Iridium Death Star! - Shows how the constellation can cover the globe

To ensure a global connection, MyComm uses the Iridium satellite service. The history behind Iridium is pretty interesting. The project primarily funded by Motorola was originally conceived in 1987 and became operational in 1998 for an estimated $6billion cost. The plan was to offer global communications to business men but the handsets ended up being the size of a brick and cost $3000, call charges were between $5-$30 per minute! By the time the complete constellation was operational the mobile infrastructure was being rolled out and although the coverage wasn’t global it was good enough and most importantly far less expensive. Nine months after going operational the company went bankrupt and at one point Motorola were going to de-orbit the whole network. Before that could happen a $35million acquisition in 2009 created a new company, Iridium Communications, Inc which is still trading today, providing extensive services to the DoD alongside global customers from the maritime, aviation petroleum and scientific industries.

Each satellite in the current network is approx 680kg, they have two 8m solar panels for power, as well as the main communications antennas there are gateway antennas for communication with the ground stations and crosslink antennas to communicate to other satellites in the constellation. For much more technical details see here.

The Iridium satellite constellation consists of 66 satellites in a low earth orbit of approx 485miles. The satellites orbit from pole to pole with approx a 100 minute orbit time. There are 6 orbital planes with 11 satellites in each plane. The orbit design provides coverage over the planets entire surface.

Currently Iridium is in the process of developing it’s second generation constellation called Iridium NEXT which aims to provide more bandwidth and higher speeds - this time they got a bargain with the estimated cost only $2.9 billion.

JG