Orbital Sciences Corp. was overextended and in trouble when Garrett Pierce came aboard in August 2000 as executive vice president and chief financial officer. The company — whose shares regularly traded at well above $40 in 1998 at the height of the stock market boom — was by then facing Wall Street's version of a perfect storm. Its woes included cost-growth problems on satellite programs; an anemic market for its Pegasus and Taurus small-satellite launchers; heavy investments in satellite messaging and imaging ventures that were hemorrhaging cash in an inexorable slide toward bankruptcy; and a hyperinflated stock market whose bubble was about to burst.
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