October Sky is the true-life story of West Virginian high school student Homer Hickham who was inspired by the 1957 launch of Sputnik to build and launch his own rocket. 

 Homer included (in his book) everything: from building the missile as part of a science project, to the first (disastrous) attempts to launch it, to the tentative first flight in front of the inquisitive locals. 

Fighting Homer all the way is his father (Chris Cooper), a fiercely proud supervisor at the local coal mine who expects his son to follow in his footsteps, and cannot understand for one minute the boy's fascination with something so fantastical as space travel. But Homer refuses to give up, often clashing with his father and practically tearing his family apart in the pursuit of his dream. 

This superb novel was set in Coalwood, West Virginia. This setting was critical to the whole point of the book, without any mines how could his dad become a mine supervisor? How would Homer spot the satellite (Sputnik) if he weren't in the Appalachian area of the US? So we can conclude that if Homer's autobiography would be set in a different place, for instance LA, he probably couldn't see the satellite because of the polluted air, there wouldn't much of a bustling mining industry, he wouldn't be known in his town. So Coalwood is the perfect place that Homer set his bio, quite obviously  where he lived.

With the help of his friends and colleagues, he was noticed by NASA for constructing and launching successful rocket missions, and to