Even before the Apollo missions ended, rocket science had begun to lose its Olympian aura. The Challenger explosion in 1986 completed the process, making many in the U.S. aerospace industry look like reckless bumblers. But with the film "Apollo 13, "the HBO miniseries "From the Earth to the Moon," and now Gary Dorsey's Silicon Sky, the engineers behind America's successes in space are once again being cast as heroes.

Dorsey's book chronicles the rise of Orbital Sciences Inc., the Virginia startup that invented the Pegasus rocket, the nation's first new launch vehicle in decades. In the early 1990s the company wooed investors with a promise to launch its own network of small, cheap communications satellites, bringing a global wireless network to market long before competitors such as Motorola. By 1998 it had succeeded, thanks in part to the brashness and savvy of Orbital co-founder David Thompson.