Publisher's Synopsis
In a town where the only things that mattered were coal-mining and high-school football, where the future was regarded with more fear than hope, a young man watched the Soviet satellite Sputnik race across the West Virginia sky and soon found his future in the stars. In 1957, Homer H. Sonny Hickam, Jr., and a handful of his friends were inspired to start designing and launching the home-made rockets that would change their lives and their town forever. Looking back after a distinguished NASA career, Hickam shares the story of his youth, taking readers into the life of the little mining town of Coalwood and the boys who would come to embody its dreams. Step by step, with the help (and occasional hindrance) of a collection of unforgettable characters, the boys learned not only how to turn scrap into sophisticated rockets that flew miles into the sky but also how to sustain their dreams as they dared to imagine a life beyond the borders of a town that the postwar boom was passing by.
