Although pre-1969 stories of lunar voyages were often silly or satirical, Frederick I. Ordway III, a former NASA researcher, argues that they played a critical role in inspiring the scientists who actually put men on the Moon.
“They all read H. G. Wells and Jules Verne," Mr. Ordway said recently. “Science fiction got us all started in the early days, I think without exception.”
Growing up on the Upper East Side of Manhattan in the 1930s Mr. Ordway devoured science-fiction pulp magazines like Amazing Stories and Thrilling Wonder Stories, some 900 of which he would later donate to the Harvard College Library. In the 1940s he was a student member of the American Rocket Society, a space enthusiasts’ organization that built and test-fired small rockets in New York and New Jersey.
After graduating from Harvard in 1949 with a degree in geosciences, Mr. Ordway went to work for Reaction Motors, which built engines for the X-1 and X-15 experimental rocket planes. From the mid-1950s to the mid-1960s he worked in Huntsville, Ala., with the rocket scientist Wernher von Braun at the Army Ballistic Missile Agency and then at the NASA George C. Marshall Space flight center.In 1965, at the author Arthur C. Clarke's suggestion, the filmmaker Stanley Kubrick hired Mr. Ordway as the scientific consultant on "2001: A Space Odyssey." Mr. Ordway has also written and edited more than two dozen books about spaceflight real and imagined.
He said that the earliest known Moon voyage in written history is by the satirist Lucian of Samosata of the second century A.D. Lucian begins his “True History” with a disclaimer that it’s all lies. He goes on to describe sailing on a ship that’s carried to the Moon by a giant waterspout. He finds the Moon inhabited by men who ride three-headed vultures and giant fleas, and are at war with the inhabitants of the Sun.
In the 16th century Ariosto’s epic poem "Orlando Furioso" depicts the Moon as the repository of all things misplaced on Earth. The knight Astolfo ventures there in a chariot pulled by four magical horses, to look for mad Orlando’s lost wits.The development of the telescope in the 17th century spurred much speculation about the Moon and its possible inhabitants. There was even an early space race, on paper at least, as English patriots exhorted their countrymen to colonize the Moon before other nations could.
The astronomer Johannes Kepler wrote his lunar speculations as fiction. In “Somnium”("Dream"), published posthumously in 1634, a young man is carried away by Moon demons. Kepler’s descriptions of a harsh lunar surface are quite accurate, even if he does inhabit it with giant snakes and other creatures. Domingo Gonsales (actually Francis Godwin, the bishop of Hereford) flies to the Moon in a chair pulled by geese in his 17th-century best seller, “The Man in the Moone.” He finds it to be “another Earth,” peopled by giants.In his satirical “Voyages to the Moon and the Sun,” the poet and wit Cyrano de Bergerac first attempts a lunar flight carried by vials of rising dew but only makes it as far as Canada. He later succeeds, propelled part of the way by rockets, a conveyance that seems to have occurred to very few writers before the 20th century.
In the 18th century Baron Hieronymus Karl Friedrich von Munchausen told such tall tales about himself that others joined in, fictionalizing him in his own lifetime. They had him traveling to the Moon once by a giant beanstalk and once in a sailing ship carried, like Lucian’s, by a storm. There he meets the king with a detachable head — depicted by Robin Williams in Terry Gilliam's film The Adventures of Baron Munchausen" (1988).Mr. Armstrong had barely set foot on the Moon when a conspiracy theory spread that the lunar landing was a hoax. In "The Sun and the Moon" (Basic Books, 2008) Matthew Goodman describes an earlier Moon hoax perpetrated in the summer of 1835 by The New York Sun. It was a series of articles purported to recount the lunar observations of an actual British astronomer, John Herschel, whose giant telescope allegedly brought him images of shaggy bison, one-horned goats and the “Vespertilio-homo, or man-bat.” The anonymous author, a journalist named Richard Adams Locke, so skillfully blended the scientific and the fantastic that many readers were taken in. Herschel, whose observatory was in South Africa, was not party to the hoax.
“There was tremendous interest in astronomy that year because Halley’s Comet, last seen in 1759, was on its way that fall,” Mr. Goodman said.
One disgruntled reader of Locke’s jest, Mr. Goodman added, was Edgar Allen Poe. That same summer The Southern Literary Messenger published Poe’s own Moon hoax, “The Unparalleled Adventure of One Hans Pfaall,” to little notice. By 1844 Moon hoaxes were so common that The Messenger ran a parody, “Recollections of Six Days’ Journey in the Moon. By an Aerio-Nautical Man.” The narrator tells of floating to the Moon using “a new and hitherto unknown science, called Aeriotism, or the faculty of self-suspension in the air.”Watch the exclusive video for this article at the following link:
Click Me
source: nytimes
