I think the point Steve is making is that as the company went along, they should have noticed their prior assumptions about the cellular market were not panning out. They cold have started seeking out alternative revenue streams besides traditional dialup voice service. I'm not sure what those options would be, maybe messaging or some other data? Two-way Internet via satellite? I'm not a telecom person, so I'm ill-suited to come up with workable options.

The problem is that Irridium was sort of an all or nothing design. You needed the whole fleet of birds to have global coverage. Geo-sync birds might have reduced the count but they cost more to launch and have a very noticeable lag.

I'll make a different assertion, at the time they dreamed it up, the business model had no chance of working. There were no pivots or re-adjustments. There weren't a lot of great data options at the time. Most importantly, if you launched half the fleet and then decided to re-tool for data support or something else, you'd have partial and inconsistent coverage during that retooling and then you're data coverage would be partial and inconsistent.

The gamble was voice was good enough and global coverage was a big enough seller that they'd re-coup the investment and become one of the largest telcos in the world and then by the time the birds died they'd launch next gen ones. It's a dynamic equation, there is tremendous demand for voice, unfortunately there isn't tremendous demand where there is no service.

The only "agile" choice they could have made was to stop. The real choices for the business were to wait (but they had money lined up, how many businesses raise the money and then call it off?) or to go forward. Personally, I just think it couldn't have worked, wrong idea at the wrong time. No agile vs. waterfall debate can change that or make a bad idea a good one.

But what could they have done differently? They could perhaps iterate the design of each satellite on the assembly line. But things like buying rockets, getting them delivered to the launch site, getting a launch window, etc, it's hard to see how you can do that in sprints. This is about moving physical stuff around.

The point is "they should have done something differently" not "what they could have done". Halfway through their development process, the problem they started out to solve no longer existed.

Launching satellites etc are expensive and time consuming. Agreed. But even when Iridium launched it's satellites were not fully operational. They would have probably had enough warning to iterate on a different product

We don't know that they had a choice. If you've signed a contract, with penalties, for 15 launches, you might know you're doomed but have to press on anyway. The Eurofighter is another example of this - when the UK govt tried to cancel its Tranche 3 order, it found the penalties would have been more than the cost of the aircraft...

They could have declared bankruptcy.