Yeah, I was at Motorola when they were supposed to be deorbited. I knew a guy that worked in the lab when they went through the lab to start to destroy all the equipment as part of the liquidation process. He saved one of the iconic brick handsets for me. No sim card. Just Accelerated Life Test Unit 4. It's been a proud possession of mine for years.

Please make sure it ends up in a museum eventually.

I believe the Computer History Museum already has one.

Here's an example of how to misplaces satellites were used to test General Relativity:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aKwJayXTZUs

Eccentric Orbits was one of my favorite reads from last year.

This article also gives a pretty decent tl;dr:

https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/d34bmk/iridium-ne...