March 18: Santpoort-Noord
Two rides are called for this weekend, 5h on Saturday and 2h on Sunday. I've got a new toy for this ride: a personal locator. This is an emergency beacon; it's got an SOS button (under a protective cover) and if you press it, you get rescued. What actually happens is that you get connected to a callcenter where they'll "arrange with local services". All the communication is done over the Iridium satellite network.
You may have heard of the Iridium network. It was peak 1900’s technology … from before cellphones, even. Motorola spent about 6 billion launching a network of satellites that would allow people to talk and text anywhere in the world. The name “Iridium” came from the original plan for 77 satellites; they scaled down to 66 but sadly they did not rename the company to “Dysprosium”.
The satellite launches started in 1997. They went live at the end of 1998: Iridium handsets cost over $3000, calls cost $9 per minute, and data transfer was 300 bytes/sec. Those numbers are laughable now, and they were pretty funny back them too, because it was no longer a world before cellphones: cellphones were everywhere and a few orders of magnitude better in every way - yes, even back then. Of course they quickly went bankrupt - about eight months later, in August 1999. At the time they had 55,000 customers which works out to about 90k per customer, making it a pretty epic fail. They weren’t the only one either: there were a few other satellite communication companies trying to do the same thing and they all turned to dust in the new dawn of cellphones: Orbcomm, ICO Global Communications, and Globalstar.
The bankruptcy administrators started looking for buyers but there wasn’t a lot of interest in buying 5 billion dollars of failing and outdated technology, even at a discount. A dotcom billionaire called Craig McCaw offered 600 million, but then the dotcom bubble burst and he backed out. So they moved on to the responsible thing: arranging to deorbit the satellites. At that point the highest bid was a 25 million offer scraped together from a Saudi prince, a Brazilian telecom company, an Australian venture capitalist, and a US investment company, organized by a former Pan Am executive. The story of how they convinced the administrators they were serious, that they should accept their lowball bid, how they got control before the satellites started burning up, and how they then revived the company and managed to make it not just self-sufficient but vaguely profitable is complicated but they pulled it off. (In fact there’s a book about it, “Eccentric Orbits”). So it’s not just a high-profile cautionary tale - but also a very respectable comeback story.
Unlike Starlink, it doesn’t need a pizza-sized dish antenna, the unit fits in a pocket. The medieval data rate makes it unusable for just about everything beyond text messages, but that’s all that’s needed for a couple of use cases - including personal locators. I’m paying 30 euro a month, and to my surprise there’s apparently over a million subscribers: they’re doing well enough to launch new satellites! I’m half-expecting them to be accidentally crushed by Starlink or whatever satellite constellation Jeff Bezos is funding, but whatever happens, their story is a good one.
Actually speaking of Iridium stories: they were involved in the first hyperspeed satellite traffic accident. To stay in orbit you need to be doing a few thousand kilometers per hour sideways. Any direction will work: so satellites are going every which way. They don’t collide that often, but when they do it’s going to be spectacular: and in 2009 Iridium #33 hit a defunct Russian satellite called “Kosmos 2251” at a relative speed of about 42000 km/h - about Mach 34, or 11.7km/s. That’s excitingly quick, and this one is memorable because it’s the first time such a collision happened. It made quite the mess - over 2000 pieces of debris were tracked by the U.S. Space Surveillance Network. In 2023 there’s still 1300 pieces in orbit.
Anyway: here’s the plan for the Saturday ride. 6 hours, a bit over 100km, one ferry.
A ferry? I’ve been assiduously avoiding them since being burnt in Holysloot back in Feb! This is a big one so I’m going to try trusting them again. (Also Google Maps claims there’s a route across some nearby locks - so if the ferry is I’ve got another option. Actually, maybe ensuring there was another option means I’m not really ready to trust them yet.)
Anyway: the route is anticlockwise, so if I get back late the end part will be familiar territory.
The only thing to relate about the run out west, is the damn Moof electric bikes. I’m working to keep up a good pace, so it’s not a good feeling to have someone breeze past at twice my speed, probably while on their phone. Curse all motors. And all middle-class status symbols.
Moving on: happily the ferry was working! It’s a car ferry, basically it’s a bridge replacement so indeed it runs 7 days a week. It was pretty busy too, and this is midday on a cold Sunday.
After that we get to the Zuid-Kennemerland National park. It’s a few kilometers away from Haarlem (pop: several hundred thousand) my expectations were not high. But it’s unexpectedly wild, and probably owes this to all the paved paths which mean the many visitors don’t trample it flat.
From left to right: a random windmill found on the first leg. This building ticks every sustainability box - including its own wind turbine! Selfie while cycling down a nice long treelined path: I will get tired of them but not today.
The 4th photo shows one of the paths in the national park. It’s set up for serious traffic. There were quite a few walkers and cyclists on them, even in this cold weather… Last photo shows that there were some dirt roads too.
There were some actual hills, and even some where you have to change down! But seriously, it’s worth a visit, and it’s cyclist friendly. Recommended.
Infrastructure pictures! On the left we have a nice bridge over a nice canal. On the right is a zoomed out view … the canal ends 20m further down at a road. (Still a nice bridge.)
The route home went past Schiphol airport, and it’s about there that my phone died. Since this was the first trip with the personal locator I didn’t want to exclusively rely on it for sharing my location, so I was using Komoot for that as well. Unfortunately that drains the phone quickly, and since I hadn’t bothered to stop for a coffee (and to recharge it) it didn’t survive the day. Here’s the track from Komoot:
As for navigating home: Amsterdam is hard to miss. The sun was getting low so I got home by putting the sun behind me, and taking a left once in a while. Saw a lot of Amsterdam than I haven’t seen before, but the cyclepaths were all good; after a while I got inside the ring road and from there’s it’s familiar routes to Station Zuid and then home. Total time: a bit under 6 hours. Efforts to cause drama by letting the phone run out: unimaginative. Total drama: not much.
There was also a Sunday ride but it was a chill 2 hours with nothing of interest to share. Next week is a hard week though, it’s the last week of the four week cycle.
