October Sky presents an excellent example of overcoming obstacles to reach a dream.  What obstacles stand in homer’s way of reaching his dream?  How does he overcome each one? 

          One of the obstacles that Homer has to over come is the Cops.  They think that one of his rockets was the reason that a fire started in their town, He overcomes that obstacle by doing the math to calculate exactly where the rocket would have landed.  When he finds the rocket that he lost, it was nowhere close to where the fire was, so he overcame that obstacle.

          The next obstacle that he had to over come was his dad.  His dad didn’t want him to make rockets he wanted him to someday take over his job as the manager of the coalmine.  Homer didn’t like that idea though so he went, and got his rocket stuff again and started to build rockets again so he could try to win the science fair.

          The next obstacle that he has to overcome is his father getting hurt in the mine.   When the mine collapses his father tries to be the hero and gets hurt trying to save the other workers.  Since Homer’s brother was in football and had a good chance at getting a scholarship Homer, said that he would go work in the mine to help out his family so they can have some money while their dad was recovering from his injury.  During the time he was working in the mine, his teacher that was supporting him in building all these rockets to get into the science fair was sick and was in the hospital. To over come this he went and won the national science fair and dedicated the victory to his teacher.