Remember Iridium? Motorola marketed it as a cellphone network for business people... in the 90s. Of course no one was paying attention. People really believed t

Remember Iridium? Motorola marketed it as a cellphone network for business people... in the 90s. Of course no one was paying attention. People really believed that it would be possible to transmit to LEO from inside an office building (faraday cage) using a tiny radio, powered by a battery small enough to be held in your hand... in 1997. So Iridium Communications went bankrupt, almost instantly, after spending 5 BILLION dollars to launch a constellation of satellites into the sky. It was all other people's money, but still. For what? Why the hell would they do that? Surely someone would have noticed that their target market didn't actually exist. One thing about Iridium was that it was launched from multiple places: Vandenberg Air Base, U.S.A; Baikonur Cosmodrome, Kazakhstan, Plesetsk Cosmodrome, Russia; and Taiyuan Satellite Launch Center, China. Now one of these countries is not like the others. At the time China did not have MIRV technology, but such was needed in order for Iridium to launch: they threw up 66 satellites on 22 rockets. So Iridium Comm, and Motorola lobbied the government for special waivers from the president and got personnel from the pentagon to transport the MIRVs to the launch site on the chinese mainland. That last measure was supposed to prevent the secret military technology from being transferred to the Chinese. It didn't. Here's an excerpt from House Report 104-851 from May, 1999: "In May 1998, allegations were made that Motorola had provided the PRC with technology that would allow it to build a multiple, independently targetable reentry vehicle (MIRV) missile-dispensing platform. The allegations were that the Smart Dispenser used by the PRC to place two Iridium communications satellites into orbit would provide the PRC with technology that would be directly applicable to MIRV dispensing. The Smart Dispenser is an on-orbit maneuvering stage with its own independent guidance system. The Select Committee has determined that Motorola did not provide the PRC with information on how to design the Smart Dispenser; rather, the PRC built the Smart Dispenser indigenously to Motorola’s specifications. However, the Select Committee’s independent technical expert noted that the PRC has demonstrated all of the techniques that are required for developing a MIRV bus, and that the PRC could develop a MIRV dispensing platform within a short period of time after making a decision to proceed." So maybe that's why Iridium happened in the way that it did. Iridium Communications went bankrupt. Of course Motorola continued to have a strong and prosperous relationship with the PRC subsidiaries. In the following years they were contracted to build up significant portions of China's GSM network.