There was once a well-known company that planned to send dozens of satellites and finally closed down.

199 1 year, Motorola officially decided to establish a mobile communication network consisting of 77 low-orbit satellites, and named it after the metal "iridium" ranked 77th in the periodic table.

Iridium system was put into commercial operation in 1997, and Iridium mobile phone became the only public mobile communication tool that can make calls anywhere on the earth's surface. 1 100 million dollars in advertising expenses pushed iridium satellite to the peak. Subsequently, the share price of Iridium soared from $20 at the time of issuance to $70 in May of 1998. Iridium system is especially favored by people who advocate science and technology, and is rated as one of the best products in the world by American popular science magazine 1998. At the end of the same year, it ranked second among the top ten scientific and technological achievements of the year selected by academicians of China Academy of Sciences. As far as high technology is concerned, the Iridium project is indeed a beautiful story. The complexity and advancement of iridium satellite system lies in the adoption of on-board processing and inter-satellite link technology, which is equivalent to putting the ground cellular network upside down in the air and realizing seamless communication on the ground. Another advanced point is that iridium satellite system solves the cross-protocol roaming between satellite network and terrestrial cellular network. Iridium system consists of a space segment and a ground segment: the space segment is a constellation, and the ground segment includes a system control center, a gateway station and a user terminal. Iridium system has created a new era of global personal communication, which is regarded as a milestone of modern communication, enabling human beings to communicate with each other anywhere on the earth. Its biggest feature is the globalization of handheld communication terminals and personal communication, which has realized five "arbitrary" (5W), that is, anyone can communicate with anyone (no matter who) in any place and in any way. However, beauty is destined to be thin. Due to the huge R&D expenses and system construction expenses, Iridium Company bears a heavy debt burden. The whole iridium system costs more than 5 billion dollars, and the maintenance cost of optical system is as high as hundreds of millions of dollars every year. In addition to the investment provided by Motorola and other companies and the funds raised by issuing stocks, Iridium also borrowed about $3 billion in debt, and the monthly interest on the debt alone reached more than $40 million. Iridium Company has never caught its breath from the beginning, and has been negotiating debt restructuring with creditor groups composed of banks and bondholders, but the two sides failed to reach an agreement. 1August 3, 999, the creditor group filed an application with the federal court of new york to force Iridium Company to go bankrupt and reorganize. In addition, Iridium Company was forced to file for bankruptcy protection on the same day because it was unable to pay the interest on the $90 million bonds due two days later. On March 18, 2000, Iridium Company went bankrupt, with debts exceeding $4 billion.