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Once upon a time — it was 1866 — Jules Verne wrote an adventure story in which a group of Americans build a large cannon to shoot the first men to the Moon.

Later, Sir Isaac Newton developed a thought experiment that placed a cannon on a very high mountain that, with the right amount of gun powder, was able to shoot a canon into orbit.

To some degree, this is how we launch space vehicles. But not really.

Now, according to Bart Leahy, a group of graduate students and academics hopes to launch low-cost satellites into orbit using a concept similar to that of Verne.

Read more in The Space Review.

In The Road to Science Fiction: From Gilgamesh to Wells, James Gunn put forth the idea that the Industrial Revolution sparked the change that needed to happen before science fiction could become a true genre. He wrote that people

“had to adopt an open mind about the nature of the universe — its beginning and its end — and the fate of man …. People also had to discover the future. As long as the future was merely the place where today’s activities went on in some eternal cycle, perhaps even spiraling downward from some earlier golden age, a fiction about the future was meaningless.” (pg. 3)

Read more »