This tale from 1869 is the very first vision of an artificial satellite, which accidentally also becomes the first space station.
Sailors could fix their latitude easily enough by the height of the North Star above the horizon, but longitude, without a comparable fixed point in the sky, had cost thousands of lives to shipwreck and miscalculation over the centuries. A group of Massachusetts undergraduates realises that this problem could be solved with a constructed celestial landmark, making precise navigation possible for any sailor without relying on expensive or delicate equipment.
What follows is what would become known as hard sci-fi, precisely charting the necessary dimensions, launch sequence, and cost of creating an object in fixed rotation around the Earth.
Their plan is simple: build a 200-foot wide sphere out of twelve million bricks, and launch it into a polar orbit using flywheels powered by waterfalls.
An unfortunate weather event launches the moon into space while it still holds a few families, huddled there against the cold of a hard winter. The team assumes that everyone on board has died a fiery death, and scours the skies, looking for their object.
When it is located in the skies, the team left back on earth sees the inhabitants jumping in morse code patterns, and begins to communicate. The people aboard not only survived, but thrived, as the moon’s surface fused on its passage through the atmosphere, and in its weak gravity caught enough atmosphere that the surface becomes a fertile paradise, with crops and evolving plants enough to keep them happy and well-fed.
This tale directly influenced Arthur C Clarke, who states in “Extra-Terrestrial Relays” (1945) that it was the first story to imagine an artificial satellite used for communication and navigation, and is namechecked in Stephen Baxter and Terry Pratchett’s Long Earth series, as the name of a space station in The Long War and The Long Mars.
