SILICON SKY

Reviewed 2/18/2000

SILICON SKY: How One Small Start-up Went Over the Top To Beat the Big Boys into Satellite Heaven Gary Dorsey Reading, MA: Perseus Books, 1999				Rating: 4.5 High
ISBN 0-7382-0094-8	332pp.	HC/BWI	$26.00

I have the impression that writing this book was as much a voyage of discovery as the creation of the revolutionary satellites it describes. Certainly both endeavors included their share of mistakes. But in the end, both succeed admirably.

Gary Dorsey is not a technologist, and his two other books are not about technology, or at least not about space technology, which is an order of magnitude more complicated than the terrestrial variety. This is no discredit to him. But it does mean that he made many mistakes in describing the engineering work he witnessed: misusing technical terms, misunderstanding concepts, mis-labeling some companies. Such errors are most apparent in the early part of the book; evidently he learned as he went along, just as the young engineers whose story he is telling did. As the book is part of the Sloan1 Technology Series, it would have benefitted from a more careful review by an outside expert in technology.

Dorsey began working on the book in 1991, and lived with the Orbital Sciences team for over five years. He was after the human side of the enterprise, apparently — much like Tracy Kidder in Soul of a New Machine. I have not read Kidder's book2, to which this one has been compared. But, in my estimation, Dorsey did only a passable job on the characters he describes. He did better with the saga of their struggle through major engineering challenges and internecine politics to reach success in a cliffhanger ending. That story is a riveting one, and despite all the crises he relates, it even has a happy ending. So I can forgive his mistakes in describing the technology. Those are listed on the errata page (linked below) for this book, along with the many grammatical and typographical errors.

Less forgivable are the errors of history and perspective, such as saying that Orbital was the first American company since 1970 to succeed with an expendable, privately funded rocket, that in 1984 it had secured the most financing ($50M) to that date for "any aerospace system", or that the aerospace industry had become a "withering cult". Because of these errors, I cannot recommend the book wholeheartedly.

Such faint praise begs the question of why I include it here, since this is supposed to be a collection of high-quality books. I think it is worth including here because it provides a closely detailed look at the creation and development of an entrepreneurial space hardware company, and because — despite some errors — it largely gets the technology, the personalities and interactions of the people right.

1The Sloan School is a renowned business school at the University of Pennsylvania.
2 Soul of a New Machine describes the development at Data General Corporation of a new minicomputer design.

List of errata for Silicon Sky