October Sky; The Final Post!

Summary: All systems go!
Sonny and the young men from the BCMA have done it! Together they have prepared the best science project that the nation has seen in the year 1960.

Before the young men were ready to set sail on an enormous competition, they needed to come up with some new rocket fuel. What they were using in the previous Auk’s, rocket candy, was just going to be powerful enough to go way over a mile into the sky. That’s when the young men got the idea of combining zinc with alcohol. Now, this was sure to make great rocket fuel, but the boys needed pure alcohol, not the stuff that they sold at the Company Store in Coalwood. That’s when they decided to go to John Eye. It was there where they would find the purest moonshine around. With it in hand, they began to amalgamate the zinc and moonshine to create a compound that would change the way their rockets are launched: zincoshine.

The followings Auks to come have been breaking the barriers on how high the rockets can go. Now, the BCMA were not just building the rockets and hope they would fly. With the book that Miss Riley provided them, they were calculating the precise measurement they wanted their rockets to go. And with each Auk, the boys were thinking big. It seemed as if with each new model, the rockets were being designed to go at least another mile over what the previous rocket had flown.

The boys were ready for the science fair, and Sonny knew they had a chance to impress the judges. The only dilemma was that the judges might be biased since their all from Welch. Coming from Big Creek High, that worried Sonny, but it wasn’t like he was going to quit. No BCMA was a quitter. Going into the country science fair, Homer won first place and moved on to the regional competition. At the region competition Sonny and his presentation shined all the way to first place. Next stop: nationals. Before Sonny could even think about going to nationals in Indianapolis he needed a suit. Sonny was planning on wearing his cotton pants and plaid shirts and penny-loafer shoes, but his mother said otherwise. She wanted him to wear a suit for the science fair, and it wasn’t like Sonny was going to have an altercation with his mother over clothing. Anyways, her word was the law.

When Sonny bought his suit, he was now ready to travel to Indianapolis. Before he traveled, he said goodbye to everyone except Dorothy Plunk (his lover), who wasn’t there to watch him leave. When he arrived in Indianapolis he met a young man named Orville (or Tex) from Lubbock, Texas. They became instant friend, and even swapped roommates to spend the next few days in Indianapolis together. Both Tex and Sonny had projects on rockets, but Sonny’s was better because he actually won the competition. Though, Tex came in second. Sonny would have felt very pleased with himself, but the felicity in all of it slipped away when he lost his chance to meet Dr. von Braun. The rocket engineer he was dying to meet was at the science fair with Sonny, and actually touched Auk XXXI (the last rocket BCMA built). What was ironic about the situation was that when Sonny was looking around for Dr. von Braun, he was looking at Sonny’s project and actually said that he would like to meet the young individual who built Auk XXXI.

At the culmination of the novel Sonny, O’Dell, Sherman, Roy Lee, and Quentin launched their last 5 rockets on the fourth of July in the year 1960. Auk’s XXVI – XXXI flew successfully and the crowd, which was the biggest that the BCMA has had (nearly all of Coalwood attended, and people from other towns as well), all ooohed and ahhhed. Out of all of them, Auk XXXI was the most impressive, as it reached over 6 miles into the sky, and what was special about it was that Sonny’s father, Homer Hickam, was the one to launch it.

Quotation: "'You did really good, Dad,' I told him as a spasm of deep, oily coughs raked his body. 'Nobody ever launched a better rocket than you'" (Hickam 407).

Reaction: By far, this was one of the greatest moments in the book. When Homer launched the rocket, it signaled many things. One of them was the relationship between father and son. To Sonny, that was probably the first time that his father really showed that he cared about what he was doing. It meant the world to Sonny to know that he father had appreciated the work he has done with rockets thus far. The novel itself was like no other that I have read in a very long time. The book being 427 pages long, it felt weird knowing that the falling action and dénouement had been compressed into the last 80 pages or so. Overall, it was a good read, and I felt great satisfaction as I closed the book.