/ck/ - Food & Cooking

>>8631860
I actually worked on the Iridium project way back in the mid-1990s. Not the satellites, but the handset prototypes by Motorola. They were truly massive phones with a huge swing-out antenna. Quite the piece of shit by today's standards, but it was amazing for its day, and an extremely expensive luxury item. I think it was somewhere around ten bucks a minute to make a call, but you could call from the middle of the ocean, Antarctica, wherever, which was a brand new thing. The Iridium satellites are quite old and obsolete now, but they are being replaced with a new constellation. The new satellites are much smaller and they will not cause the bright sky flares that the old ones do when the sun hits them just right. I'm not sure if those old satellites still have enough fuel to be de-orbited, but they fly so low that they will re-enter the atmosphere and burn up on their own after some years pass. One of them collided with a Russian satellite at over 42,000 km/hr and exploded. The first ten new generation satellites already launched earlier this year, it was the return-to-flight mission for SpaceX after that shared Israel & Facebook satellite blew up on the ground (LOL).