The film October Sky (1999) is adapted from "Big Creek Missile Agency" and Rocket Boys: A Memoir, by Homer Hickam Jr. They tell the heart-touching story of growing up in a rural West Virginia mining town in the late 1950’s, and boyhood friends’ pursuit of amateur rocketry. History changed on October 4, 1957, when the Soviet Union successfully launched Sputnik, the world's first artificial satellite. That launch ushered in the start of the space age while the coal industrial declined and the teen