This book was written by a popular science journalist and it shows. It's painfully uninformative and heavy-handed.

For example, while telling the story of Astra, he begins by writing about his privileged, unparalleled access to the company when it was still a tightly-kept secret and, consequentially, he'll be able to take us on the unfolding journey of a rocketry company, rather than just a retrospective, but instead all he does is repeat common knowledge in a manner that makes the reader feel intelligent. You'll come across a sentence like 'They'd often make exceptional progress on an engine for weeks, feeling like they were almost there, only for a detail to derail the plan by months'. Everyone knows delays happen and, more importantly, the uncritical reader comes away feeling like they've learned something despite, if being asked, not being able to say a word about the challenges of designing an engine.

Equally egregious is the almost hagiographic account of NASA Ames Research Center, a backwater that can't win a bid and suffers from an asbestos-filled campus a century old, which he casts as a bastion of progress fighting against the upper bureaucracy of the other bases and praises it for having hosted a scam university.