Sat 2000 was highly focused on (or obsessed by) the problems surrounding the industry’s two recent high profile MSS failures, namely Iridium and ICO.

Numerous reports at the convention suggest Teledesic backer Craig McCaw is now close to finalising a plan for the Teledesic project to absorb ICO and Iridium (see separate story), and whether the end name would be ICODESIC or ICODESIUM, depending on the final make-up of the company. In December the deal looked set to be signed but was pulled at the last moment with insiders citing battles over Iridium’s system builder and main backer Motorola’s expectations. It seems Motorola is now prepared to cut its annual operational charges for the LEO system to around $100 million a year, and to wait a year or two for any cash, rolling over the debt until ICODESIUM is cash-flow positive.

Motorola needs a solution to rescue Iridium out of Chapter 11 bankruptcy while at the same time protecting Iridium’s bondholders. However, one panellist posed a “nightmare scenario” for any LEO system.

Retired US Lt. Colonel Glenn Kweder, now a senior engineer at Logicon, suggested that LEO systems represented the perfect target for a low-yield nuclear weapon detonated at high altitude. An explosion above Pakistan or India, Kweder says, within 30 minutes would release a massive burst of high-energy beta electrons throughout the Earth’s Van Allen radiation belts. Any satellites not adequately protected and “hardened” against such an eventuality would “drop from the sky like flies…All that a power need do is launch a vehicle, a nuclear device and a timer to detonate it at the right altitude,” said Kweder. The result would be devastating for the satellites and dependent e-commerce.