Growing up with rockets

This film is a personal account of growing up during the fifties and sixties in the space boomtown of Cocoa Beach, a small town on the desolate coastline of Cape Canaveral, Florida. This historical chronicle of America's space program combines the filmmaker's first-person commentary, with archival footage, newsreels, excerpts from NASA promotional films, home movies, contemporary interviews and period music. The children of Cocoa Beach found their lives marked by the proximity of such events as the Soviets' launch of Sputnik, America's first manned spaceflight, John Glenn's parade through the community, the Cuban missile crisis, the first walk in space, the tragic capsule fire of Apollo 6 and the Apollo 11 lunar landing. With the end of the Apollo era, the area experienced widespread unemployment, but an eventual economic revival occurred with the space shuttle program.