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To: Michael who wrote (30061)	5/14/1999 1:58:00 PM
From: Gregg Powers	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 152472

Michael: My point is that we have to really understand whether Iridium's problems are technological, structural or simply liquidity-related. As for the billions of dollars sunk into satellite infrastructure, I am reminded of sugar beet plantations (no...I didn't get too much sun in Hawaii). Years ago, there were several publicly-traded sugar production and processing companies. Periodically their stocks would "pop" when some bright boy added up the replacement cost of the sugar beet plantation infrastructure and concluded that the stocks were trading at ten cents on the dollar of replacement cost. That sounded good until further analysis revealed that, even if acquired for ten cents on the dollar, the plantations still could not produce sugar at prices competitive with the world market. The big discount to development cost simply highlighted the enormity of the economic debacle suffered by the plantation developers. There is a non-zero possibility that Iridium and MOT have built an extraterrestrial sugar beet plantation..... For example, Recall that in contrast to GSTRF's design (where the network intelligence is located in terrestrial gateways), Iridium's satellites contain the network systems. This is a far more complicated (and expensive) system to work with and I can't even begin to imagine the challenges facing the network engineers on a go-forward basis. All the best, Gregg