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To: pcstel who wrote (17803)	10/9/2000 12:55:28 PM
From: Rocket Scientist	Respond to of 29987

Thanks, pcstel, for linking the old Mot PR regarding provision of Iridium services. Of course, it's not known how much of the "potential value" of 219M$ was actually realized by Mot or committed to by DISA. We know that Iridium has received a tiny fraction of this, if anything. In fact the "parties at interest" in the Irid C.11 case may want to inquire how much Mot has been paid on this contract, and why no significant revenue ever found its way into the "debtors' estate." Maybe this contract is why Mot continues to maintain Irid in orbit, at a claimed cost of 10M$/month. hmmmmmmm..... The PR says something else I didn't know: it refers to the the Hawaii Gateway as belonging to Motorola, albeit "US Government dedicated." Maybe less taxpayer's money was spent on Iridium than I thought. FWIW, about five years ago, a source I consider credible told me that the USG and Motorola had a kind of "field of dreams" understanding: that is, if Mot built the system, the USG assured Mot it would be an anchor tenant consuming a considerable fraction of the system's capacity. That assurance was supposedly an important underpinning of Mot's confidence in the Irid business plan. For whatever reason, the USG hasn't been a big user of Irid, at least as far as can be told by looking at Irid's income statements. The PR also mentions "annual usage up to 28 million airtime minutes" which would have been less than 5% of Irid's capacity and not have made much of a dent in the O&M cost Mot was charging Irid at the time. Very interesting piece of memorabilia...thanks again.