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Like a lot of people, "Rocket Boys" author and former NASA engineer Homer Hickam tuned into last night's premiere of "Cosmos," a reboot of Carl Sagan's 13-part science series. Unfortunately, he wound up being disappointed. The show's rather inauspicious beginning probably didn't help:

July 20 is the 30th anniversary of a great moment in American and world history when a human climbed gingerly down an aluminum ladder attached to a spindly, fragile spacecraft and, for the first time, set foot on a chunk of the solar system not of this world. Neil Armstrong accomplished with one step President John F. Kennedy's call to greatness in a 1962 speech at Rice University to "go to the moon and do the other things," that would demonstrate American spirit and resolve. Armstrong's boot print in the dust also fulfilled countless speculations over centuries on how the...

On Thursday, April 14, NASA's Glenn Research Center in partnership with the Cleveland Area Metropolitan Library System will host a discussion with Homer Hickam, author of "Rocket Boys" from 11:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. ET. Dee Perry of WCPN radio will moderate the event. "Rocket Boys", the 2005 selection for the North Coast Neighbors Share a Book program, and the inspiration for the movie "October Sky", is a best-selling novel-memoir based on the author's coming of age in Coalwood, West Virginia. A coal miner's son, Hickam dreamed of launching a rocket and sending it into space. His quest, which began...

At the end of the movie "October Sky" which was based on my memoir Rocket Boys, there is a dramatic launch of the Space Shuttle. The director of the film wanted to show the transition from my small amateur rockets in West Virginia to the huge professional rockets of NASA as a metaphor for my own transition from coal-town boy to big-time space engineer. The scene works wonderfully. When I was at the Venice Film Festival, the audience rose to their feet after this scene and applauded me while tears streamed down their faces. When I go to the Cape...