As you will see, rockets were my passion when I was a boy. That passion
led me to a wonderful future. I hope the movie will help you to see the
marvelous possibilities we all have within ourselves. To succeed first
requires a dream so please, please dream big. Then, along with eternal
optimism and hope, hard work will make your dream come true. This is my
promise to you.
Homer Hickam’s youthful passion was building rockets with his friends
and his dream was “to slip the surly bonds of Earth” by becoming an
astronaut. Later, it was his experience in Vietnam and that day in 1969
when, after returning home, he began to pursue another passion of his:
writing. Defying F. Scott Fitzgerald’s famous quote that “There are no
second acts in American lives,” Homer Hickam later segued from a
successful career as a NASA (National Aeronautics and Space
Administration) engineer into that of a best selling author when his second
book, Rocket Boys, was published in 1998. It has since been translated into
eight languages and is studied in many U.S. and international schools.
As a child of the 1960s, my imagination was captured by space flights
and trips to the moon. These extraterrestrial adventures through which I
lived vicariously contributed to my sense of what human beings were
capable of and what was possible. That, along with travel and contact with
people different from me, lit a fire deep inside and helped me to envisage
other worlds and ways of being and doing that laid out a personal and
professional path before me.
For Homer the ingredients of success were many and varied. A
combination of hard work, belief in himself and his abilities. The support of
role models and mentors - a famous rocket scientist he never got the chance
to meet, a parent who provided unconditional love and nurturing that
helped keep his dream alive, a teacher who recognized his potential and
chose to “believe in the unlucky ones,” for whom higher education was a
