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

by Gary Dorsey

For more than a decade some of the world’s 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 heavens—huge start-up costs, mind-blowing technical obstacles, and dark tangos with investors—is 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 Thompson’s managers, markets, and “freshouts”—a brilliant team of young engineers from the country’s best universities. Like The Soul of a New Machine, Silicon Sky—part of the celebrated Sloan Technology Series—reads like fast-paced fiction, tracing the advent not just of a single company, but of a quickly emerging technological industry.

Genres: Business, Nonfiction

352 pages, Paperback

First published April 27, 2000

Reviews

[Brendan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Too much focus on the first pair of Orbcomm birds. Needed more on Orbital CEO Thompson's biography and ambition, history of the Pegasus vehicle and ICBM conversions, efforts to raise start-up funding, etc. I was, however, struck by the similarities between the Orbital and SpaceX narratives.

[Fraser Kinnear · Rating 2 out of 5]

The parallels to SpaceX are really funny, and it’s interesting to read about this decade in the aerospace industry. But this is really just the story of their space systems group, so almost nothing on Pegasus. And of course so much of Orbital’s history happened after this book. As for Orbcomm, that story also has so much more after their 1995 launch.