A movie based on a true story released in 1999 about Homer Hickam and his friends developing small amateur rockets, inspired by the satellite Sputnik passing overhead. They enter a science fair with their rockets, and win a college scholarship, which saves them from being coal miners. Homer Hickam became an aerospace engineer at NASA.
This movie is often shown in schools as an educational tool. Aside from the mostly accurate rocket science involved, it supposedly shows the power of dreams come to life. A more sinster use of this movie in schools is to further the cause of generalized education: it is said that the "rocket boys" used math, physics, and chemistry to build the rockets, but also needed to know English to write a description of their science fair rockets.