THE JOURNAL OF ASTROSOCIOLOGY VOLUME 1

Figure 5: Image from the 1902 film Le Voyage dans la Lune, showing the cannon beingloaded for the Moon shot.While Verne anticipated the Apollo missions, at about the same time, Edward EverettHale, in “The Brick Moon” (1869), described the orbit of an artificial satellite, and explained theuse of satellites as an aid for navigation. Although the details of his use of satellites fornavigation – visual acquisition of the satellite for triangulation on the surface – were not used, itfollowed the navigational principles of its day, by astronomical observations using transit andsextant. The advent a century later of satellite navigation systems, evolving from the early transitsystem into the global GPS system currently in use, owes a small debt to science fiction.Following the turn of the 20th century, spaceflight became a more popular topic infiction, with H. G. Wells’ two novels War of the Worlds (serialized in 1897; in book form in1898) and First Men in the Moon (1901) and Kurd Lasswitz’s Auf Zwei Planeten (“On TwoPlanets”) in 1897 leading the way in bringing the concept of spaceflight into the publicimagination; along with (now) more forgotten works such as Edison’s Conquest of Mars (serial1897; in book form 1947), and George Griffith’s “Stories of Other Worlds” (serial 1900; in bookform as A Honeymoon in Space, 1901).Hugo Gernsback, who founded the first science-fiction magazine, Amazing Stories, in1926, explicitly viewed science fiction as a tool for explaining science and for stimulatinginterest in science and technology in young people, describing an ideal story as “75 percentliterature interwoven with 25 percent science.”© 2015 Astrosociology Research Institute61