Phase 2 : New Crescent
Space Race
But of course this is not the earliest version of such a lunar story . It ’ s not even the earliest version of this story , since Méliès was heavily influenced by Jules Verne ’ s 1865 novel , From the Earth to the Moon . In Vernes ’ novel , the scientists are replaced by the United States Baltimore Gun Club . The US Civil War having just ended , these weapons-enthusiasts are looking for new adventure , and new purposes for their cannons , and so they plan to build the Columbiad “ space gun ” to carry them to the moon . It is a scenario that will recur in only a slightly different manner nearly a century later in the real world when the United States , fresh from World War II , embraces Nazi scientist Werner von Braun , whose German V-2 rockets were fired more than 3,000 times at civilian targets ( mostly at civilians in London ), but who�we think�might help us win the space race to the moon if we could just get him to work on rockets that carry humans up rather than rockets that carry explosives down . The violent technologies of the war angled now toward exploration , one must pause to ask whether it is possible to point the values of those tools anew as well , or if a technology of war , slightly repurposed , will always be a technology of some sort of war .
I was born just a few miles from where Neil Armstrong was born . Though our births were separated by nearly four decades in time , they were separated by very little space . Growing up , I felt a strange connection to him , and would go to the little museum there in Wapak , Ohio , marveling at his boyhood bicycle , his school report cards , his Apollo spacesuit , and a genuine moon rock collected from Neil ’ s two-and-ahalf hour lunar walk in July of 1969 . To be honest , though , I could get to the public library far more often than I could the museum , and there I read books about the engineers who made the Apollo program happen . I came to idolize those
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