Homer Hickam
Homer Hadley Hickam, Jr. (born February 19, 1943), is an American writer, best known for his autobiographical novel Rocket Boys: A Memoir, which was the basis for the film October Sky.
Hickam is the second son of Homer Hickam, Sr., and Elsie Hickam in Coalwood, West Virginia, United States. He is married to Linda Terry Hickam. From what he written in Rocket Boys, his nickname was "Sonny" Hickam.
Hickam became fascinated with space travel when Sputnik flew over his West Virginia home in 1957. He idolized Wernher von Braun, who headed the United States' space program during the 1950s. While in high school, he and his friends (Roy Lee Cook, Quentin Wilson, Sherman Siers, Jimmy "O'Dell" Carroll and Billy Rose) formed the Big Creek Missile Agency and started to build small rockets from spare parts. With support from his chemistry and physics teacher, Freida J. Riley, he graduated from Big Creek High School in 1960. He enrolled at the Virginia Polytechnic Institute (Virginia Tech) from which he graduated in 1964 with a Bachelor of Science degree in Industrial Engineering. Hickam served for six years with the United States Army, retiring from duty in 1969 as a Vietnam War veteran.
While working on his writing career, Hickam worked as an engineer for the United States Army Missile Command from 1971 to 1981. He moved to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration at Marshall Space Flight Center in 1981 as an aerospace engineer. During his career with NASA, Hickam worked in spacecraft design and crew training. His specialties at NASA included training astronauts on science payloads, and extravehicular activities. He trained astronaut crews for many Spacelab and Space Shuttle missions, including the Hubble Space Telescope deployment mission, the first two Hubble repair missions, Spacelab-J, and the Solar Max repair mission. When Hickam retired from NASA in 1998, he was the Payload Training Manager for the International Space Station Program.
Novels
Hickam initially wrote about his scuba diving adventures for a variety of different magazines. His first novel, Torpedo Junction (1989), was a military history bestseller based on his research into German U-Boat attacks of the eastern American coast during World War II.
His next novel, Rocket Boys: A Memoir (1998), began as a filler article in Air & Space magazine, in which he wrote about launching homemade rockets in 1950s Coalwood, West Virginia. He expanded the article into the novel, which has won many awards and been translated the world over, and in 1999 was adapted into the critically acclaimed movie October Sky.
His first fiction novel Back to the Moon (1999), was a thriller about a new space race, filled with insider information from his years at NASA.
Hickam has also written two more memoirs in the "Coalwood" series (The Coalwood Way (2000) and Sky of Stone (2001)), and is currently writing the "Josh Thurlow" historical fiction series (The Keeper's Son (2003) and The Ambassador's Son (2005).