On July 20, 1969, from behind the Iron Curtain in communist Romania, ten-year-old Bogdan Marcu watched Neil Armstrong take the first step on the moon. That moment unleashed a space dream and a chain of events that included a gutsy escape plan, a revolution, a USC graduate application funded by selling cotton socks on the streets of Budapest, a miners' revolt and saving the life of a total stranger who would forever seal his fate.