Homer Hickam

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Homer Hickam (left) with Art Stephenson, the director of the Marshall Space Flight Center , 1999

Homer Hadley Hickam, Jr. (born February 19, 1943 in Coalwood , West Virginia ) is an American engineer and writer .

Life

Homer Hickam's father was the head of the Coalwood colliery and his mother was a housewife. Ever since the Russians launched the Sputnik satellite into space in 1957 , Homer was so fascinated by space travel that he later wanted to work on Cape Canaveral and Wernher von Braun became his idol.

During high school he founded the Big Creek Missile Agency with friends Roy Lee Cook, Quentin Wilson, Sherman Siers, Jimmy "O'Dell" Carroll, and Billy Rose, and they began making small missiles. They were supported by Freida Joy Riley, Homer's chemistry teacher, and Homer's mother. After graduating from Big Creek High School in 1960, he began studying engineering at the Virginia Polytechnic Institute, graduating in 1964.

He then served six years in the United States Army , where he served, among other things, from 1967 to 1968 as a lieutenant in Vietnam. From 1971 to 1981 he worked as an engineer for the US Army Missile ( Cruise Missile ) command. In 1981, Homer realized his dream and became a NASA engineer at the Marshall Space Flight Center . There he trained astronauts and worked on the design of the spacecraft. While at NASA, he also wrote his first book, Torpedo Junction , which was published in 1989. In 1998 he retired from NASA and became a full-time writer. So far, his autobiography Rocket Boys and the novel "Albert Must Go Home: The Somehow True Story of a Man, His Wife and Their Alligator" have been translated into German, and Rocket Boys was also made into a film in 1999 under the name October Sky .

Today Homer lives in Alabama and the Virgin Islands with his wife Linda .

Awards and honors

  • Great Books of 1998, by the New York Times for Rocket Boys
  • Book-of-the-Month, by the Doubleday book club for Rocket Boys
  • Book-of-the-Month, by the Doubleday book club for The Coalwood Way
  • Alabama's Distinguished Service Award

Works

Coalwood range

  • Rocket Boys / October Sky , 1998
  • The Coalwood Way , 2000
  • Sky of Stone , 2001
  • We Are Not Afraid , 2002

Josh Thurlow series

  • The Keeper's Son , 2003
  • The Ambassador's Son , 2005
  • The Far Reaches , 2007

more books

  • Torpedo Junction , 1989.
  • Back To The Moon , 1999.
  • Carrying Albert Home , 2015.
    • Albert has to go home. Somehow true story of a man, a woman and their alligator . HarperCollins, Hamburg 2016, ISBN 978-3-959679732 .
  • Rocket Boys , 2017.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ An alligator traveling in FAZ from September 27, 2016, page 10
personal data
SURNAME Hickam, Homer
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Hickam, Homer Hadley Junior (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American engineer and writer
DATE OF BIRTH February 19, 1943
PLACE OF BIRTH Coalwood , West Virginia