ECCENTRIC ORBITS: THE IRIDIUM STORY, by John Bloom, is a business history of Iridium, the satellite-phone company that was originally founded by Motorola and relied upon 77 low-earth orbit satellites to provide coverage.

The book opens with a curtain-raiser from 2000 when the satellites are going to start being de-orbited, and then reviews the history of satellites and communication, and the process of designing, building, and operating the system. This part of the story occupies the first 250 pages of the book.

Despite their excellent design of the system, Motorola's management of the business was inexplicably bad. They spent a decade and billions of dollars designing the system, obtaining the spectrum to use it (a complicated side quest that occupies a chapter and involved wrangling delegates to the 1992 World Administrative Radio Conference), and launching it.

Iridium's initial marketing pitch was to executives and wealthy international travellers who could afford the $3 795 cost of the handset, positioning the phone as a luxury good. But executives usually travel from city to city & boardroom to boardroom, always in built-up locations where regular cell service is available. A much better plan would have been to focus on people who needed a satellite phone and had no alternative: oil-rig workers and fishermen, people who live in remote areas, search-and-rescue teams, the US military, foreign-aid workers, etc.

Instead Iridium had poor sales, launching on November 1st 1998, with limited handset availability. Sales were immediately minimal, so Motorola began dismantling engineering by May 1999, Iridium defaulted on loans in August 1999, and entered bankruptcy. Service ended in March 2000 with talk of de-orbiting the constellation.

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