Thats pretty tl;dr. Just looking at the graph I'd say this part was more important: "Motorola poured $2.6 billion and countless engineer hours into a $5 billio

Thats pretty tl;dr. Just looking at the graph I'd say this part was more important: "Motorola poured $2.6 billion and countless engineer hours into a $5 billion consortium to develop it. But once Iridium was finally operable in the late 1990s, its bulky $3,000 phones and $7-a-minute calls proved prohibitively expensive. Iridium declared bankruptcy in 1999 and sold off the bits for $25 million." Because that was when the decline started.