• Question: Who thought of the idea to go into space?

    Asked by burnley26 to Amy, Drew, Julia, Kimberley, Sara on 19 Jun 2011.
    • Photo: Drew Rae

      Drew Rae answered on 17 Jun 2011:

      Hi Burnley. That’s a science-fiction question, which puts it right up my alley. It was probably a Greek called “Lucian of Samatosa”. In his book they didn’t do it deliberately, they got sucked up in a storm.

      Jules Verne wrote a book called “From the earth to the moon” which was about a deliberate space expedition. In the 1930s and 1940s there were a lot of writers who took seriously the idea of space travel, and tried to make quite realistic stories about how it might happen.

      So if the question is “who thought of it”, that’s the ancient Greeks. If the question is “who thought of it AND thought it could actually be done”, that’s the USA pulp-fiction writers, and all the kids they inspired who ended up in the space programs of Russia and the USA.

    • Photo: Sara Imari Walker

      Sara Imari Walker answered on 18 Jun 2011:

      Hello burnley!! I immediately thought of Jules Verne – so I am glad to see Drew has covered that here! I hadn’t really thought about this before, so now I am really glad you asked!! I think Drew is right, the Greeks did think of it first. However, after Newton wrote down his laws of motion, I think the idea of space travel became much more plausible. I’ve done some digging and in fact, as early as 1813 the British mathematician William Moore wrote up a Treatise on the Motion of Rockets based on Netwon’s laws. To my knowledge this is the earliest scientific outline of how we could actually get to space (although I am sure many thought about going to space even earlier!). Later, in the early nineteen hundreds a Russian by the name of Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, inspired by Jules Verne’s writings, showed that space exploration by humans was theoretically possible. By the early 1920’s Goddard was testing and launching the first liquid fueled rockets!! This details some of the published science and literature but I am sure countless humans have thought about it over the ages, looking up at the stars one can only wonder what it must be like up there!

    • Photo: Julia Griffen

      Julia Griffen answered on 19 Jun 2011:

      Who knows… I’m sure lots of people have thought of it guess we could never say for sure who was 1st to think of it…but the greeks sounds good… These other guys sure know thier history!

    • Photo: Amy MacQueen

      Amy MacQueen answered on 19 Jun 2011:

      I guess a lot of people have thought about this…we can’t definitively say who was the very first (because we don’t have everyone’s thoughts recorded) but I imagine even earlier than the Greeks people would wonder about going into “the sky” – but if you mean practically decided that was something they wanted to do and set about thinking about it in more depth and to get it done then I think these other answers are comprehensive!! 🙂

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