My guest is Mr. Homer Hickam, author of the new novel, Crater and former NASA engineer, and our subject is, “Space Our Last Frontier, Can Mankind Take on the Challenge?
Homer Hadley Hickam, Jr. is an American author, Vietnam veteran, and a former NASA engineer. His autobiographical novel Rocket Boys: A Memoir, was a #1 New York Times Best Seller, is studied in many American and international school systems, and was the basis for the film October Sky. Hickam has also written a number of best-selling memoirs and novels including the "Josh Thurlow" historical fiction novels. His books have been translated into several languages.
Homer H. Hickam, Jr. was raised in Coalwood, West Virginia and graduated from Virginia Tech in 1964 with a Bachelor of Science degree in Industrial Engineering. A United States Army veteran, Hickam served as a First Lieutenant in the Fourth Infantry Division during the Vietnam War in 1967 and 1968. For his service, he earned the Commendation and Bronze Star Medals. He served six years on active duty, leaving the Army as a Captain.
Hickam was an engineer for the United States Army Aviation and Missile Command from 1971 to 1978 assigned to Huntsville. For three years (1978–81), he was an engineer for the 7th Army Training Command in Germany. He began employment with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration at Marshall Space Flight Center in 1981 as an aerospace engineer. During his NASA career, Hickam worked in spacecraft design and crew training. His specialties at NASA included training astronauts on science payloads, and extra-vehicular activities (EVA). He also trained astronaut crews for many Spacelab and Space Shuttle missions, including the Hubble Space Telescope deployment mission, the first two Hubble repair missions, Spacelab-J (the first Japanese astronauts), and the Solar Max repair mission. Prior to his retirement from federal service in 1998, Hickam was the Payload Training Manager for the International Space Station Program.
Hickam began writing in 1969 after returning from Argentina. Despite his reputation of being interested in space and astronautics, he has written surprisingly little about this subject. A scuba instructor, he unsurprisingly set most of his focus for his first writings on his scuba diving adventures for a variety of different magazines. Then, after diving on many of the wrecks involved, he branched off into writing about the battle against the U-boats along the American east coast during World War II. This resulted in his first book, Torpedo Junction (1989), a military history best-seller published in 1989 by the Naval Institute Press.
His second book, Rocket Boys, is the story of his life as the son of a coal miner in Coalwood, West Virginia Among its many honors, it was selected by The New York Times as one of its "Great Books of 1998" and was an alternate "Book-of-the-Month" selection for both the Literary Guild and the Book of the Month Club. Rocket Boys was also nominated by the National Book Critics Circle as Best Biography of 1998. In February 1999, Universal Studios released its critically acclaimed film October Sky, based on Rocket Boys (The title "October Sky" is an anagram of "Rocket Boys"). Delacorte subsequently released a mass market paperback of Rocket Boys, re-titled October Sky. October Sky reached the number one position on the New York Times Best Seller list.
Hickam's first fiction novel was Back to the Moon (1999) which was also simultaneously released as a hardcover, audiobook, and eBook. It has also been translated into Chinese. To date, Back to the Moon is Hickam's only novel specifically about space. The Coalwood Way, a memoir of Hickam's hometown, was published a year later by Delacorte Press, and is referred to by Hickam as "not a sequel but an equal". His third Coalwood memoir, a true sequel, was published in October 2001. It is titled Sky of Stone. Sky of Stone is presently under development as a television movie. His final book about Coalwood was published in 2002, a self help/inspirational tome titled We Are Not Afraid: Strength and Courage from the Town That Inspired the #1 Bestseller and Award-Winning Movie October Sky.
After his memoir series, Hickam began his popular "Josh Thurlow" series set during World War II. The first of the series was The Keeper's Son (2003) set on the Outer Banks of North Carolina. The series continued with The Ambassador's Son (2005) and The Far Reaches (2007). both set in the South Pacific. His next novel was Red Helmet (2008), a love story set in today's Appalachian coalfields and dedicated to "Mine Rescue Teams Everywhere." In 2010, he co-authored My Dream of Stars (2010) with Anousheh Ansari, a multi-millionaire Iranian-American who dreamed of going into space and became the world's first female commercial astronaut. Hickam, an avid amateur paleontologist, also wrote The Dinosaur Hunter, a novel set in Montana published by St. Martin's in November, 2010. His newest book is Crater, a novel about a mining colony on the Moon.
Download | Duration: 00:50:59