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Technology Stocks : IRID - Iridium World Communications IPO Announced! -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: BLACK CROW who wrote (982)	7/31/1998 3:27:00 AM
From: SidStock	Respond to of 2693

Hey Black, As for the bug being in all the satellites. Well thats a hard one to answer. Iridium hasnt been to forthcoming in describing the problems and instead it tends to leak out slowly sometimes on the boards. I've tried to compile what i've picked up through several different channels, some even through friends of friends near the project. What i have picked up is related to these darn momentum wheels. I am pretty sure allied signal supplies the wheels to lockheed, and it turns out this is the first and only lockheed birds to use these wheels. Now most larger satellites use several wheels, and have redundancy enough that they can loose one and not affect them. But these are cheap little birds and are built for short life span and have built in some % of expected failure rate, I am pretty sure they only contain a single wheel. Loose it and you are basically toast. They have tried to salvage a few w/damaged wheels using other means (ala thrusters, torque bars, and laser gyros) to fly the birds. But these damages ones will need to be replaced much sooner, since their life span has been greatly shortened. Currently the hit list contains 7 dead and 2 wounded. Iridium had built in contingency for losing upto 9 birds, so I guess you could say that this was expected. But I do believe the 9 included provisions for losing about 1/2 of them in a failed launch which did not happen. Also of the 7 dead, 2 are not due to wheels, 3 are, but the last 2 are unknown what caused the failures. Initial reports from iridium claim the last 2 are unrelated... hmm... i would have rather liked to see the actual cause and not a disclaimer. In any case, back to your question on whether it is a bug in all or not. Well, one indication that is very positive for iridium is that the failures have been reported to be in the early deployment stage. Thus the wheel problem seems to be an infant failure and thus once the bird's wheel runs ok for a while, it should be fine. Even if the last 2 birds did fail due to wheels... they are both deployed after the previous 5 failed satellites and thus would still fit the infant scenario. Right now it appears that about 1 out of 10 birds is defective, and there isnt anything they can do about it. So I wouldnt start panicing unless we see birds that have been up there a while, start to fall out of the sky... then you know it is really a bad problem. Sid