October Sky [Mass Market Paperback]

Inspired by Werner von Braun and his Cape Canaveral team, 14-year-old Homer Hickam decided in 1957 to build his own rockets. They were his ticket out of Coalwood, West Virginia, USA, a mining town that everyone knew was dying--everyone except Sonny's father, the mine superintendent and a company man so dedicated that his family rarely saw him. Hickam's smart, iconoclastic mother wanted her son to become something more than a miner and, along with a female science teacher, encouraged the efforts of his grandiosely named Big Creek Missile Agency. He grew up to be a NASA engineer and his memoir of the bumpy ride toward a gold medal at the National Science Fair in 1960--an unprecedented honour for a miner's kid--is rich in humour as well as warm sentiment. Hickam vividly evokes a world of close communal ties in which a storekeeper who sold him saltpeter warned, "Listen, rocket boy. This stuff can blow you to kingdom come." Hickam is candid about the deep disagreements and tensions in his parents' marriage, even as he movingly depicts their quiet loyalty to each other. The portrait of his ultimately successful campaign to win his aloof father's respect is equally affecting. --Wendy Smith --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

'Gloriously inspiring' --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

'Deserves to take its place in the long line of American classics running from Tom Sawyer to To Kill A Mocking Bird.' --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

'Inspirational.' --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

'Wonderful.' --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

'Moving, utterly absorbing and often explosively funny.' --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

The true story, originally published as Rocket Boys, that inspired the Universal Pictures film.

It was 1957, the year Sputnik raced across the Appalachian sky, and the small town of Coalwood, West Virginia, was slowly dying.

Faced with an uncertain future, Homer Hickam nurtured a dream: to send rockets into outer space. The introspective son of the mine’s superintendent and a mother determined to get him out of Coalwood forever, Homer fell in with a group of misfits who learned not only how to turn scraps of metal into sophisticated rockets but how to sustain their hope in a town that swallowed its men alive.

As the boys began to light up the tarry skies with their flaming projectiles and dreams of glory, Coalwood, and the Hickams, would never be the same.

Unusually for 50s’ West Viriginia, all the Rocket Boys went to college and on to professional careers. Homer Hickam, 21 years after the BCMA fired its final rocket, joined NASA as an engineer at the Marshall Space Flights Centre from which he retired in 1997.

--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.