From the Earth to the Moon
From the Earth to the Moon is a science fiction story written in 1865 by Jules Verne and is one of the earliest entries in that genre. It tells the story of three well-to-do members of a post-American Civil War gun club who build an enormous sky facing cannon and ride a space ship fired from it to the moon.The story is also notable in that Verne attempted to do some rough calculations as to the requirements for the cannon and, considering the total lack of any data on the subject at the time, some of his figures are surprisingly close to reality. Most interestingly, his estimate of the cost of the project in 1865 dollars is near the cost of the Apollo 11 flight in 1969 dollars. The story bears further similarities to the real-life Apollo program. Verne's cannon was named the Columbiad while the Apollo 11 command module was named Columbia. The spacecraft crew consisted of three people in each case. The crew names (Barbicane, Nicholl, Ardan) in Verne's story bear resemblance to the crew names (Borman, Lovell, Anders) of Apollo 8, the first voyage to lunar space.
Due to its age, the text is now out of copyright and can be downloaded from Project Gutenberg from [1] (English translation), or from [1] (French, English, Spanish and Russian).
From the Earth to the Moon was also the name of a HBO miniseries in 1998, see From the Earth to the Moon (HBO)