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People have dreamed of going to the Moon for a long time.
We thought about it way before we even had rockets to get there! After rockets were invented, some scientists still thought we could not travel to the Moon.
1657
◀ In 1657, French writer Cyrano de Bergerac wrote a tale about going to the Moon. In it, he stuck bottles full of dewdrops to his body. The dew dried up in the morning sun, and he was lifted into the sky. He landed on the Moon to find forests and strange animals. He met smart creatures with four legs. They played music to communicate with each other. He also met the king of the Moon. The king got mad when de Bergerac said the Moon was only a small satellite of Earth.
1865
Jules Verne was a French science-fiction author. In 1865, he wrote a novel called From the Earth to the Moon. In it, the Baltimore Gun Club built a really big cannon. It could shoot a giant missile to the Moon. The spaceship was shaped like a bullet. It could carry three explorers. Verne wrote that an object would need to travel seven miles per second to get out of Earth’s gravity and reach the Moon. He was right! ▶
1902
◀ In 1902, French director Georges Méliès made a silent film of Jules Verne’s From the Earth to the Moon. In it, a spaceship crashes into the eye of the Man in the Moon. Ouch! The explorers meet creatures that look like insects. They are called Selenites. They disappear when hit with an umbrella!
1920
▲ In 1920, American scientist Dr. Robert Goddard suggested shooting a small, unmanned rocket at the Moon. It would make a bright explosion. People with telescopes could see where it landed. Goddard was a pioneer of rocket science. Yet back then the New York Times did not agree with him. The newspaper said rockets could not work in space. It explained that the exhaust from a rocket would have “nothing to push against.” The writer did not do his homework very well. Rockets can move without pushing against anything.
1950s
◀ In the early 1950s, the idea of Moon trips got more popular. Collier’s magazine printed articles by rocket scientist Dr. Wernher von Braun. He had made powerful rockets to carry weapons for Germany during World War II. His stories had pictures by space artist Chesley Bonestell. They were exciting, real-looking scenes of the Moon. Von Braun’s writing even fired up President Dwight Eisenhower. But some of his advisers didn’t think we could go to the Moon. They said it was just “science fiction.”
1959–1960
The television show Men Into Space ran from 1959 to 1960. It showed how humans would explore the Moon in the future. In it, rocket shuttles took astronauts back and forth to a Moon base. The base was like a home, with bedrooms and a kitchen. It also had lots of spacesuits for taking moonwalks! ▶
