Rocket Boys

Hickam’s memoir of building amateur rockets as a teenager in Coalwood, West Virginia, a company coal town, in the years after Sputnik. He and four friends taught themselves the chemistry and the machining, mostly by failing, with help from a machinist in the mine shop and a teacher who pushed them toward the science fair; the group’s work eventually won at the National Science Fair and Hickam became a NASA engineer. The other half of the book is the town — his father the mine superintendent, the union, and an economy already visibly ending.

Context: The lowest Lexile in this shard at 900, and the list’s clearest case of a book about vocation: technical curiosity pursued without resources or permission.

Connections

• A Library to Build Great Americans — the list this came from.
• Homer Hickam — the author, later a NASA engineer at Marshall Space Flight Center.
• Technological Innovation — amateur engineering as its own apprenticeship.
• Engineering — learned by iteration and explosion.
• Education — and the specific role of one teacher in it.