Riassunto:
In the early 1990s, Motorola, the legendary American company, made a huge gamble on a revolutionary satellite telephone system called Iridium. Light-years ahead of anything previously put into space, and built on technology developed for Ronald Reagan's 'Star Wars,' Iridium's constellation of sixty-six satellites in six evenly spaced orbital planes meant that at least one satellite was always overhead.
Iridium was a mind-boggling technical accomplishment, surely the future of communication. The only problem was that Iridium was also a commercial disaster. Only months after launching service, it was $11 billion in debt, burning through $100 million a month and bringing in almost no revenue. Bankruptcy was inevitable - the largest to that point in American history. It looked like Iridium would go down as just a 'science experiment.'
That is, until Dan Colussy got a wild idea. Colussy, a former CEO of Pan Am, heard about Motorola's plans to 'de-orbit' the system and decided he would buy Iridium and somehow turn around one of the biggest blunders in the history of business.
Eccentric Orbits masterfully traces the birth of Iridium and Colussy's tireless efforts to stop it from being destroyed, from meetings with his motley investor group, to the Clinton White House, to the Pentagon, to the hunt for customers in special ops, shipping, aviation, mining, search and rescue. Impeccably researched and wonderfully told, Eccentric Orbits is a rollicking, unforgettable tale of technological achievement, business failure, the military-industrial complex and one of the greatest deals of all time.
Advance Praise for "Eccentric Orbits"
"Eccentric Orbits" is a remarkable work. I had known about Iridium but not about its fascinating history. John Bloom s writing style is attractive and the level of detail is astonishing. This was a page-turner for me! Vint Cerf, Chief Internet Evangelist, Google
Interested in giant, head-scratching miscalculations by a great American company? The power of one man to rescue the world s biggest deployment of low-earth satellites? A place where genius engineering meets a total lack of common sense? Then John Bloom s book about Motorola s multibillion-dollar debacle, Iridium, is for you. "Eccentric Orbits" is both a novelistic thriller and a cautionary tale, a page-turner about a reach for the heavens and a business primer on a near-fatal fall back to the earth. Julian Guthrie, author of "The Billionaire and The Mechanic"
John Bloom s "Eccentric Orbits," which tells the story of one of the most ambitious projects in the history of technology, is the most compelling book I have read in a long while. Bloom somehow coaxed the deepest thoughts and darkest secrets out of many satellite engineers, skeptical VCs, business royalty, inner-city tycoons, Italian marketers, Russian rocket launchers, Arabian princes, corporate CEOs, African leaders, Washington insiders, insurance giants, Pentagon brass, government lifers, politicians, and frustrated bankruptcy judges. This is a masterpiece of research and storytelling. If not for Bloom, one of the greatest stories of American ingenuity and bullheadedness would still lie scattered in thousands of documents and the memories of those who lived it. Gary Kinder, author of "Ship of Gold in the Deep Blue Sea"
This is a monumental piece of non-fiction, not just for the breadth and depth of the research, but for its audacity: Bloom seeks to make technology and marketing and high finance dramatic and funny and instructive of the human conditionand succeeds. Until I read this, I had always assumed that my cell phone was created by something like spontaneous combustion; like one day, it just appeared between my right hand and my ear, as if it had always belonged there. Bloom has given all of usall billions of usthe back story on it, and what a strange, tangled, convoluted, fairly hilarious one it is. Jim Atkinson, "Texas Monthly" contributing editor
Build a better mousetrap, and the world will erect every possible obstacle to its success. That s the sobering lesson of John Bloom s book on the progress of a reliable, cheap, encrypted, worldwide mobile phone system to supermarket shelves. The exhilarating lesson is that it can be done if you have visionary geeks, hard-boiled veterans, retired capitalists, and the occasional eccentric rebellious bureaucrat determined to do it. This is high scientific journalism, exciting business journalism, and a rattling good tale. It even includes Nazis. John O Sullivan, author of "The President, the Pope, and the Prime Minister: Three Who Changed the World"
Impeccably researched, and in smooth, easy prose, John Bloom interweaves fascinating historical trivia about the space race, satellites, and global communications with detail-filled personality snapshots and cringingly revealing, often disturbingly humorous, insights about the many ways big business can shoot itself in the foot. --John Brewer, former president and editor-in-chief, New York Times Syndicate and News Service
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