch his life took four years ago toward adventure and the outer envelope of information science. The derring-do is a small part of the chief technologist’s work. Thanks to Iridium, the pilot arranged an emergency landing on a snow-covered speck of an island in the far south Atlantic. Since that Friday night call (which Adams got because a friend associated with the Alaska Rescue Coordination Center just happened to remember that he worked at Iridium), Adams, 40, has aided in a dozen successful rescues, most memorably one of a pilot with engine trouble off South America’s Cape Horn. Iridium has staff on duty 24-7 to support the technical operations of the system, and though Adams spent several hours that night coordinating an effort to identify the approximate location of the flier’s last transmission, by the time rangers found the man, he was dead. In 2000 Iridium had come within a whisker of disappearing itself, but it lived to transmit again, thanks to the magic of Chapter 11 bankruptcy. The flier had been carrying a telephone serviced by Iridium, a global satellite network for whom Adams is the chief technical officer. The Alaska Rescue Coordination Center was on the line, looking for a pilot missing in the vast northern forests of the state. IT WAS 11:30 ON A FRIDAY NIGHT IN 2003 when Mark Adams got a call at his home in suburban Virginia.