October Sky is a 1999 American biographical drama film directed by Joe Johnston, and starring Jake Gyllenhaal, Chris Cooper, Chris Owen and Laura Dern. The screenplay by Lewis Colick, based on the memoir of the same name, tells the true story of Homer H. Hickam Jr., a coal miner's son who was inspired by the launch of Sputnik 1 in 1957 to take up rocketry against his father's wishes and eventually became a NASA engineer.

October Sky is based on the lives of four young men who grew up in Coalwood, West Virginia.^[3] Principal photography took place in rural East Tennessee, including Oliver Springs, Harriman and Kingston in Morgan and Roane counties. The film was a moderate box office success and received very positive critical reception; it continues to be celebrated in the regions of its setting and filming.^[4][5]

October Sky is an anagram of Rocket Boys, the title of the 1998 memoir upon which the film is based. It is also used in a period radio broadcast describing Sputnik 1 as it crossed the "October Sky". Homer Hickam said that "Universal Studios marketing people got involved and they just had to change the title because, according to their research, women over thirty would never see a movie titled Rocket Boys."^[6] The book was later re-released with the name in order to capitalize on interest in the film.^[7][8]

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In October 1957, news of the Soviet Union's launch of Sputnik 1 reaches the town of Coalwood, West Virginia, where most male residents work in the coal mines. As the townspeople gather to see the satellite orbit across the sky, Homer Hickam is inspired to build his own rockets to escape the tedium of Coalwood. His family and classmates do not respond kindly, especially his father John, the mine superintendent, who wants Homer to join him in the mines.

Homer teams up with math geek Quentin Wilson, who shares an interest in aerospace engineering; with the support of friends Roy Lee Cooke and Sherman O'Dell, and their science teacher at Big Creek High School, Freida J. Riley, the four construct small rockets. When one of their rockets lands near the mine and nearly injures some workers, John angrily tells Homer not to let him catch him on company property with rockets again. The boys hike to the edge of the coal company's property, where they succeed with the help of townsfolk, including the mine's machine shop manager, Ike Bykovsky, who is punished by John for helping the boys and sent to work in the mine.

The rocket launches begin attracting townsfolk, and the local paper runs a story about the boys. Afterward, they are accused of starting a wildfire with a stray rocket and are arrested. In the aftermath, the dejected boys abandon rocketry. In a mining accident, John is injured and Bykovsky is killed, devastating Homer. He drops out of high school to work in the mine and provide for his family while his father recovers.

Homer is inspired by Miss Riley to read a book on applied rocket science, learning to calculate the trajectory of a rocket. Using this, he and Quentin locate their missing rocket and prove it could not have caused the fire. The boys present their findings to Miss Riley and the school principal, Mr. Turner, who determines that the cause was a flare from a nearby airfield. Homer tells his father he is returning to high school and no longer wants to work in the mine. The boys return to rocketry and win the school science fair. When the opportunity arises for one of them to participate in the National Science Fair in Indianapolis, they elect Homer. The miner's union goes on strike against the coal company. With the mines set to close and resenting his father's pressures, Homer storms out of the house, vowing never to return.

At the national science fair, Homer's display is well-received. Overnight, someone steals his machined rocket part model – the de Laval nozzle – and his autographed picture of Dr. Wernher von Braun. Homer makes an urgent phone call home to his mother Elsie, who implores John to end the strike so that Mr. Bolden, Bykovsky's replacement, can use the machine shop to build a replacement nozzle. John relents when Elsie, fed up with his lack of support for their son, threatens to leave him. With the town's support and replacement parts sent to Indianapolis, the boys win the top prize and Homer is bombarded with college scholarship offers.

He returns to Coalwood as a hero and visits Miss Riley, who is dying of Hodgkin's lymphoma. Preparing for the launch of their largest rocket yet, Homer asks his father to come and tells him that Von Braun is brilliant but is not his hero--implying John is his true idol. At the launch of their rocket, named for Miss Riley, almost all of Coalwood turns out to watch. John is given the honor of pushing the launch button. The Miss Riley reaches an altitude of 30,000 feet (9,100 m) – higher than the summit of Mount Everest. As the town looks to the skies, John puts his hand on Homer's shoulder and smiles, showing Homer that he is proud of him.

An epilogue reveals the real-life outcomes of the main characters' lives, noting that Miss Riley died, the mine closed, and all four Rocket Boys went to college, going on to successful careers, with Homer working at NASA.

Filming began on February 23, 1998, almost a year before the movie's release. Although the film takes place in West Virginia, Tennessee was the location of choice for filming in part because of the weather and area terrain. Film crews reconstructed the sites to look like the 1957 mining town setting the movie demanded. The weather of east Tennessee gave the filmmakers trouble and delayed production of the film. Cast and crew recalled the major weather shifts and tornadoes in the area during the filming months, but Joe Johnston claimed, "ultimately, the movie looks great because of it. It gave the film a much more interesting and varied look."^[9][10] For the underground scenes, the crews also recreated a mine, with Johnston expressing that the mine took on a "villainous" appearance in the film, which felt ironic given its position as the town’s source of livelihood. More than 2,000 extras were used in the film. A small switching yard allowed the filmmakers and actors to film the scenes with the boys on the railroad and gave them freedom to do as they pleased, including the tearing apart of tracks. The locomotive used in the scene was Southern Railway 4501, re-lettered as Norfolk and Western No. 4501. Filming concluded on April 30, 1998.^[9]

The film's star, Jake Gyllenhaal, was 17 years old during filming, the same age as Homer Hickam's character. In an interview in 2014, Natalie Canerday recalled that Gyllenhaal was tutored on set because he was still in school and taking advanced classes.^[10]

October Sky opened on February 19, 1999 in 1,495 theaters and had an opening weekend gross of $5,905,250. At its widest theater release, 1,702 theaters were showing the movie. The movie has had a total lifetime gross of $34,675,800 worldwide.^[2]

The movie was praised for its portrayal of 1950s Appalachia despite several major and minor differences from the book on which it is based.

• Homer Hickam is the main character's name; in the book and in real life he was nicknamed "Sonny".^[23][24]
• Homer Hickam Jr.'s father was not named John. This was changed in an effort to keep the audience from being confused.^[24][25]
• There were actually six "rocket boys" rather than the four in the movie. Some of the movie's representations of the characters are combinations of the real-life boys. Their names were: Homer Hickam Jr., Quentin Wilson, Jimmy O'Dell Carroll, Roy Lee Cooke, Billy Rose and Sherman Siers.^[23][24]
• The Rocket Boys did not steal railroad parts as in the film; however, they did attempt to grab a cast iron pipe under the tracks and, according to Homer's website, this almost got him killed.^[23]
• While the boys were accused of starting a fire, they were never detained. The police soon realized that their rockets could not have traveled over 3 miles and the boys were exonerated. Homer never had to prove their innocence, as his character did in the film.^[24]
• Homer never dropped out of school to work in the town's mine. He did, however, work in the mine the following summer, as described in Hickam's book Sky of Stone.^[23]
• Homer never met Wernher von Braun - as it turns out, von Braun was looking for the Rocket Boys' exhibit when Homer was looking for him; and they missed each other.^[24]

There are two annual festivals in honor of the Rocket Boys and the film. One is held in West Virginia where the real-life events depicted in the book and film took place, and the other is in Tennessee where the movie was actually shot. The Rocket Boys often visit the festival in West Virginia, which is also called the "Rocket Boys Festival", while the festival in Tennessee focuses more on the filming locations. The Tennessee festival's site claims that the festival is "a celebration of our heritage."^[4][5]

Jeff Bezos, the billionaire founder of Amazon, saw a screening of October Sky in 1999. In a subsequent conversation with the science fiction writer Neal Stephenson, Bezos commented that he had always wanted to start a space company. Stephenson urged him to do so. Bezos then started the private aerospace manufacturing and services company Blue Origin, and Stephenson became one of the company's early employees.^[26][27]

The author of Rocket Boys claimed that the Star Trek Enterprise episode Carbon Creek was based on October Sky, and there are obvious references to the story in the episode.^[28][29]