The Science Behind Jules Verne's Moon Novels

The idea of using a large gun to send humans into space is as impossible today as it was a century and a half ago, when Jules Verne wrote From the Earth to the Moon and Around the Moon. Yet he went to great lengths to persuade readers it wasn't impossible - not through arm-waving and made-up technobabble, but using real physics and astronomy. No one had done anything like that in fiction before - and even today it's unusual to see so much "real science" discussed in a work of science fiction. But just how much did Verne get right, and what did he get wrong? This book takes a closer look at the science content of his two great Moon novels - from Newton's laws of motion and the conservation of energy to CO2 scrubbing, retro-rockets and the lifeless grey landscape of the Moon.