I'll bet that if any Iridium engineers are reading this they are shaking their heads in disbelief. Once the hardware decisions were made they were locked in. T

I'll bet that if any Iridium engineers are reading this they are shaking their heads in disbelief. Once the hardware decisions were made they were locked in. The lead times in aerospace are nothing like software or consumer electronics. You can't exactly tweak your hardware when it's orbiting the earth at 500 miles. By the time they launched they must have known of the shortcomings for several years but it was too late to do anything about it. The best they could do is launch and hope that a big enough niche would emerge to fund further development. Sadly, that didn't happen. It was a bold, daring plan that achieved spectacular results. They were very unlucky it didn't work out commercially - even if the reasons are obvious in hindsight. I don't see how they could have done any better. Who knows, maybe one day somebody will figure out a novel way to capitalise on it.