Forty years ago Monday,Neil Armstrong became the first human to set foot on the Moon. But for millennia before him,people had been imagining that giant leap in fiction,fables and film. They flew to the Moon in rocket ships,winged chariots and projectiles fired from huge guns. There they met giants,insect-men,Nazis and topless women. 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, Ordway said recently. Ordway devoured science-fiction pulp magazines like Amazing Stories and Thrilling Wonder Stories as a youngster. After graduating from Harvard in 1949 with a degree in geosciences,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 with rocket scientist Wernher von Braun and then at the NASA George C. Marshall Space Flight Center. In 1965,at author Arthur C. Clarkes suggestion,the filmmaker Stanley Kubrick hired Ordway as the scientific consultant on 2001: A Space Odyssey. 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 its all lies. He goes on to describe sailing on a ship thats 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 Ariostos epic poem Orlando Furioso depicts the Moon as the repository of all things misplaced on Earth. The development of the telescope in the 17th century spurred much speculation about the Moon and its possible inhabitants. 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. 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,fictionalising him in his own lifetime. They had him travelling to the Moon once by a giant beanstalk and once in a sailing ship carried,like Lucians,by a storm. There he meets the king with a detachable headdepicted by Robin Williams in Terry Gilliams film The Adventures of Baron Munchausen (1988). 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 1835 by The New York Sun. The anonymous author,a journalist named Richard Adams Locke,so skillfully blended the scientific and the fantastic that many readers were taken in. One disgruntled reader of Lockes jest was Edgar Allan Poe. That same summer Poes own Moon hoax,The Unparalleled Adventure of One Hans Pfaall,to little notice. In Jules Vernes novel From the Earth to the Moon (1865),three adventurers hurtle toward the Moon in a projectile fired from a giant cannon. Rockets to the Moon proliferated in books for young readers in the postwar years. In Robert A. Heinleins young-adult novel Rocket Ship Galileo (1947),a team of American teenagers flies a rocket to the Moon (You be a good boy on the Moon, one mom instructs),only to find that the Nazis beat them there. In Marcia Martins childrens book Tom Corbett: A Trip to the Moon (1953),little Johnny and Janie ride there in Corbetts spaceship Polaris. Look out for the big holes, Corbett cautions the kids as they make their own giant leaps for mankind. Pre-1969 Moon movies werent all intended as family fare. The lunar inhabitants in the low-budget Cat-Women of the Moon (1953) are young women in black tights (billed as the Hollywood Cover Girls) with designs on Earths men. Ordway helped make 2001: A Space Odyssey one of the most convincing spaceflight films ever. Released a few months before Armstrongs epochal footstep,it may have been all too accurate in one sense. In depicting lunar travel as routine and even humdrum,it anticipated how worldwide excitement over the Apollo 11 trip turned to global disinterest in later lunar missions. Maybe after 2,000 years of three-headed vultures,man-bats and topless ladies,the real Moon couldnt help but seem a little dull once we got there.
