The first call on the original Globalstar system was placed on November 1, 1998, from Qualcomm chairman Irwin Jacobs in San Diego to Loral Space & Communications CEO and chairman Bernard Schwartz in New York.
Due to changes in the space launch business—including the challenges faced by companies such as Globalstar, Teledesic, and Iridium and the resulting drop in the number of anticipated commercial satellite launches per year—Lockheed Martin deemed that continuing development of the X-33 privately without government support would not be profitable.
Jha began his career at Qualcomm in 1994 as a senior engineer with the Qualcomm very-large-scale integration group working on the Globalstar satellite phone, and later on the first 13k vocoder application-specific integrated circuit, which was integrated into Qualcomm's MSM2200 chipset.