There may be a buyer after all for the Iridium satellites. Motorola has been keeping them running at great expense, hoping for a long shot deal. I asked my brother, who knows about such things, why people weren’t snapping at this seemingly wonderful opportunity: an already orbiting set of communications satellites, all ready for a global application. According to him, these satellites were designed very specifically for their intended purpose. Modifying them would of course be prohibitively expensive. So any buyer would have to use the same original techniques of data transfer, which they don’t really want to do (here he used some fancier words which have slipped my memory). I suppose that if Iridium had prepared themselves for potential failure, they could have designed the satellites to be more multi-purpose, and facilitated a buyout of their assets. But who thinks of such things when you are planning to conquer the world?