From the Earth to the Moon

Verne's 1865 tale of a trip to the moon is great fun, even if bits of it now seem, in retrospect, a little strange. Our rocket ship gets shot out of a cannon? To the moon? Goodness! But in other ways it's full of eerie bits of business that turned out to be very near reality: he had the cost, when you adjust for inflation, almost exactly right. There are other similarities, too. Verne's cannon was named the "Columbiad"; the Apollo 11 command module was named "Columbia." Apollo 11 had a three-person crew, just as Verne's did; and both blasted off from the American state of Florida. Even the return to earth happened in more-or-less the same place.