The idea for Iridium was conceived in 1987 when a Motorola engineer and his wife were planning a vacation on a remote island in the Caribbean. The wife, a real estate executive, was wary of travelling to a spot where she’d be out of telephone communication with her home office. Just what would happen if travelling businesspeople had the wherewithal to ‘stay in touch’ from anywhere in the world with a single, fit-in-your-briefcase telephone unit? The proverbial light bulb clicked on, the vacation was cancelled, and Motorola found itself on the threshold of wireless communications 3 an industry that a decade or so later would have a global value in the hundreds of billions. Iridium’s first-of-its-kind plan to utilise low-level satellite technology (called LEO, leap-frogged over the competition, which relied on more traditional high-altitude satellites requiring comparatively huge dishes. Iridium’s satellites would orbit the earth at an altitude of about 420 miles. In November 1998, Iridium unveiled its first handheld satellite phone, after spending $140 million on an international advertising blitz and setting a goal to sign up 500,000 customers within six months. By April, however, only 10,294 people had signed up 3 and they were to pay $3000 each for the clunky, oversized telephones and up to $5 per minute to talk on them. ‘We’re a classic MBA case study in how not to introduce a product’, John Richardson (Iridium’s CEO) said. ‘First we created a marvellous technological achievement. Then we asked the question of how to make money with it.’ Plagued by problems with its suppliers, batteries that needed to be recharged 233 times a day, frequent cut-off calls and interference, and limited global coverage, Iridium also had to compete against cheaper cellular competitors whose technology was considered better. In July 2000, Motorola made the decision to pull the plug on the entire Iridium operation. Iridium was told to issue orders to its 66 LEO satellites 3 now effectively ‘space junk’ 3 to, individually and over a period of several months, fire their thrusters, and alter orbit to a new course that would send each into the earth’s atmosphere to burn up. For a moment it would blaze like a shooting star. ‘A lot of engineering went into making Iridium possible’, said Herschell Shosteck, a Washington DC based analyst, ‘Iridium can serve as a reminder to the entire wireless industry in the future . . . a reminder not to let technological exuberance override business prudence.