Iridium Cost $5 Billion. Motorola Got a Court's Permission to Burn It.

In March 2000, sixty-six satellites worth about five billion dollars were circling the Earth in perfect working order, and the company that built them had already won a court's permission to set them on fire. This is the story of Iridium: a phone network sketched on a whiteboard in a security guard's office, backed by Motorola at the height of its confidence, named after an element it no longer had, bankrupted nine months after launch, saved from deliberate destruction by a retired airline executive, a Saudi prince, and the Pentagon for about half a percent of what it cost to build — and sold again in 2026 for more than it ever cost in the first place. Sources: reporting and retrospectives on Iridium's founding, launch, 1999 bankruptcy, and 2000-2001 rescue, including John Bloom's "Eccentric Orbits"; Iridium Communications and Rocket Lab public filings and press releases; contemporary coverage of the 1998 Rose Garden call, the 2009 Iridium-Kosmos collision, the Iridium NEXT launches, and the 2026 Rocket Lab acquisition announcement. Where accounts differ, they are described as accounts.