They're going to pull the Iridium satellites out of the sky and dump them into the ocean. Last Friday Iridium shut down all remaining accounts, and the bankrupt satellite phone service will be "de-orbiting" its space-borne assets over the next two years. The ritual sacrifice of sixty-six flaming satellites should be a major public event -- a Moon landing in reverse gear. Or, at least, the death of poor Iridium should rank with one of those final, kinda boring Moon landings, when people realized that the Moon is much less interesting than NASA said it was. If we miss the vital lesson in the squalid techno-carnage of Iridium, we have nobody to blame but ourselves. After this vast, smoking debacle, we should all grow up, make our peace with the loss of a chrome-plated illusion, and come to terms with the painful fact that big, shiny space rockets aren't the coolest things in the universe.

There are precisely two ways in which space rockets are incredibly cool: One, if you're personally strapped inside one. Then, yeah, they're really amazing, but that's never gonna happen to you. Or two, if you're a Soviet in 1957. There's no press freedom, there's no toilet paper and the roof leaks, but man, the Soviet Union has space rockets!! Rejoice, comrade! We are storming the cosmos, we are shattering the surly bonds of Earth! We have seized the starry high ground, and this makes any earthly sacrifice worthwhile!

Those times are quite dead now and deserve a formal burial. Nowadays, most people don't blindly believe swaggering space propaganda, where the glamour of technical accomplishment is fiercely valued over any hint of earthly practicality. (In a word, most people aren't Motorola engineers.) Iridium sacrificed five billion of other people's money, including, not surprisingly, rather a lot of money from gullible, poverty-stricken Russians. Iridium is the single greatest debacle in communications history. We really shouldn't paper over a mess of that size. We should watch with care and take note.

My heart particularly goes out to that cult of trainspotter geeks who watch Iridium "satellite flares. " There are space-fan Web sites about this; it's a hobby thing. You bundle up nice and warm, consult your calculator for Naval Observatory time and azimuth coordinates, and tramp out into the predawn chill to witness an accidental gleam of sunlight off the remote orbital majesty of that multi-million-dollar passing bird. Great, huh? It brings the whole effort home, somehow; it's almost as if space rockets had something to do with you personally.

But now the real fun starts -- if anyone's willing to look. Watching 'em gleam is nothing compared to watching 'em burn. Just think about it: fantastically advanced orbiting switching stations, chock-full of state-of-the-art circuitry, falling into our outer atmosphere like abandoned Cadillacs. They're still up there, sixty-six of them, spinning in the pure empyrean to the vivid strains of a Stanley Kubrick Strauss waltz. But wait -- that space-waltz was just a Hollywood effect, because in a real-life vacuum, there can be no Strauss soundtracks. In reality, there was only the near-silent radio crackle of Iridium phone calls -- and, in even harsher reality, there were never very many of those. Unlike NASA and the Soviet Union, Iridium had to work in a market economy, where nobody wants to pay big moolah for fantastic rocket prestige, as opposed to actual phone service. So they shut down the Iridium phones last week. Those gleaming birds fly in perfect, tomblike silence now, 485 miles due up -- until they're forced down flaming, one by one, to a cold, blind, final rendezvous with the bottom of the sea.

Bruce Sterling writes science-fiction novels. He owns three computers, yet he has never been in a spacecraft.