Google’s foray into space has given me a severe case of deja vu.  I spent a good chunk of the 1990s working at Eutelsat, the European satellite operator.  As the dotcom boom got underway on the ground, a commercial space race started in the satellite business that came crashing down to earth at about the same time as the Internet bubble burst.

Whilst companies such as Eutelsat and SES Astra went about growing pedestrian but very profitable businesses distributing digital TV to the Direct-to-Home and cable markets, billions of dollars were pumped into projects of truly galactic dimensions to build new global communications infrastructures in the sky.  The two exemplars were Teledesic and Iridium.  Although, these two projects targeted different markets (Teledesic was all about high bandwidth applications, whereas Iridium was global voice communications), they had many similarities:

1. Backed by titans from the high tech sector: Microsoft put $30M into Teledesic, and Motorola was the lead investor in the $5bn investment in Iridium’s network

2. A large dose of philanthropy: both companies exhibited a strong belief that satellites could bridge the digital divide and bring IT and communications services to the Third World.  But forgot that whilst the need was there, nobody had the money to pay for the services brought by these billion dollar networks!

3. Some very costly experimentation in new technologies – LEOs and MEOs for the interested (whereas we at Eutelsat made do with the old faithful GEOs)

4. Complete failure – Teledesic wound up before getting a satellite off the ground in 2002 and Iridium went bankrupt in 1999 (although it came back to life in a different form in 2001)

Google’s adventure is remarkably similar.  $20M contributed so far into a project estimated to cost $750M to launch 16 LEO satellites into orbit to bring Internet services to the “other 3 billion” people in the Third World. umm …

As JFK said: “We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard“.  I wonder whether a similar sentiment has taken hold in the Googleplex.  Could this be hubris from a cash-rich tech behemoth at the apogee of its market dominance? They have after all remade the planet as Google Earth, so now let’s look to the stars … And will this well-intentioned project burn up on re-entry as the fundamentals of the business model unravel?  I really hope it succeeds, but fear that like its predecessors it’s destined to fail.