Reaching for a rainbow

Abstract

Those three . . . have carried into space all the resources of art, science, and industry. With that, one can do anything; and you will see that, some day, they will come out all right. Those three men might well be Young, Mattingly, and Duke, who, at press time, were rendezvousing with the moon and destiny in their Apollo 16 spacecraft. But they are Impey Barbicane, M. Michel Ardan, and Captain Nicholl. All are Jules Verne heroes in his remarkably prescient From the Earth to the Moon (1873) in which he describes man's first trip to the moon via a projectile fired from a 900-foot cannon. In his yarn set in post-Civil War America, Verne accurately deals with most of the technical problems of manned space travel, even to his Tampa launch site. He also foresaw and answered some of the objections to space exploration that would be voiced 100 years later when ...