A Telephone for the World: Iridium, Motorola, and the Making of a Global Age by Martin Collins

Abstract

Reviewed by: A Telephone for the World: Iridium, Motorola, and the Making of a Global Age by Martin Collins Rebecca Slayton (bio) A Telephone for the World: Iridium, Motorola, and the Making of a Global Age. By Martin Collins. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018. Pp. 280. Hardcover $44.95. Iridium was an ambitious business and engineering venture that aimed to provide telecommunications services to the entire world. Using both published sources and oral history interviews, Martin Collins's new book situates Iridium in the transition from the Cold War era, in which U.S. military interests played a dominant role in shaping technological research and development, to an era in which neoliberal philosophy and free markets seemed ascendant. Collins argues that Iridium represented corporate, technological, and ideological conceptions of "the global." Launched by the U.S.-based multinational corporation Motorola, Iridium was part of a broader globalization of Western businesses that characterized the late twentieth century. Technologically, Iridium was literally global; initial proposals envisioned seventy-seven satellites (hence "Iridium," the element with atomic number seventy-seven), providing communications to any place on earth. And ideologically, the project drew upon and amplified the notion that global markets were a force for social progress. Iridium grew out of the Systems Engineering Group within Motorola's Government Electronics Division, which aimed to move beyond the division's traditional work as a subcontractor for military, intelligence, and space projects by becoming a prime contractor for commercial as well as government customers. Iridium eschewed new technology and instead focused on the organizational innovations needed to achieve "manufacturability" in a globally-dispersed workforce. This meant focusing on "quality," as epitomized for example in Motorola's Six Sigma method of reducing errors to 3.4 per million opportunities (the fraction of instances more than six standard deviations from the mean of a normal distribution). Whereas previous satellite manufacture had focused on designing single vehicles for worst-case-scenarios, Iridium focused on the timely production of an entire constellation of satellites, which only needed to succeed in aggregate. Iridium also used "culture" as a tool which "aimed to respect the local (whether inhering in an individual, an institution, or a geographic region)" while assuming that "it could be harmonized with the global (as conceived by the venture)" (p. 4). In fact, Iridium hired cultural anthropologists and futurists who predicted that the "Iridium Revolution" would have a beneficial impact on cultures around the world, advancing individual entrepreneurship, women's rights, sexual freedom, and more. In the mid-1990s, major media outlets such as Wired magazine publicized Iridium in similarly glowing terms. [End Page 928] Yet in 1999, Iridium filed for bankruptcy. Despite some rhetoric about uplifting citizens of the developing world, the service was largely marketed to well-heeled business travelers who did not need "global" telecommunications, but rather mobile telecommunications in the major cities that served as hubs of global commerce. By the 1990s, networks based on terrestrial cellular towers could serve these needs with more compact phones, better reliability, and lower costs than a satellite-based network. Additionally, Iridium depended upon partnerships with "gateways" in nations around the world; these were tasked with obtaining regulatory permission to operate Iridium, and then selling the service to companies that would then enroll individual subscribers. But many gateways did not share Western business values or priorities, and faced constraints not anticipated by Iridium; ultimately, they did not generate a sufficient number of customers. The tensions between Iridium's global multinational ambitions and local political and cultural realities played a significant role in the project's demise. Iridium's greatest asset, a globe-spanning satellite constellation, was nonetheless rescued from a fiery fate of de-orbiting and incinerating as the satellites plunged towards the earth. The U.S. military stepped in to encourage a group of investors to buy the satellites, forming Iridium Satellite Corporation. The Defense Information Systems Agency then promptly awarded the new corporation a contract. Iridium was ultimately used for communications in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. Collins' account of Iridium is well-researched and written. It brings together and builds upon multiple themes in the history of technology, including digital utopianism, "systems" thinking, business history, and...