People dreamed about flying into space long before it could actually happen.
Jules Verne was a French fiction writer. In 1865, he published his novel From the Earth to the Moon. It told a story about people using a cannon to fly to the moon. In the story, he used scientific ideas. Thirty-two years later, The War of the Worlds came out. It was a novel by British writer H. G. Wells. The book was about invaders from Mars and travel between planets. Scientists wanted to make these science fiction stories real. First they had to figure out how to escape Earth’s gravity. They used rockets.
