Rocket Boys is a bestselling memoir by Homer Hickam published in 1998. It was made into a movie the year titled October Sky (an anagram of Rocket Boys) in the year following its publication, and the memoir was subsequently re-published under the same title.
The first in a series of four memoirs, Rocket Boys covers Hickam's early life from eight years old to high school. It describes his upbringing in Coalwood, West Virginia and his experiences while attending Big Creek High School where, after Hickam was inspired by the launching of the Russian satellite Sputnik 1, he and his friends founded an amateur rocket-building group called the Big Creek Missile Agency (BCMA). From 1957 to 1960, the boys experimented with different means of rocket propulsion, including gunpowder ("black powder") and sugar ("rocket candy"). This culminated in their qualification for and participation in the 1960 National Science Fair, where they won a silver and a gold medal in the area of propulsion for their project, titled "A Study of Amateur Rocketry Techniques".
Rocket Boys contains numerous allusions to historical figures, places, and things. "Cape Coalwood", for example, is an allusion to Cape Canaveral on Florida's "Space Coast". The boys' rockets, named Auk I to XXXI, are named for the great auk: an extinct--and, ironically, flightless--North Atlantic seabird.
The memoir serves as a backstory for Hickam's later experiences pursuing industrial engineering at Virginia Tech, serving in the Vietnam War, and later working for the United States Army Aviation and Missile Command and NASA. However, Rocket Boys and its film adaptation were both influential in their own right: two festivals, one in West Virginia and one in Tennessee (where the film was shot), are held annually in celebration of the memoir/film. After attending a 1999 screening of October Sky, Jeff Bezos--founder of Amazon--was inspired to start the aerospace manufacturer and spaceflight services company Blue Origin.
