Customer Reviews

Silicon Sky: How One Small Start-Up Went Over the Top to Beat the Big Boys Into Satellite Heaven

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4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

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.

One of the most inspiring business books of the past year tells how a little company full of big ideas, Virginia-based Orbital Sciences Corp., got into the business of putting commercial satellites into space. In Silicon Sky: How One Small Start-Up Went Over the Top to Beat the Big Boys into Satellite Heaven, author Gary Dorsey chronicles the progress of a pipe dream as it has evolved into a company with 1998 revenues of $734 million. Orbital founder David Thompson gave Dorsey unfettered access to the company's inner workings -- from the beginning of its efforts to design a commercially viable communications satellite in 1992 through the first launch in 1995. The author clearly identifies with Thompson's entrepreneurial ardor, contrasting Orbital's culture of discovery with the 'feudal,' unimaginative culture of old-line aerospace companies addicted to government contracts. What Dorsey lacks in objectivity, he makes up for in clarity. From his fly-on-the-wall perch, sitting in on company meetings and peering over the shoulders of workers in the lab, he has observed and distilled into concise prose the details that made Orbital's success possible. Dorsey explains the technology behind the business so fluidly that it hardly seems like rocket science. BOOKPAGE, June 1990 REVIEW BY E. THOMAS WOOD

As someone who worked at the 'old' OSC during the time that this book covers, I knew a lot of the characters portrayed here and am acquainted with the Orbcomm story. It's not only accurate but it also tells a lot more about the engineering team and the management of the project than most people in the company knew at the time. Some people fault the book for only covering the time period to the '95 launch, but for the three critical years of the start-up's story, he captures every significant facet. I'm sure some engineers might not be happy with how they're portrayed, but this is not a technical book. As a story about entrepreneurial guts and the essence of engineering it's one of the best. The recent award from IEEE was highly deserved.

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.

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.

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 that Gary Dorsey has written about in Silicon Sky.

"Studied" might be a better term than written about... We were definitely studied, like amusing and sometimes suprisingly humanoid monkeys in a cage. We always used to joke about the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. It goes something like this: You can't measure anything without affecting it a little bit. Dr Heisenberg was a physicist, and wrote down his idea in terms of th mathematics of atomic particles, but it is a concept equally valid in the field of anthropology, which is what this book is going to be about. I've read a couple of books by Gary Dorsey, and they share this feature; he works hard to get inside the head of his subjects and succeeds in taking you there, too. That and his style entranced me. It doesn't take much time at all to get fully engrossed because the book immediately surrounds you with its own "virtual reality" So, Gary was our own Heisenberg, measuring us, and certainly impacting the process a little along the way.

I remember being surprised that Dave Thompson (the Big Boss, we always called him) had allowed Gary unlimited access. Gary was like a spider on the wall, crawling silently into any group he wanted, from the executives' meetings to bitch sessions in the lab. The little red light of his tape recorder, an occasional note he took, these things reminded you this was all going to come out, eventually. Gary would also come around and interview you occasionally. I remember thinking, "damn, I don't \ have time for this guy." or, later "damn, what's he going to write about me?" or even "this will make one cool book!" ...and now it will.

I am nervous about what I may find in this book about myself, but still pretty sure I will deserve it. When Gary did his little interviews, there were always less questions than you expected - he had you figured out already.

And yes, he did have an effect. Gary was part of a special scent that permeated OSC: exuberance, fear and a little magic. We thought we were doing something of historical significance and he added to that instinct. Confirmed it, sort of. You would wake up nights feeling your pulse hammer. The way Gary writes, you will probably feel it too.

People will kill themselves to do something that really matters, whether it's a spacecraft or a book. I hope it has.

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 telling the whole story, linking the pieces together, or capturing the true challenges of a startup such as Orbital. While the book is of 1999 vintage, the story stops short 3 years ago, leading the reader hanging as to what happened.

On the other hand, Dorsey had excellent visibility and access within the company. He relates stories of all levels of technical and management personnel. His narratives and writing style are quite good, and the book is overall a very easy read.

The book is several steps below Soul of a New Machine, by Tracy Kidder.

The race to space never looked like this before. Compares well with "Apollo 13" and "Soul of a New Machine." Somehow this writer found the passion in what was an apparent engineering/marketing coup that created the world's first entrepreneurial space company. Great characters, a sizzling story, excellent writing. This has to be one of the best books -- if not the best book -- in the highly touted Sloan technology series.