weed in space!
A still from the 1902 Georges Méliès film Voyage dans la Lune (A Trip to the Moon), the first film to depict spaceflight. As depicted here, a party of astronomers are shot to the moon out of a giant cannon. The idea of using a cannon-like mechanism to shoot a projectile at a celestial body to transport its passengers was popular in both the works of Jules Verne and H.G. Wells, but was later deemed implausible by Konstantin Tsiolkovsky’s 1903 paper “The Exploration of Cosmic Space by Means of Reaction Devices”; launches would be impossible to construct due the fact that the extreme acceleration needed would instantly kill any passengers on board.