yes, all of this is true. The second incarnation of Iridium Corporation which acquired the bankrupt assets paid maybe 5 cents on the dollar. It was ridiculously expensive to build and ate up a ton of late 1990s venture capital money. And the US DoD gateway stuff (Hawaii, etc) and Iraq, Afghanistan wars certainly helped their revenue stream. But now that they're established, they seem to have found commercial viability and funding to launch the next generation of satellites which will provide medium speed (but expensive $$$/MB) data service in a truly global fashion.

Iridium's polar orbit LEO architecture makes it a rare and special thing. Globalstar was an utter network architecture failure (bent pipe satellite relay), Inmarsat is not usable at polar latitudes due to being geostationary based.