Next: The Super-Cell

Wouldn't it be great if you could call your friends or family, your boss or stockbroker--even while you're trekking in the Himalayas? If you didn't have to lug around one of those briefcase-size satellite phones, but instead had a cell phone just slightly larger than the one you carry now? How much of a premium would you be willing to pay for such convenience? Two American-based firms with a list of global backers that reads like a high-tech Who's Who are rolling the dice in a multibillion-dollar gamble that they can answer those questions. In their effort to find that new plateau in communications, however, they're off to a rocky start.

It all began in 1985 while Barry Bertiger, an engineer at Motorola, was vacationing in the Bahamas with his wife Karen. She wondered aloud why she couldn't call home from their secluded getaway on Green Turtle Cay. Good question, thought her spouse. By 1988, Bertiger and two colleagues had drafted blueprints for a revolutionary new system that would blanket the heavens with communications satellites--77 in all--bounce a cellular call from one to another, then beam the data stream downward 420 miles to one of 12 earth stations where the call would enter the terrestrial telephone network. Motorola dubbed the system--and the company it spun off to build and operate it--Iridium, after the 77th element on the periodic table. (After trimming the number of satellites required to 66, Motorola wisely chose not to go with the name of the corresponding element, the practically unpronounceable Dysprosium.)

Iridium is now a consortium whose major shareholders include Motorola (which kept a 20% stake), Lockheed Martin and Sprint, plus Germany's Veba AG and Russia's Krunichev State Research Production Space Center. The joint venture was supposed to go live on Sept. 23, but then software glitches led officials to disclose that they will delay until Nov. 1 what amounts to the final roll of the dice in its $5 billion gamble to revolutionize telecommunications--or become the best-publicized flop in history. The announcement nudged its stock price on the NASDAQ exchange down to the mid-30s in mid-September, from a stratospheric high of $72 a share in May. The firm also revealed that it has not yet received a license to operate in France. Nonetheless, the advertising campaign for the system is under way, and Iridium's backers continue clinging to their high-flying hopes.

They are not alone. A clutch of new satellite-based services from a half-dozen similar corporate alliances is launching into orbit. They are likely to turn the earth's lower atmosphere into a space jam of communications links promising to keep us in touch--anytime, anywhere. The systems rely on a new version of an old (at least for the aerospace business) and proven technology.

It was science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke who in 1945 was the first to suggest a band of geosynchronous satellites, dubbed "extra-terrestrial relays," hovering 22,000 miles above the equator and bouncing signals back to the ground. Until recently, most communications satellites have imitated that high-cost-and-high-altitude model, drifting in what scientists call the Clarke orbit.