The Engines of Our Ingenuity, Episode 1421   |   By Dr. John Lienhard
Dr. Lienhard watches four teenagers, hungry for learning, and they show him how education rises out of high purpose.

“Not another boys’ coming-of-age story,” a friend says when I recommend Homer Hickam’s book, Rocket Boys. But Rocket Boys does something remarkable with that genre. Homer Hickam was fourteen in Coaltown, West Virginia, when the Russians launched Sputnik. The steel companies were losing interest in Coaltown’s deep mining operation. The imminent death of the mine was obvious to everyone but Homer’s father, one of its senior managers. Young Homer senses the decay of his world on a visceral level. He sees very clearly that he wants to go to work for Werner von Braun, and to build rockets.

Football is king in Coalville—no sympathy for foreign rocketry. Homer looks for a book on rocket-making. Of course, there are none. He eventually recruits three friends, and they set out to invent their own rocket. Now let’s play for a moment with that problem—a real rocket that’ll travel miles straight up!

We need a chemical propellant and a binding agent for the fuel. We need to shape the fuel within the rocket. We need metals to withstand the temperature of burning fuel. The shape of the necessary supersonic nozzle is not only mathematically complex; it’s also a completely unexpected form. A true guidance system would be far too complex. Without one, we need accurate tail fins and a launch system to aim it properly. We need means for measuring the height of the flight.

All these things the four boys accomplished against a backdrop of economic and domestic chaos—and in a world that couldn’t comprehend their work. They eventually hurled a rocket six miles into the sky and won a national science fair prize as well.

On the surface, the story leads us through the problem-solving process. As it unfolds, we’re hardly aware that we’re learning thermodynamics, fluid mechanics, chemistry, dynamics, and metallurgy. That’s because each of those issues mirrors into one or another of the crushing problems that go with hacking a living out of a dying company town. It is a remarkable piece of multilevel story-telling.

Homer Hickam went on to become an engineer. He never met von Braun, but in the 1980s he joined NASA. He did meet the Russian engineers who launched Sputnik. And, in 1997, an astronaut carried one of his old rocket nozzles on the shuttle Columbia. Only ghosts of his childhood linger in the remnants of Coaltown. But they’re benign ghosts. They are that array of surmountable trials we must all undergo if our lives are to find any form or contentment.

Hickam, H. H., Jr., October Sky (aka Rocket Boys). New York: Island Books, 1999.