Eccentric Orbits : Grove Press UK : 9781611855357 : 1611855357 : 14 Jun 2016 : 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