"October Sky" is pretty much the patron-saint movie for hobby rocketry, although you gotta watch it with a few of grains of salt:
1. Be sure and tell any younger kids watching the movie with you, "this is why we have model rocketry, so we don't have to blow up 50 steel-pipe rockets in a row building our own motors," and,
2. Point out in real life, if you blew up 50 steel-pipe rockets in a row as they did in the movie, it would be an absolute miracle if somebody didn't catch a piece of shrapnel in the head.
3. Point out that in real life, if you were firing off steel-pipe rockets 2-3 feet long, weighing 10-some pounds each, to go 2-3,000 feet high, then auger straight in with no recovery system, their little tin-shack "bunker" -- or even being inside a car -- would be no more protection than a paper plate if it decided to come down on your head. If you were sitting inside a car and that MFker came down on you, it would probably go straight through the car roof, straight through you, and straight through the car floor before drilling a couple feet deep in the ground.
So, all that said, I still love the movie. :wink: