填空题
Verne"s Accurate Preview of the Future
Since the beginning of time, man has been interested in the moon. The Romans designed a special day to show admiration and respect to the moon. They called it "Moon-day", or "Monday", as we know it today. Later, the great mind of Leonardo da Vinci studied the moon and designed a machine to carry a human to the moon. Leonardo said that one day a great machine bird would take a person to the moon and bring great honour to the home where it was born.
Four and a half centuries later, Leonardo"s idea was realized. Apollo Ⅱ took three Americans Collins, Aldrin, and Armstrong to the moon. The mission (任务) did fill the whole world with great surprise, as Leonardo had said it would. Numerous essays, articles, and books were written about man"s first moon mission. But perhaps the most interesting story was one written before the event over 100 years before.
In 1865, French author Jules Verne wrote a story about the first journey to the moon. His story was very similar to the 1969 Apollo Ⅱ mission. Verne"s spacecraft also contained three men—two Americans and a Frenchman. The spacecraft was described as being almost the same size as Apollo Ⅱ. The launch (发射) site in Verne"s story was also in Florida. The spacecraft in Verne"s story was named the "Columbiad". The Apollo Ⅱ command ship was called "Columbia". His account of sending the spacecraft into the space could easily have been written about how Apollo 11 was sent into the space.
Verne"s story was the same as the actual event in several other respects. The speed of Verne"s spacecraft was 36,000 feet per second; Apollo"s was 35, 533 feet per second. Verne"s spacecraft took 97 hours to reach the moon; Apollo"s time was 103 hours. Like Apollo"s spacemen, Verne"s spacemen took pictures of the moon"s surface, relaxed on their seats, cooked with gas, and experienced weightlessness. They too came down in the Pacific and were picked up by an American warship.
What were the reasons for Jules Verne"s extreme accuracy in describing an event 100 years or more before it actually occurred? He based his writings on the laws of physics and astronomy (天文学). Nineteenth-century science and the vivid Verne"s imagination gave people an unbelievably accurate preview of one of the greatest events of the 20
th
century.