- Hardcover: 352 pages
- Publisher: Perseus Books (18 May 1999)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0738200948
- ISBN-13: 978-0738200941
- Product Dimensions: 23.6 x 16.5 x 3.3 cm
- Average Customer Review: 3.2 out of 5 stars See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 2,855,826 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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Product Description
Product Description
A classic American tale of ingenuity, hard work, guts and glory.. For more than a decade some of the worlds most powerful defense companies have raced to launch the first constellation of low-earth orbit commercial satellites. The prize? An explosive global market for personal communications worth billions of dollars. Fresh out of Harvard Business School, twenty-something David Thompson entered the fray with an insane idea: to build his own rockets, satellites and a multi-million-dollar corporation that could go head-to-head against the big guys. His electrifying grab for the heavenshuge start-up costs, mind-blowing technical obstacles, and dark tangos with investorsis told by acclaimed writer Gary Dorsey, who was there reporting from inside. The story of their obsessive gamble in the high-stress game of space commerce is told through the lives of Thompsons managers, markets, and freshoutsa brilliant team of young engineers from the countrys best universities. Like The Soul of a New Machine, Silicon Sky part of the celebrated Sloan Technology Seriesreads like fast-paced fiction, tracing the advent not just of a single company, but of a quickly emerging technological industry.
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Canada geese rose over a thin strand of pine trees, eased out of formation, and glided quietly down into a clear, cold, man-made pond. Read the first page
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index | Back Cover
Canada geese rose over a thin strand of pine trees, eased out of formation, and glided quietly down into a clear, cold, man-made pond. Read the first page
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
Format:Hardcover
Having worked at Orbital during the period this book covers, I was shocked at the inconsistency throughout this book. The author writes as an authority on Orbital, but in reality, he has had a very small slice of insight into what went on during that time. Critical events affecting the company as a whole which almost everyone at the company would know about did not show up in this book. For instance, two highly publicized failures of the Pegasus Rocket which occurred prior to the flight of Orbcomm were not even discussed. These failures definitely had some impact to the Orbcomm project. When you talk about Orbital, you talk about an end to end space company. That includes building the satellite, launching it, and providing the infrastructure to control it. The attempt was made at getting this across, but it really did not do justice to that topic. The book should be described as the incomplete history of the design of a satellite, not a history of Orbital. I do have to say that management personalites were described rather accurately. The engineers in the story are really depicted as an inexperienced bunch of kids who came right out of school with their "license to learn" (degree) and were directed to design a satellite system with nothing but their egos. Quite a bit of the book describes the long hours they worked and the stress involved in getting it done. This wasn't a superhuman abnormality in the engineering world at Orbital, as the author would lead you to believe. He could have told us about it in maybe 3 sentences, not 300+ pages. With that out of the way, the author could have brought this history of Orbcomm into recent history, instead of stopping before the constellation was launched. In summary, I have to say this book was a big disappointment. It doesn't do justice to Orbital or provide a consistent picture of the Orbcomm constellation development.
Format:Hardcover
I agree completely with the reader from Monument, CO. This book was very disjointed and poorly written. The only favorable reviews I see on this page are from people involved in the satellite business. One five star rating comes from a guy who has not read the book! This book pales in comparison to one of my favorites, "The Soul of a New Machine", by Tracy Kidder. The characters in Silicon Sky are sketchy and at times superficial. For example, all we really learn about Grace is that she sings pop songs while walking and loves to get in the face of the contract manufacturers - even though she was apparently an engineer of some importance. Dorsey also does a rather poor job at documenting how various technical obstacles are overcome. How exactly was the "last great obstacle", the problem with the satellite's batteries overcome? We'll never know. The last thing Dorsey talks about is some experiments with some mysterious shielding material. Did the material work? Or did the engineers have to come up with something else? Instead we are treated to coverage of engineers howling when they found out their board does not work because the MCU is placed wrong. I've designed boards for embedded systems for years. The only time I've had an error of this nature I found I had mislabled the board's silkscreen. Takes a tech about three minutes to fix with a hot-air rework station. Sorry, I really wanted to like this book. But it appears that Dorsey does not have enough technical expertise to determine the relative importance of projects and engineers to really make this an informative and entertaining book.
Format:Hardcover
It is almost invariable that stories that I have personal knowledge of are conveyed with glaring errors and omissions. I am happy to say that Gary Dorsey's book is a notable exception.
I joined Orbital in 1996 and worked on the subsequent Orbcomm constellation, which started after the completion of the book. Of the principals who worked on the original Orbcomm and stayed for the constellation development, Mr. Dorsey captures the character of each with incredible precision. Mr. Dorsey also gets the technical details right. He has a real knack for picking up how engineers talk to each other and how technical problems penetrate their equilibrium.
My only issue with the book is that it's episodic in nature and fails to follow specific technical problems and their human actors to resolution.
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Most Recent Customer Reviews
A sizzling story told with style --couldn't put it down!
The race to space never looked like this before. Compares well with "Apollo 13" and "Soul of a New Machine. Read more
Published on 4 Jun 1999
Disjointed, incomplete treatment of excellent subject
The story of Orbital is excellent, but Dorsey's narrative lacks direction and completeness. It bounces between episodes in the growth of Orbital Sciences, but does a poor job of... Read more
Published on 20 May 1999
The monkey speaks! (Review from a participant.)
I've not yet read this book of course, it isn't published yet. But I'll write a review anyway. You see, I was one of the engineers working on the satellite development team... Read more
Published on 7 April 1999
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