The Rocket Boys of Coalwood, 1957 to 1960

October Sky

In a West Virginia coal town, a satellite crossing the night sky sent six high school boys to building rockets, and then to learning the math and physics to make them fly. Here is their true story, the Space Race around it, and safe ways to try rocketry yourself.

On October 4, 1957, the Soviet Union put the first artificial satellite into orbit. In Coalwood, West Virginia, a fourteen-year-old named Homer Hickam Jr. decided he would build rockets. He and five friends from Big Creek High School did, for three years. Their first tries blew up. So they learned trigonometry, geometry and physics, got help from the town, and kept at it. In 1960 they won a gold and a silver medal at the National Science Fair. Homer later became a NASA engineer and told the story in his memoir Rocket Boys (1998), which became the film October Sky (1999).

Want the math? The boys had to work out how high their rockets went, how fast they flew, and why some tumbled. Our companion course, Rocket Boys Math and Physics, teaches those ideas one topic at a time, with practice. Start with measuring height with a theodolite and the tangent of an angle, the way they did.

The story, step by step

  1. A coal town in a narrow valley, with company houses, the mine's tipple and a coal car

    1943 to 1957

    A coal town

    Homer Hadley Hickam Jr. was born on February 19, 1943, in Coalwood, a mining town in McDowell County, in the mountains of southern West Virginia. Coalwood was a company town, founded in 1905 around its coal mines. His father, Homer Sr., was the mine superintendent. His mother hoped he would make a life away from the mine. By the late 1950s, mining there was in decline.

  2. Night over the ridge: a small satellite with four long antennas crosses the stars while a boy looks up

    October 4, 1957

    Sputnik

    The Soviet Union launched Sputnik 1, a metal ball about 23 inches across with four long antennas. It circled the Earth about once every 98 minutes. Homer saw it cross the sky over Coalwood, and the sight set him on his way. He gathered friends from Big Creek High School: Roy Lee Cooke, Sherman Siers, Quentin Wilson and Jimmy O'Dell Carroll, with Billy Rose joining later. They called themselves the Big Creek Missile Agency.

  3. A backyard fence with a broken gap and a cloud of smoke, and a small rocket lying on the grass

    1957 to 1958

    The first rockets fail

    Homer's first rocket blew up and wrecked part of his mother's fence. The group's first named rocket, Auk I, rose about six feet before it came apart. The boys mixed their own fuels in those years, as amateurs did then, and it was dangerous work. Today's hobby rocketry uses factory-made, certified motors instead; see Try it safely.

  4. A chalkboard with a right triangle: the baseline d, the height h and the angle theta, with h equals d times tan thetaθdhh = d·tan θ

    1958 to 1959

    Learning the math

    Their teacher Freida Riley taught chemistry and physics at Big Creek. She pushed the boys to study advanced math and physics and gave Homer a book called Principles of Guided Missile Design. They worked through trigonometry, plane and solid geometry, and the physics of motion. Machinists and welders in the mine's shops helped shape metal parts, and the carpenters made nose cones.

    To tell how high a rocket went, the boys built their own theodolites, which are sighting tools that read an angle. From a measured distance and the angle up to the rocket's highest point, trigonometry gives the height. Learn how in the course.

  5. Cape Coalwood: a flat old slack dump between ridges, a small blockhouse, a rocket climbing, and an observer sighting it through a theodolitebaseline

    1958 to 1960

    Cape Coalwood

    The boys needed a safe place to launch, away from houses. They used an abandoned slack dump, the flat waste ground left by the mine, nearly a mile long between two ridges. Homer's father allowed it. They built a small blockhouse from company lumber and named the place Cape Coalwood, after Cape Canaveral in Florida. Their rockets, numbered Auk I to Auk XXXI, went from a few feet to thousands of feet. By their own measurements, the last one, Auk XXXI, climbed nearly four miles. More than a hundred miners and their families came to watch it.

  6. A science fair table with a three-panel display about rockets, and a gold medal and a silver medal on ribbons1960

    1960

    The science fairs

    With Miss Riley's urging, the boys entered their work in the science fair as "A Study of Amateur Rocketry Techniques." It won at the county fair and went on from there to the National Science Fair in 1960, where it won a gold and a silver medal in propulsion. Homer graduated from Big Creek High School that same year.

  7. Stars above the curve of the Earth, a graduation cap, and an open book with a rocket drawn on its page

    After 1960

    What became of the Rocket Boys

    All six went to college. Roy Lee Cooke became a banker. Jimmy O'Dell Carroll went into insurance and farming. Quentin Wilson, Billy Rose and Sherman Siers became engineers. Sherman died young, at 34.

    Homer earned an engineering degree at Virginia Tech in 1964, served in the U.S. Army from 1964 to 1970, including a year in Vietnam, and then worked as an engineer for the Army in Huntsville, Alabama, and in Germany. In 1981 he joined NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center, where he trained astronauts for Space Shuttle and Spacelab missions, including the launch and first repairs of the Hubble Space Telescope. He retired in 1998, the year Rocket Boys came out.

    Freida Riley had Hodgkin's disease for many years and kept teaching at Big Creek through it. She died on August 5, 1969, at 32.

More about October Sky

Look it up

Encyclopedia articles: Homer Hickam, Coalwood, West Virginia, Sputnik 1 and the theodolite on Grokipedia.

Next: The real story · Learn the math the boys learned in Rocket Boys Math and Physics, a Physics Ladder course.

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