[diek]

This is a fun blast from the past.

My dad was one of the "original six" engineers that worked on Iridium within Motorola, so my 90s childhood was filled with Iridium posters and satellite footprint tracking software.

I've mentioned it previously here when talking about SpaceX and Starlink. Iridium launched with satellite-to-satellite links. None of this "bent pipe" stuff where the satellite can only route between itself and a ground station in its same coverage area. As long as you could talk to an Iridium satellite, your data could be routed _in orbit_ to its destination along those inter-satellite links.

[jpgvm]

Iridium was nothing short of an engineering marvel. Your dad must be a pretty badass engineer.

[Aloha]

You arguably can't build something like Iridium or Starlink without it - the thing that.. makes me question Starlink was the choice of optical sat to sat links.

There are other issues with minimum spot beam sizes that make me wonder if Starlink can make money, but that choice alone made me ask a whole bunch of questions right out of the gate.

[tinus_hn]

Clearly there is a difference between the things you need to do to deliver text messages and telephony and the things you need to deliver useful internet connectivity.

[Aloha]

You cannot deliver meaningful over the ocean coverage without it, Starlink was designed to have sat to sat routing, using optical links, which is.. somewhat nonsensical.