Homer Hickam - Rocket Boys

Auk XXIX and Auk XXX were both designed for twenty thousand feet, but with different dimensions. Auk XXIX was two inches in diameter, XXX two and a quarter but shorter. Auk XXIX was six feet long, the longest rocket we had ever fired. It was such a beauty, I almost regretted having to launch it and see it shattered back on earth. It took off in the mightiest roar ever witnessed at Cape Coalwood, tearing out of a caldron of flame and smoke. Our calculations put it just under four miles. Auk XXX vaulted off the pad similarly, its parabola drifting up to twenty-three thousand feet. I looked downrange and saw Quentin out on the slack, joyfully jumping up and down.

Auk XXXI was our last and biggest rocket—six and a half feet long, two and a quarter inches in diameter. We carefully raised it into a vertical position and then lowered it on the launch rod. Inside it was the nozzle touched by Dr. von Braun. It had been designed to reach an altitude of five miles. With a rocket this size, I thought perhaps we were exceeding the critical dimensions of zincoshine. I hoped it wouldn’t blow up, but I knew it might. I knelt at its base and started twisting together the ignition-wire connections.

“Sonny,” Roy Lee said. “Do you see who’s here?”

I looked up from my work. “Who?”

“Look.”

Tag opened a path through the crowd, and there stood Dad in his work clothes. Roy Lee went after him, escorted him out on the slack. I heard Roy Lee say, “Come and help us, Mr. Hickam.”

“You don’t need my help,” Dad said. “I just came to watch.”

All the boys protested. “No sir, you can help all you want.” “Whatever you want to do, sir, you go ahead and do it.”

I stood up, brushing the slack off my jeans. “A rocket won’t fly unless somebody lights the fuse,” I said. “Come on.”

Dad entered the blockhouse, and I directed him to the firing panel after checking the connections. “This one’s yours, Dad, if you want it.”

There was no mistaking the pure delight I saw spread across his face as he knelt in front of the panel. Roy Lee called from the back door. “Whenever you’re ready,” he said.

I counted down to zero and Dad turned the switch. Auk XXXI erupted, blowing huge chunks of concrete loose from the pad. The crowd took a step backward, and some of them started to run. Auk XXXI seemed to split the air that filled the narrow valley, a shock wave rippling across the slack. Women screamed and men clapped their hands to their ears. We boys came pouring outside, Billy at his theodolite, O’Dell with his binoculars. The thunderous din didn’t stop. Auk XXXI kept pounding us as it climbed. Men, women, and children all watched it with mouths agape, eyes wide, their cheers stuck in their throats.

At the Big Store, those few old men not at the launch got uncertainly to their feet as the thunder reached them. They stumbled into the road, shading their eyes, the trunk of fire and smoke tearing out of the mountains like God’s finger stuck suddenly toward the sky. In his church, Little Richard raced to the belfry and began to toll the bell in celebration. Some of the junior engineers down from Ohio were on the Club House roof with girlfriends and Jake’s telescope. They raised their beers to what they saw rising from the mountains.

Roy Lee kept his eye on his watch. “Thirty-eight, thirty-nine, forty…”

“Still see it,” Billy announced, the great spout of smoke turned into a dim yellowish streak. “Just about gone…”

“Forty-three, forty-four…”

“Gone,” Billy announced.

Gone at forty-four seconds. I did a quick calculation. Assuming it was flying nearly vertical, Auk XXXI had disappeared at an altitude of thirty-one thousand feet, nearly six miles high. I became aware of movement beside me, and I was astonished to see Dad prancing along the slack, waving his old hat in his hand. He was exulting to the sky.

“Beautiful! Beautiful!”

As Auk XXXI raced across the sunlit sky on that glorious day, I instead watched my dad, and waited patiently, and with hope, for him to put his arm around my shoulder and tell me, at last, that I had done something good.

“There!” I heard Billy yell. “There it is!”

People surged from the road across the slack, following the other boys as they raced after our last, great rocket. Dad stopped his dance and put his hat over his heart. He bent over as if a great weight had suddenly been dropped on his back. He looked at me, his mouth open, and I saw in his eyes a curious mixture of happiness and pain that dissolved into fear. I went to him and put my arm around his shoulder, supporting him while he fought for air. “You did really good, Dad,” I told him as a spasm of deep, oily coughs racked his body. “Nobody ever launched a better rocket than you.”

ALL OF US rocket boys would go to college, something not likely in pre- Sputnik West Virginia. Roy Lee became a banker, O’Dell went into insurance and farming. Quentin, Billy, Sherman, and I became engineers. Sherman died unexpectedly of a heart attack when he was only twenty-six years old.

My brother became a successful high-school football coach and a mentor to hundreds of young men, helping them through the difficult transition from adolescence to manhood. Although we had our differences while growing up, I am now, as I have always been, proud to be Jim Hickam’s brother.

Dorothy Plunk is a pseudonym but the actual girl I describe in this book went on to become a wonderful wife to a fine gentleman and the proud mother of two daughters, both of whom excelled in the classroom. I would meet the grown-up Dorothy again during a class reunion twenty-five years after our high-school graduation. We danced to “It’s All in the Game” that night and, to no surprise to me, I found that I still loved her. Some things never change. Every once in a while, we talk on the telephone. I am her friend.

As we hoped and prayed, Miss Riley’s disease went into remission. When it returned several years later, she continued to teach even when it was necessary for her students to carry her up the steps to her classroom. Freida Joy Riley died, barely thirty-two years old, in 1969.

John Kennedy had two great visions in his presidency: one to go to the moon, the other to fight for freedom across the world. I believed equally in both, so I volunteered for Vietnam, delaying my dream of working on spaceflight. The irony was not lost on me when I climbed out of a bunker one morning and found a dud Russian 122-mm rocket buried nearby. I inspected its nozzle and thought it crudely designed.

I never got to meet Wernher von Braun. After building the rocket that took his beloved adopted country to the moon, he died of colon cancer in 1977. Vietnam and other work delayed me, but in 1981, twenty-one years after the BCMA fired its last rocket, I finally grasped the dream of my youth and became a NASA engineer at the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, Dr. von Braun’s old headquarters. Over the years that followed, many of the men and women on his team became my colleagues and friends. I trained astronauts, talked them through their science experiments while they were in orbit, and often went to Cape Canaveral for launches of the space shuttle and other rockets. I went to Russia and sat across the table from the men who launched Sputnik I , and worked with men and women from Japan, Canada, Europe, and across the planet who shared the vision of space exploration with me. My career with NASA was everything I hoped and dreamed it would be.

My father resisted his black lung and kept going into the mine. When the day came that I inherited his books, they included a few of poetry, which surprised me a little. Some of them even had coal dirt on them, enough so I knew he had taken them inside with him. While everybody who knew him figured he was in the mine studying the roof or worrying over ventilation at the face, I wonder now if he wasn’t sitting alone in the gob on an old timber with a book of poetry illuminated by his miner’s lamp. Which poems he enjoyed there I am not certain, but of all of them that were blackened by coal, he circled but one: