Projectile trains for the Moon from From the Earth to the Moon : direct in ninety-seven hours and twenty minutes, and a trip round it.

From the Earth to the Moon : direct in ninety-seven hours and twenty minutes, and a trip round it.

Projectile trains for the Moon.

You can’t roll down the window on this kind of trip and let the wind whip in your hair, but you’re sure to have an incredible time anyways if you’re on the first rocket headed to the moon! French novelist, Jules Verne, was ahead of this time in 1865 when he imagined a trip just like this his book, From the Earth to the Moon Direct in Ninety-Seven Hours and Twenty Minutes: And a Trip Round It. The story tells about a group of people riding a projectile, or an object that is thrown by force into space, all the way to the moon. Verne’s idea on how to get there was to use a Columbiad, or a type of large-caliber cannon, as a firing mechanism to launch the manned projectile into space, and to show how he believed this would work, he illustrated his book with many detailed drawings of what the spacecraft would look like both inside and out. Verne was ahead of his time. In fact, he imagined sending humans to the moon 104 years before the Apollo 11 Mission in 1969 and astronauts, Neil Armstrong, Edwin E. Aldrin Jr. (Buzz), and Michael Collins were the first people to step foot on the moon’s surface. You could say that Verne’s book was one small step for man, one giant leap for the imagination!