Fly Me to the Moon - Joan Lennon

"Do you remember where you were on 20 July, 1969?" *

I do. I was in the basement with my dad. We'd put the TV down there because it was so hot in a Canadian summer (no air conditioning) and the basement had a particular sort of cooler air that I would recognise the feel of immediately if I ever came across it again. Walter Cronkite's mellifluous voice filled the room. It took a long time, but then, at last, those fuzzy images... We had gone to another world.

We'd finally done it.

Humans have been intrigued by the possibility of going to the Moon for as long as there have been people to look up into the sky. (Not a statement I can prove, of course, but I'm sure anyway.) Here are just a few of the ways we know that have been mooted. "It's only science fiction!" you may say. And I say, "There's nothing 'only' about it." Without science fiction, without that human desire to get there in any way we can imagine, the space programme would never have got off the ground. So to speak.

How about Lucian of Samosata in 125 CE, who imagined a waterspout so huge it carried a ship on a lunar adventure? (Meeting the inhabitants - three-headed vultures - did not go well.)

  

  

Or Francis Godwin in The Man in the Moone, or a Discourse of a Voyage Thither, who suggested using swans for the trip in 1638? 

How about using a hot-air balloon, which was Edgar Allen Poe's take on the problem in 1835, or building your rocket out of anti-gravity metal, as H.G. Wells proposed in 1901, or blasting off using a cannon a la Jules Verne, as illustrated by Henri de Montaut? 

Have a look at Georges Méliès' fabulously chaotic and wonderfully badly acted Le Voyage dans la Lune ** from 1902, loosely based on Verne's novels. It was the first science fiction film and well worth a watch, if only for all those ladies' legs on display! Heavens to Betsy***! 

20 July, 1969 was only a continuation of all those wild, weird and wacky dreams. Though there's nothing 'only' about it.

* Yeah, all right, lots of you weren't even born.

** Not the music I would have chosen, but you can always mute it.

*** Etymology unknown.

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