Eccentric Orbits
The Iridium Story
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Narrated by:
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Donald Corren
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By:
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John Bloom
About this listen
The incredible story of Iridium - the most complex satellite system ever built, the cell phone of the future, and one of the largest corporate bankruptcies in American history - and one man's desperate race to save it.
In the early 1990s, Motorola, the legendary American technology company, developed a revolutionary satellite system called Iridium that promised to be its crowning achievement. Light-years ahead of anything previously put into space, and built on technology developed for Ronald Reagan's "Star Wars", Iridium's constellation of 66 satellites in polar orbit meant that no matter where you were on Earth, at least one satellite was always overhead, and you could call Tibet from Fiji without a delay and without your call ever touching a wire.
Iridium the satellite system was a mind-boggling technical accomplishment, surely the future of communication. The only problem was that Iridium the company was a commercial disaster. Only months after launching service, it was $11 billion in debt, burning through $100 million a month, and crippled by baroque rate plans and agreements that forced calls through Moscow; Beijing; Fucino, Italy; and elsewhere. Bankruptcy was inevitable - the largest to that point in American history. And when no real buyers seemed to materialize, it looked like Iridium would go down as just a "science experiment".
That is, until Dan Colussy got a wild idea. Colussy, a former head of Pan Am now retired and working on his golf game in Palm Beach, 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.
In Eccentric Orbits, John Bloom masterfully traces the conception, development, and launching 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, the Pentagon, and the hunt for customers in special ops, shipping, aviation, mining, search and rescue - anyone who would need a durable phone at the end of the Earth. 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.
©2016 John Bloom (P)2016 Blackstone Audio, Inc.Listeners also enjoyed...
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Story
Losing the Signal is a riveting story of a company that toppled global giants before succumbing to the ruthlessly competitive forces of Silicon Valley. This is not a conventional tale of modern business failure by fraud and greed. The rise and fall of BlackBerry reveals the dangerous speed at which innovators race along the information superhighway.
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Fascinating
- By Gerardo A Dada on 09-05-15
By: Jacquie McNish, and others
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Sellout
- How Washington Gave Away America's Technological Soul, and One Man's Fight to Bring It Home
- By: Victoria Bruce
- Narrated by: Tom Parks
- Length: 10 hrs and 44 mins
- Unabridged
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American technological prowess used to be unrivaled. But because of globalization, and with the blessing of the US government, once proprietary materials, components, and technologies are increasingly commercialized outside the United States. Nowhere is this more dangerous than in China's monopoly of rare earth elements - materials that are essential for nearly all modern consumer goods, gadgets, and weapons systems.
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Uncovering unsung heroes of modern America
- By Ben DeNardo on 08-24-17
By: Victoria Bruce
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The Yugo
- The Rise and Fall of the Worst Car in History
- By: Jason Vuic
- Narrated by: Erik Synnestvedt
- Length: 8 hrs and 57 mins
- Unabridged
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Six months after its American introduction in 1985, the Yugo was a punch line; within a year, it was a staple of late-night comedy. By 2000, NPR's Car Talk declared it "the worst car of the millennium." And for most Americans that's where the story begins and ends. Hardly. The short, unhappy life of the car, the men who built it, the men who imported it, and the decade that embraced and discarded it is rollicking and astounding, and it is one of the greatest untold business-cum-morality tales of the 1980s.
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Better Than The Car!
- By Chris Reich on 08-25-10
By: Jason Vuic
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Crash Course
- The American Automobile Industry's Road from Glory to Disaster
- By: Paul Ingrassia
- Narrated by: Patrick Lawlor
- Length: 12 hrs and 18 mins
- Unabridged
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In Crash Course, Ingrassia answers the big questions: Was Detroit's self-destruction inevitable? What were the key turning points? Why did Japanese automakers manage American workers better than the American companies themselves? Ingrassia also describes dysfunctional corporate cultures (even as GM's market share plunged, the company continued business as usual) and Detroit's perverse system of "inverse layoffs" (which allowed union members to invoke seniority to avoid work).
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Contemporary History at Its Best
- By Roy on 04-19-10
By: Paul Ingrassia
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War Dogs
- How Three Stoners From Miami Beach Became the Most Unlikely Gunrunners in History
- By: Guy Lawson
- Narrated by: Jason Culp
- Length: 9 hrs and 25 mins
- Unabridged
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In January 2007 two young stoners from Miami Beach - one a ninth-grade dropout, the other a licensed masseur - won a $300 million Department of Defense contract to supply ammunition to the Afghanistan military. Incredibly, instead of fulfilling the order with high-quality arms, Efraim Diveroli and David Packouz - the dudes - bought cheap Communist-style surplus ammunition from Balkan gunrunners.
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What is with those accents?
- By Reader808 on 08-22-16
By: Guy Lawson
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Good for the Money
- My Fight to Pay Back America
- By: Bob Benmosche
- Narrated by: Sean Pratt
- Length: 9 hrs and 33 mins
- Unabridged
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In 2009, at the peak of the financial crisis, AIG - the American insurance behemoth - was sinking fast. It was the peg upon which the nation hung its ire and resentment during the financial crisis: the pinnacle of Wall Street arrogance and greed. When Bob Benmosche climbed aboard as CEO, it was widely assumed that he would go down with his ship. In mere months, he turned things around, pulling AIG from the brink of financial collapse and restoring its profitability.
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Worthwhile, informative, and just short of inspiring
- By Preston on 11-17-21
By: Bob Benmosche
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Dethroning the King
- The Hostile Takeover of Anheuser-Busch, an American Icon
- By: Julie MacIntosh
- Narrated by: Joyce Bean
- Length: 12 hrs and 57 mins
- Unabridged
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How did InBev, a Belgian company controlled by Brazilians, take over one of America's most beloved brands after barely a whimper of a fight? With timing - and some unexpected help from powerful members of the Busch dynasty, the very family that had run the company for more than a century. From the very heart of America's heartland to the European continent to Brazil, Dethroning the King is the ultimate corporate caper and a fascinating case study that's both wide-reaching and profound.
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Good Story but Narration Can be Annoying
- By Ken on 10-21-11
By: Julie MacIntosh
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Glory Lost and Found
- How Delta Climbed from Despair to Dominance in the Post-9/11 Era
- By: Seth Kaplan, Jay Shabat
- Narrated by: Joseph Durika
- Length: 25 hrs and 53 mins
- Unabridged
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Glory Lost and Found: How Delta Climbed from Despair to Dominance in the Post-9/11 Era tells the story of Delta's dramatic tumble into bankruptcy and how it climbed its way back to pre-eminence despite hurricane-force headwinds: high fuel prices, a hostile takeover bid, relentless competition, economic meltdowns, and geopolitical shocks.
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For Aviation Enthusiasts & the Business Industry
- By Striker on 03-24-17
By: Seth Kaplan, and others
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The Watchers
- The Rise of America's Surveillance State
- By: Shane Harris
- Narrated by: Kirby Heyborne
- Length: 15 hrs
- Unabridged
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Our surveillance state was born in the brain of Admiral John Poindexter in 1983. Poindexter, President Ronald Reagan's national security adviser, realized that the United States might have prevented the terrorist massacre of 241 Marines in Beirut if only intelligence agencies had been able to analyze in real time data they had on the attackers. Poindexter poured government know-how and funds into his dream---a system that would sift reams of data for signs of terrorist activity.
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Important context for privacy debate
- By Keefer on 09-17-11
By: Shane Harris
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The Asylum
- The Renegades Who Hijacked the World's Oil Market
- By: Leah McGrath Goodman
- Narrated by: Robert Fass
- Length: 16 hrs and 34 mins
- Unabridged
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They were a band of outsiders unable to get jobs with New York's gilded financial establishment. They would go on to corner the world's multitrillion-dollar oil market, reaping unimaginable riches while bringing the economy to its knees. Meet the self-anointed kings of the New York Mercantile Exchange. In some ways, they are everything you would expect them to be: a secretive, members-only club of men and women who live lavish lifestyles; cavort with politicians, strippers, and celebrities; and blissfully jacked up oil prices to nearly $150 a barrel while profiting off the misery of the working class.
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A far better book than its come-on implies
- By Philo on 01-05-14
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The Lost Bank
- The Story of Washington Mutual - The Biggest Bank Failure in American History
- By: Kirsten Grind
- Narrated by: Traber Burns
- Length: 14 hrs and 7 mins
- Unabridged
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During the most dizzying days of the financial crisis, Washington Mutual, a bank with hundreds of billions of dollars in its coffers, suffered a crippling bank run. The story of its final, brutal collapse in the autumn of 2008, and its controversial sale to JPMorgan Chase, is an astonishing account of how one bank lost itself to greed and mismanagement, and how the entire financial industry - and even the entire country - lost its way as well. Kirsten Grind’s The Lost Bank is a magisterial and gripping account of these events.
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Sad and Angry by Turn
- By Johnnie Walker on 07-24-12
By: Kirsten Grind
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Faster, Higher, Farther
- The Volkswagen Scandal
- By: Jack Ewing
- Narrated by: Joel Richards
- Length: 10 hrs and 34 mins
- Unabridged
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A shocking exposé of Volkswagen's fraud by the New York Times reporter who covered the scandal. In mid-2015 Volkswagen proudly reached its goal of surpassing Toyota as the world's largest automaker. A few months later, the EPA disclosed that Volkswagen had installed software in 11 million cars that deceived emissions-testing mechanisms. By early 2017 VW had settled with American regulators and car owners for $20 billion, with additional lawsuits still looming.
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Excellent recap of VW, its structure and culture
- By Northern IN Mark on 05-27-17
By: Jack Ewing
What listeners say about Eccentric Orbits
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- J
- 02-26-17
great book,but the audio editing needs work
great book. great quality. but at least two dozen times in the book a sentence or two gets repeated (with a slightly different tone). Seems obvious to me that some editing got missed.
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- Alex Telleria
- 03-08-17
The narrator repeating himself isn't that bad
The story was a little slow in the middle but I would still definitely recommended.
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- Anne Ryberg
- 08-08-18
Magnificent Book - discombobulated editing.
Well researched - concise storyline in a highly complicated fiasco - hat's off to the author and Dan Colussy
Audiobook Editors must have been Motorola employees.
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- DMflyer
- 06-10-18
Good book
Interesting. I liked it, especially as it was a true story. Would recommend for those who like technology. Good background on Motorola.
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- W. Wade
- 02-08-17
Financial roller coaster and political nightmare
Being in the trucking business I had a ringside seat to watch this fight and many others play out. I've watched the telecoms come and go. I was one of the early MCI customers, was given an Iridium demonstration and eventually ended up with a phone bill that looked like a social security number. But being a loyal Motorola customer I always wondered what happened. This book has answered all those questions and then some. Absolutely unbelievable.
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- CHARLES E OESTERLE
- 10-19-16
fascinating listen
This a fascinating story the is a prelude to the coming debate about the international space station's fate.
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- xian
- 09-11-16
Great tech tale, too much minutiae
I love tech, history, and space, and I'm generally interested in business. This story combines all of these areas to tell the 20+ year story of Iridium. I loved the overall story, but was by turns bored and irritated by the hours taken to discuss the intricate details of insurance and government contract procurement. A subtitle might be "how the sausage is made: a detailed list of ingredients and processes."
If you enjoy name-dropping, there are hundreds of individuals named, from Al Gore to Michael Jordan to dozens of Pentagon personnel. Personally, I found the endless names detracted from the core narrative of 10-20 individuals.
Still, Iridium is a big deal, and this telling does it justice. It does a good job of explaining the relevant technology, and detailing the relationship between capital markets (i.e. investors and lenders) and socially important "megaprojects". I feel like this book could have been 20-30% shorter, but greatly enjoyed the other 70%.
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2 people found this helpful
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- Ralph
- 06-26-19
As real as it gets
There are countless misconceptions about technology entrepreneurship. This book is exceptionally researched, highly entertaining, and the most accurate account of the real world challenges of building something truly revolutionary I have ever read. Many thanks to the author for the undoubtedly long hours invested in creating it.
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- Walker
- 02-28-24
Iridium, starlink 0.5
this was an interesting story about a well known but poorly understood leader in the LEO satellite constellation business. The story about how close it was to a wasteful "death" was surprising gripping. If the subject interests you then it's worth a lieten/read!
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- Jon Bonte
- 03-23-24
Great Storytelling
A great and captivating narration. Love the politics and underdog story. Excellent reading and recording.
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