Remember the much hyped Iridium project in the late nineties? The original Motorola project, with 66 low-earth-orbit satellites, seemed like the future of cellphones, communications and even globalization. Wired Magazine ran several stories about it, and I remember being all excited by this, especially since the concept was designed a few miles from where I live, in Chandler, Arizona.

But the idea didn’t fly, for several reasons, and the 77 birds (there were spare satellites in the constellation) were supposed to be taken down. But the project survived. Today, the sat-phone is still around, in a new skin. It is appearing in cabin systems, as modems, and with specialized push-to-talk features for first responders.

Why am I interested in the future of the Satellite phone? I used to work up the road from where Arthur C. Clarke lives in Sri Lanka. (quite by coincidence my office was down a side street called Cosmos Avenue) This month in LMD magazine, I wrote a feature on Clarke, that you could read here. Clarke has always fascinated us, with his prophetic ideas. Half a century before Iridium –or even modems, for that matter– he conceived of satellites, in an article on Extra Terrestrial Relays. Hard to imagine a world without satellites now.

And here’s a sidebar I should have included in my Clarke article. The use of the Iridium phone for JetMaps. We have all seen the application in use when flying. Now Honeywell, uses a version called JetMap II, that does more than maps, to include headline news, stock reports and sports. See it here.

Speaking of maps, Mark, a colleague at work showed me this site he subscribes to, call keyhole.com (billed as ‘the earth on your desktop.") For the moment it only covers the U.S. but the satellite imagery is remarkably clear. You could zoom in to a neighborhood, and even identify  the cars in the parking lot! Definitely worth a visit.