Space missions in the movies can seem elegant and straight-forward. Most are anything but! This book takes a personal journey into the labyrinth that a space-mission concept must travel through before a mission blasts off into deep space. Here is the story of the Rossi X ray Timing Explorer (RXTE), an Earth-orbiting NASA observatory meant to study X-ray emitting celestial objects. The technical and bureaucratic hurdles facing this mission are described with humor and wry personal anecdotes. And the pay-off? Sixteen years of successful observations resulting in critical new insight into black holes and neutron stars.