I LOVE ROCKETS and I suspect you do, too. We happy few, we band of brothers and sisters, it is in our blood to build and launch rockets.

Failure in rocketry is not an option, even though it is often a result. But failure rarely stops us. Even while our last rocket is falling from the sky, or crumpled on its side spewing smoke, we're planning our next rocket, and our next.

I think this is what makes rocketeers unique. We are not quitters. We fail, only to strive to succeed another day. Rocketeers are, in fact, the best role models in the country, and I hope very soon the nation will discover that fact.

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Soon after my book Rocket Boys was published, bundles of letters began to arrive on my doorstep, as well as a host of e-mails on my computer. These messages came from all kinds or people including, inevitably, amateur rocketeers, most of them quite complimentary and hoping that the book, and the coming film, October Sky, might popularize their avocation. Receiving mail from people who love rockets was and is a joy.

It is indeed refreshing to hear from people who know the difference between a nose cone and a nozzle. Still, a reviewer of my book wrote that Rocket Boys is about rockets the way Moby Dick is about whales.

By that, he meant that there are many threads and undercurrents to the book that has nothing to do with rockets, among them the relationship between fathers and sons, the internal and external conflict of families, the life of a small town dependent on a dying industry, the struggle to beat the odds of birth and geography, and the yearning of teen-age boys for unattainable girls.

All quite true. I wrote Rocket Boys for my parents and the townspeople of Coalwood, West Virginia, to tell them how much I appreciated their sacrifices, and to recall a youth filled with equal parts of hardship, fun, and adventure. The rockets were, in many ways, metaphors that allowed me to spin the story of the town, the people in it, and my own coming of age.

Still, the rockets of the Big Creek Missile Agency were always my touchstone, where I returned again and again to demonstrate to the reader how the other boys and I were maturing, not only with our rocket designs but also as young men.

When my editor received the first draft of the book, he remarked how dramatic and fluid my writing always turned when I wrote about our rockets. Reading those passages, he said, made him feel as if he was actually there with us boys, helping us haul the heavy steel rockets across the old slack dump of Cape Coalwood, erecting them on the launch pad, and chasing after them, with a whoop, when they fell downrange. He was on the money with his observation.

Writing much of Rocket Boys was difficult for me and required reaching deep down into my soul to bring up what sometimes were unpleasant things to recall. But the rockets! How I loved building those rockets when I was a teen-ager, and how I loved writing about them when I was a fifty-five year old man!

Why? Because I loved those rockets. They were mine. And their success and failure depended on how much I could learn, how skilled I was at assembling them, how careful I was to prepare the launch site, and how well I mastered the thousands of details that had to be just right to make my rockets fly. Everything ultimately depended completely on me and the boys of my team.

That's why we loved them and that's why each nuance of every rocket we ever built stuck so firmly in my memory. In that, I suspect I am not alone.

I have no doubt that rocketeers, professional and amateur alike, all share a common bond, the love of our fiery little machines. We are willing to spend an inordinate amount of hours worrying over them just for that one rumbling moment on the launch pad, no matter if it is followed by complete success or abysmal failure.

Rockets and their builders have a personal attachment that is almost completely unknown between humans and any other kind of machine. That's why I missed my old rockets and wanted to write about them. They were good old birds, even the ones that blew up. They seemed to have heart, although perhaps it was just the combined hearts of the builders wishing them well.

No matter what the future holds for me, I will always say I am glad that once upon a time, I was a rocket boy. For three years, from 1957 to 1960, I ate, drank, and breathed rocketry. No matter what the course was that I took in school, whether trigonometry, typing, or English, I related it to rockets and applied myself to it.

I cannot deny, in fact, that the love of rockets ultimately made me the man I am today. It gave me two careers, one with NASA, and now another as a writer. But even if it hadn't, my experiences with rockets would not have been wasted. Rocketry gave me a purpose in life, and created a bond between me and people I came to love. I think in that way, all rocketeers, amateur and professional alike, are a band of brothers and sisters.

As we boys said clasping hands on the slack at Cape Coalwood: Rocket Boys, Rocket Boys, Rocket Boys forever! And, of course, if you girls want to join in, that's fine with me.

Homer H. Hickam, Jr. is the author of "Rocket Boys", an autobiography of his involvement with model and amateur rocketry that led to his career with NASA, and subsequently inspired the movie "October Sky". You may reach him by email at This email address is being protected from spam bots, you need Javascript enabled to view it .