A rendering of Jules Verne's fictional moon capsule - which was to be launched from a gigantic "moon gun."

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Visionaries dreamt of traveling in space and visiting the Moon decades before the world’s super powers began their space programs. Jules Verne, in his 1865 novel From the Earth to the Moon, wrote of a massive gun that would fire a bullet-shaped space capsule (with three human passengers) through the atmosphere and into space.

Verne — using sound engineering — correctly predicted many aspects of space missions nearly a century before they were realized. In reality, however, the vehicle of choice was the rocket – not a projectile fired from a giant gun, as Verne surmised.

While Verne’s Moon gun idea still has merit according to some scientists, the rocket has been the workhorse of the space program from the first manned spaceflight by Yuri Gagarin in 1961 to modern shuttle missions and satellite deployments.