Eccentric Orbits: The Iridium Story

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.

In the early 1990s, Motorola, the legendary American radio and telecom company, made a huge gamble on a revolutionary satellite telephone system called Iridium. Light-years ahead of anything previously put into space, built on technology for Ronald Reagan’s ‘Star Wars’, Iridium was a mind-boggling technical accomplishment that sent waves of panic through phone companies around the world, because, surely, Iridium was the future of communication. Only months after launching service, bankruptcy was inevitable-the largest to that point in American history. It looked like Iridium would go down as just a ‘science experiment’.

That is, until Dan Colussy got a wild idea. Colussy, a retired former President of Pan Am, heard about Motorola’s plans to ‘de-orbit’ the system and decided he would buy Iridium.

A rollicking, unforgettable tale of innovation and failure, Eccentric Orbits masterfully traces the development of satellite technology, the birth of Iridium, and Colussy’s tireless efforts to stop it from being destroyed, despite the doors slammed in his face.