Apart from the Sun, the Moon is one of the most well-known celestial body that has great meaning in mass culture and tons of stories and mysteries around it. The craters of the lunar surface often remind people of some strange man face. Those gormandizers see cheese holes in lunar craters, daydreaming about delicious cheese being moon-size.
Robert Goddard and Hermann Oberth were the fathers of modern rockets powered by liquid fuels, both of them told that initially they were inspired by the work of Jules Verne “From the Earth to the Moon”, written in 1865. In this novel Verne managed to make some pretty correct suggestions.
The U.S. would be the first to send human mission on the rocket to the Moon.
The way the rocket looked like in Verne’s illustrations and depiction of the vehicle was close to the actual spacecraft for Apollo mission.
He also was right indicating that there will be 3 crew members.
There would be a contest among two states: FL and TX on who will host the launch site. It was decided by Congress in 60s choosing Kennedy Space Center in Houston, TX as the main Mission Control Center.
Telescope technology would allow people to track the status of the mission. During Apollo 13 mission, the oxygen tank had a breach, and the telescope from the Johnson Space Center was able to detect it on the distance 200,000 miles from our planet.
Verne described the rockets structure, which later was known as retro rocket and it became a prototype for the modern rockets that helped Neil Armstrong with Apollo 11 to complete his mission to the Moon.
Jules Verne was right about the weightlessness, however, it was a little bit incorrect, since he thought that weightlessness happens only at the gravity midpoint of the trip with Moon’s and Earth’ gravity being equalized.
The first people to return back from the Moon would land in the waters of Pacific Ocean, that what happened with Apollo 11 mission that landed in the Pacific Ocean. It was surprisingly predicted by Jules Verne more than 100 years till it actually happened.
The first movie about the Moon was made in France in 1902. It was called Le Voyage Dans la Lune and it was silent black and white. After that, in 1968 there was “2001: A Space Odyssey”. Until nowadays these are one of the most outstanding movies about the Moon.
Though we don’t have the colony on the Moon as of now, we left our footprint on the Moon, leaving 6 US flags and lots of traces from missions. However, it doesn’t mean that Americans own the Moon. There was a pact in 1967 that prohibits any country from adding any planet or satellite to its territory or proclaiming it.
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