IF HIS family had guessed that Homer Hickam Jr had a future in the space business, they might have paid a little more attention. Mealtime conversations in the Hickam household tended to revolve around coal mining and American football; the obsessions, respectively, of Homer Sr and his elder son Jim. When fourteen-year-old Homer Jr announced at the dinner table that he was going to build a rocket, nobody took the blindest bit of notice. Except, that is, for his mother, Elsie. She thought about it for a while. “Well,” she said, finally. “Don't blow yourself up.”
   Homer Jr - “Sonny” to all who knew him - was as good as his word. Instead, he blew up his mother's rose garden fence, along with her bathroom scales, a fair quantity of her cookware and the household water heater. He also knocked chunks out of the brickwork of his father's office; stood accused - wrongly - of setting fire to several acres of forest; and left a smoking crater outside a local church. This would in turn lead to the sole casualty of Homer's rocket-building program, when the town drunk, a man by the name of Carson, fell into it one night and sprained his ankle. “God looks after fools and drunks,” the pastor, Reverend “Little” Richard, was fond of saying, but he was wrong on this occasion.
   Reverend Richard's nickname derived from a resemblance, possibly cultivated, to the singer. He was minister to the black population of Coalwood, West Virginia. Like any other Southern town in 1957, Coalwood was segregated. The black families lived up a dirt track west of the paved roads which skirted the white homes. Housing, education and worship were separate, shopping, dining and working mixed. And as coal was the only industry in town - indeed, the reason the town existed - the men were all the same colour when they came up out of the pit.
   The house nearest to the pit-head belonged to the Hickams, for as long as Homer Sr was in charge of the mine. In common with all the houses in Coalwood, and all the shops, roads, utilities and chapels, it was owned and maintained by the Olga Coal Company. Coalwood was a model town, unique in the West Virginia mining industry. Whatever the workers needed, they should have. A doctor and dentist, for a nominal charge. Running water and a proper sewerage system - no outhouses in Coalwood. Cable television, to bring in the signals lost in the surrounding Appalachian Mountains. A company store which, unlike those of other outfits, was not run to gouge its captive customers and leave them hopelessly beholden to the owners. A post office, a drugstore, even - for a while - a bakery.
   Over this American idyll, on October 5, 1957, flew the Soviet satellite Sputnik, the first spacecraft. It could not have caused more of a stir if it had plunged onto the town in a screaming fireball. The panic and pessimism which would build up across America in the coming weeks were immediate in Coalwood, where the people gathered at night to watch the blinking light track across the firmament, and the radio station broadcast Sputnik's stuttering signal in place of the customary rock'n'roll.
   For Sonny Hickam, dreamer, sci-fi fanatic and unexceptional student, Sputnik was like a sign written in the sky telling him to build his own rocket. As it happens, he would build thirty-five. His goal, at first, was relatively modest: to make them go. If he could learn to do that, he reasoned, maybe he could work on rockets for the government. And if you could build rockets, what - in an age before anyone had heard of astronauts - was to prevent you flying them? To the moon. To Mars.
   Homer Hickam, his boyish nickname long discarded, would fulfil at least one of his ambitions, although it would take him more than twenty years. After diverting himself with college, war and aqualungs, he went to work for NASA. He engineered spacecraft, although he came no nearer to the cosmos than the simulators in which he helped train the crews of Space Shuttle missions.
   But in 1957, in Sonny's mind, the sky was no longer the limit. By the time he was through with homemade rockets, Coalwood's entire citizenry had, one way or another, been caught up in his scheme. What started as a naive enthusiasm became the focus for his hopes and those of his friends, as well as for the divisions which split both his family and his town, father against mother, management against union, past against future. Plus it was a great way to get girls.



“SPUTNIK,” says Homer Hickam, “was a slap in the face for the country. We were supposed to send a satellite up first, because we did everything first, right? The belief was that the world was going to choose one of two ways to go, either our way or the Russians' way. And if it appeared that the Russians' system was so much better than ours, then the countries in Africa and Asia would choose to become communist. It astonished everyone and scared them. But I thought it was great. I loved the fact that the space race had started, and I loved the idea of being part of that, somehow, some way.”
   The porch of Hickam's home in Huntsville, Alabama is screened off to deter insects, and the occasional raccoon, with which his cats are foolish enough to pick fights. It was out here that Homer wrote the story of his childhood, Rocket Boys. The book has been a bestseller in the States, enabling him to retire from full-time work at NASA. The subsequent film is called October Sky - an anagram of Rocket Boys. Where the book portrays Coalwood with an honest sentimentality, the film is merely sentimental. It does capture the feeling of the town, and of its time; but Hickam himself seems to have been lost in the process. The Homer of the movie is neither the smart and audacious boy of the memoir, nor its droll, good-natured author.
   A neat, compact man, his open face ringed with greying curls, Hickam has that unruffled way of talking - down-home, but worldly all the same - peculiar to parts of the US South. His conversation is a curious mix of professional expertise and homespun wisdom, and you could argue that he is well entitled to use either.
   When Homer, as the teenage Sonny, took to building rockets, it was largely thanks to Disney World, the favourite children's TV program of the day. The show regularly featured an imposing, suave, self-assured presenter who in looks and demeanour bore a vague likeness to a blond, teutonic Cary Grant. Sonny idolised this television star. His name was Wernher von Braun. He was a rocket scientist. In the Second World War, he had built the V2 rocket, the flying bomb, for Germany. He had, as he would later remark, aimed for the stars and hit London. This flippancy was revealing of a man for whom developing the tools of space exploration was worth any cost. By 1957 he was America's rocket guru, and he confidently, almost casually, asserted that if America wanted a satellite of its own, he could send one up tomorrow. Just give him the word.
   Sonny Hickam, dreamer, sci-fi fanatic and unexceptional student, had never been so impressed with anything or anyone in his life. And when, 24 years later, he moved to Huntsville, it was to work at the Marshall Space Flight Centre, where Wernher von Braun's team of emigrés developed the Saturn boosters which powered the Apollo moon landings.
   The Germans had arrived in Huntsville in 1949. It was a charmless, sprawling municipality which produced little else beside cotton, chemical weapons and mosquitoes. Nowadays it brands itself “Rocket City” and the mosquitoes, at least, appear to have thought better of it and departed. Where the Hickam residence stands, secluded by thick woodland on Huntsville's suburban hillsides, it is very pleasant indeed. A little like Coalwood, perhaps, without the dust and the slag heaps.
   When Sonny Hickam began constructing rockets, was he was thinking about beating the Russians? Was he dreaming of conquering space? Or did he simply want a way to get out of Coalwood and into somewhere like Huntsville?
   Hickam's wife, Linda Terry, smiles fondly at him. “You just wanted to blow something up, didn't you, honey?”
   “Well, yeah, sure,” he allows. “I was a teenage boy. But my idea was, if I learned how to build a rocket, I could just go hire on with Dr von Braun. That's the way you did it in the coal mines, you had a skill of something, you just went up to the coal mine, you got a job. And then the problem came; well, how do you build a rocket?”



IN TRIBUTE to von Braun's Army Ballistic Missile Agency, Sonny Hickam and four friends formed the Big Creek Missile Agency, named for their local high school. The grandiose title belied the group's assets, which at that stage consisted of a broken plastic torch tube and the gunpowder from a dozen cherry-bombs, left over from the 4th of July. Nonetheless, it was with these meagre resources that they managed to destroy the fence around Mrs Hickam's rose garden.
   Next, with the help of the company's machine shop, they made four small rockets out of aluminium tubing, each with a carved wooden nose cone and a washer soldered to the base for a nozzle, and powered them with a mix of saltpetre, sulphur and charcoal known as “black powder”. Sonny wryly christened his rocket series Auk, after the extinct flightless bird. On the barren summit of Pine Knob, two mountains over, Auk 1 jumped six feet into the air and expired. Auk II went berserk, reaching a height of 20 feet during its convoluted flight, and smashed itself into the boulder behind which the boys took swift and undignified shelter. Auk III looped the loop, bounced off the nearby trees, and buried itself in the mountainside. It was with Auk IV that the Big Creek Missile Agency inadvertently launched its rocket attack on the Olga Coal Company offices.
   After that incident, Homer Sr barred the BCMA from company property. They retreated to a disused slag dump in a desolate valley some miles away, where they constructed'ôD`)ö om cannily a#ü°priated concrete and tin. This was to be their firing range. In keeping with their ambitions, they named it Cape Coalwood.
   Meanwhile, at Cape Canaveral, the USA's official rocket program had met with scarcely greater success. Determined to launch a “civilian” spacecraft, in visible contrast to the Soviets' military-based Sputniks, the government staked its prestige on a project called Vanguard. Come December 1957, the much-touted Vanguard toppled flaming from the launchpad like a wedding cake hit by a bottle bomb. It was a worldwide public relations disaster. “Kaputnik!” cackled The Daily Express, while The Daily Herald settled for “Flopnik”. Somewhat grudgingly, the Eisenhower administration conceded that the army, and von Braun, should carry the flag. A month later, von Braun successfully put the Explorer satellite into orbit on his first attempt. Sonny, of course, was delighted.
   “You couldn't have scripted this better. The Vanguard team, they're plodding along, they're just nondescript rocket scientists. Sure enough, it blew up. And von Braun comes along, he's going to save the country, and he did. He did exactly what he said he was going to do. To me it was just like, I wanna be on his team.”
   Sonny and his four friends - Quentin, Sherman, Roy Lee and O'Dell - were all sons, and for the most part grandsons, of miners. “It was kind of an unspoken thing:‘If you want to stay in this part of the country, you'll have to work in the mine.’ And also, the vast majority of kids could not afford to go to college.”
   Quentin, whose IQ was off the scale, came from a family so poor that he dreaded anyone seeing the house they lived in. The Hickams were relatively well off. Jim was sure to win a football scholarship, while their mother had saved enough money to send the younger boy to university. Worried by Sonny's apparent aimlessness, she alone encouraged him in his first experiments. “Coalwood's going to die, Sonny,” she told him. “You can't count on the mine being here when you graduate from high school. You can't even count on this town being here. You need to do everything you can to get out of here.”
   Homer Sr repeatedly forbade Sonny to have anything to do with rockets. He wanted Sonny to follow him down the mine; not to dig coal, but to be the engineer Homer himself was in all but title. Sonny was quietly defiant. He became one of the most determined and attentive pupils at Big Creek High School, tackling algebra and calculus with a tenacity he had previously shown only in his unsuccessful wooing of a girl called Dorothy Plunk. Some staff viewed the change with suspicion. The principal, Mr Turner, referred to the BCMA as “The pipe-bomb club.”