Eccentric Orbits - by John Bloom (Paperback)

About the Book

This book recounts the story of how Dan Colussy, the former head of Pan-Am, saved the satellite system, Iridium, from failure.

Book Synopsis

In the early 1990s, Motorola, the legendary American radio and telecom company, made a huge gamble on a revolutionary satellite telephone system called Iridium. Light-years ahead of anything previously put into space, built on technology for Ronald Reagan's "Star Wars," Iridium was a mind-boggling technical accomplishment that sent waves of panic through phone companies around the world, because, surely, Iridium was the future of communication. Only months after launching service, 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 retired former President of Pan Am, heard about Motorola's plans to "de-orbit" the system and decided he would try to buy Iridium. Somehow, the little guy figured he could turn around one of the biggest blunders in the history of business.

Eccentric Orbits masterfully traces the development of satellite technology, the birth of Iridium, and Colussy's tireless efforts to stop it from being destroyed, despite having doors slammed in his face by all of Wall Street. Piecing together funding from a motley group of investors that included a mysterious Arab prince and friends of Jesse Jackson, he eventually made his case before the most powerful people at the Clinton White House, the Pentagon, the FCC, intelligence services, and a consortium of thirty banks, pleading for the only phone that works at the ends of earth. Eccentric Orbits is a rollicking, unforgettable tale of innovation, failure, the military-industrial complex, and one of the greatest deals of all time.

Review Quotes

Praise for Eccentric Orbits:

Named one of the "Top 10 Nonfiction Books of 2016" and one of the "20 Books That Defined Our Year" by the Wall Street Journal
Named a Book of the Year 2016 by the Economist
An Amazon Best Book of the Month
A Hudson Booksellers' Best Book of 2016 (Best Business Interest)

"Engaging and ambitious . . . Eccentric Orbits is maximalist nonfiction, 500 pages of deep reporting put forward with epic intentions . . . a panoramic narrative, laced with fine filigree details, that makes for a story that soars and jumps and dives and digresses . . . [A] big, gutsy, exciting book."--Wall Street Journal

"Those with visions of vast satellite communications networks dancing in their heads would do well to read John Bloom's new book on [Iridium] . . . Bloom . . . tells this story well . . . He does a good job of explaining the technology and the importance of the inventors who made the technology possible."--Washington Post

"Think of Final Cut, Steven Bach's gripping account of the notorious movie disaster 'Heaven's Gate.' Or The Smartest Guys in the Room, Bethany McLean and Peter Elkind's chronicle of the collapse of Enron, and The Big Short, Michael Lewis' tale of the cratering of the national economy. Eccentric Orbits . . . is a tale of ham-fisted management that's lively enough to invite comparisons to those modern classics."--Los Angeles Times

"An exhaustive account . . . Eccentric Orbits not only offers good corporate drama, but is an enlightening narrative of how new communications infrastructures often come about: with a lot of luck, government help and investors who do not ask too many questions."--Economist

"Eccentric Orbits is a story rich in larger-than-life characters, including shady Cold War operatives and warrior-like Motorola executives . . . Bloom gives a wonderful sense of what an engineering marvel Iridium was."--Bethany McLean, Strategy + Business (Best Business Books 2016)

"An inspiring history as well as an effective business thriller . . . Bloom argues convincingly that creating and then saving Iridium was one . . . desperately difficult--and brilliant--achievement."--New Scientist

"Extensive . . . Sprawling . . . A detailed and entertaining history of the rise, fall, and rebirth of Iridium."--Space Review

"A good read."--Marketplace

"Highly engaging . . . Check it out."--News Tribune

"A prize-worthy example of the investigative genre . . . [Eccentric Orbits] has conflict and triumph on a Wagnerian scale . . . John Bloom has achieved in Eccentric Orbits an admirable balance of the human and the technological in what is at heart an age-old tale of one man's triumph against apparently insuperable odds."--Literary Review

"An outstanding read . . . [An] inspiring story . . . Highly recommended."--ATC Reform News

"Eccentric Orbits does for the 1990s birth of the satellite phone industry what Tracy Kidder's Soul of a New Machine did for the next-generation computer business. It's a wild story . . . Funny, informative, exciting . . . A sprawling masterpiece of history and reporting."--Shelf Awareness

"Spellbinding . . . A tireless researcher, Bloom delivers a superlative history . . . A tour de force."--Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

"Eccentric Orbits is a remarkable work. I had known about Iridium but not about its fascinating history. John Bloom's writing style is attractive and the level of detail is astonishing. This was a page-turner for me!"--Vint Cerf, Chief Internet Evangelist, Google

"Interested in giant, head-scratching miscalculations by a great American company? The power of one man to rescue the world's biggest deployment of low-earth satellites? A place where genius engineering meets a total lack of common sense? Then John Bloom's book about Motorola's multibillion-dollar debacle, Iridium, is for you. Eccentric Orbits is both a novelistic thriller and a cautionary tale, a page-turner about a reach for the heavens and a business primer on a near-fatal fall back to the earth."--Julian Guthrie, author of The Billionaire and The Mechanic

"John Bloom's Eccentric Orbits, which tells the story of one of the most ambitious projects in the history of technology, is the most compelling book I have read in a long while. Bloom somehow coaxed the deepest thoughts and darkest secrets out of many satellite engineers, skeptical VCs, business royalty, inner-city tycoons, Italian marketers, Russian rocket launchers, Arabian princes, corporate CEOs, African leaders, Washington insiders, insurance giants, Pentagon brass, government lifers, politicians, and frustrated bankruptcy judges. This is a masterpiece of research and storytelling. If not for Bloom, one of the greatest stories of American ingenuity and bullheadedness would still lie scattered in thousands of documents and the memories of those who lived it."--Gary Kinder, author of Ship of Gold in the Deep Blue Sea

"This is a monumental piece of non-fiction, not just for the breadth and depth of the research, but for its audacity: Bloom seeks to make technology and marketing and high finance dramatic and funny and instructive of the human condition--and succeeds. Until I read this, I had always assumed that my cell phone was created by something like spontaneous combustion; like one day, it just appeared between my right hand and my ear, as if it had always belonged there. Bloom has given all of us--all billions of us--the back story on it, and what a strange, tangled, convoluted, fairly hilarious one it is."--Jim Atkinson, Texas Monthly contributing editor

"Build a better mousetrap, and the world will erect every possible obstacle to its success. That's the sobering lesson of John Bloom's book on the progress of a reliable, cheap, encrypted, worldwide mobile phone system to supermarket shelves. The exhilarating lesson is that it can be done if you have visionary geeks, hard-boiled veterans, retired capitalists, and the occasional eccentric rebellious bureaucrat determined to do it. This is high scientific journalism, exciting business journalism, and a rattling good tale. It even includes Nazis."--John O'Sullivan, author of The President, the Pope, and the Prime Minister: Three Who Changed the World

"Impeccably researched, and in smooth, easy prose, John Bloom interweaves fascinating historical trivia about the space race, satellites, and global communications with detail-filled personality snapshots and cringingly revealing, often disturbingly humorous, insights about the many ways big business can shoot itself in the foot."--John Brewer, former president and editor-in-chief, New York Times Syndicate and News Service

"Pacy [and] . . . worth reading, not just for the wild ride that involves secretive Saudi sheikhs, plucky terrorists, never-say-die businessmen and Bill Clinton, but also as a reminder of how vast business can be vastly dumb . . . A thrilling boom-to-boom corporate drama."--Sunday Times (UK)

"John Bloom's account of the Iridium satellite network is more than a ripping read, it is both a commentary on the way we do technology today and a reminder of Friedrick Hayek's observation that presumed experts and planners are the last people you want picking winners. A tale well told is a thing of delight, and John Bloom's Eccentric Orbits: The Iridium Story does not fail."--Quadrant (Australia)

"Riveting . . . I've never used the term 'tour de force' in a book review before, but if it ever belonged in one, it is this review of Eccentric Orbits."--800-CEO-READ

About the Author

John Bloom is a veteran investigative journalist, a three-time finalist for the National Magazine Award, and a Pulitzer Prize nominee. He was a long-time columnist for the New York Times Syndicate and has written for Rolling Stone, Playboy, Newsweek, and The Village Voice, among many other publications. He is the author of nine books, including Evidence of Love, which won the Edgar Allan Poe Award and was made into an Emmy-winning film. Bloom has also written several books of humor and film criticism and hosted several television shows as his alter ego, Joe Bob Briggs. He lives in New York City.