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To: CAtechTrader who wrote (28120)	8/7/2000 10:05:16 AM
From: DepyDog	Respond to of 35685

Iridium Gets One More Chance at Survival Published: 2000 July 31 9:46 pm ET (0146 UT) A bankruptcy court gave satellite phone company Iridium a week and a half to find a buyer for the company's assets or else it will approve a plan to deorbit the company's satellites. The decision by the federal bankruptcy court in New York City came after merchant bank Castle Harlan backed out of plans Friday to purchase the company's assets, including the more than 70 satellites currently in orbit, for $50 million. "Although Iridium provides a magnificent international point-to-point telephone service, our due diligence and marketing studies were unable to confirm that Iridium would generate even low levels of revenue with a high degree of certainty," Castle Harlan said in a statement Friday afternoon. In June the bankruptcy court granted Castle Harlan a 45-day "due diligence" period, during which time the bank investigated Iridium top determine if it the company's assets would be worth the $50-million offer it made. Iridium now has until August 9 to try and work out a new deal with Castle Harlan or another company, such as New York-based Venture Partners, which expressed interest in the company earlier this year. If no deal is made by then, Motorola, which operates the satellites for Iridium, will have approval from the court to begin deorbiting Iridium's satellite constellation. "We have a plan in place to decommission the constellation once the deorbiting plan is finalized," Motorola said in a statement on its Web site. "Details of that plan will be discussed once it is finalized." Iridium filed for bankruptcy protection in August of last year after the company had difficulty attracting customers for its worldwide satellite phone service. After Teledesic cofounder Craig McCaw declined to bail out the company in March, the company ceased operation March 17. Since then Iridium has been looking for potential buyers of its assets while Motorola worked on a plan to deorbit the satellites. Motorola said in March that it would take up to nine months to rewrite software and fire the thrusters for the initial orbit-lowering maneuver, and up to two years until all the satellites have been deorbited. The total cost of the deorbiting maneuver is expected to be between $30 and $50 million, and will likely be shouldered by Motorola. The financial failure of Iridium has become a symbol of the collapse of the launch market for small low-Earth orbit satellites. This collapse has hurt the launch vehicle industry, as a number of companies started to develop launch vehicles -- including a new generation or reusable launch vehicles that promised to reduce the cost of space access by an order of magnitude -- to serve this large market that never materialized. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Over 66 satellites like the one above may be removed from orbit over the next two years if no sale can be worked out. (Iridium) "Our due diligence and marketing studies were unable to confirm that Iridium would generate even low levels of revenue," Castle Harlan said in a stateme