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 "Moonday", 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   did fill the whole world with great surprise, as Leonardo had said it would. A lot of 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 site in Verne's story was also in prefix = st1 /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 II 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 law of physics and astronomy  . Nineteenth-century science and the vivid Verne's imagination gave people an unbelievably accurate preview of one of the greatest events of the 20thcentury. Jules Verne wrote his story of a man's visit to the moon about   _  .
100 years before the Apollo II mission 10 years before the Apollo II mission four and a half centuries ago 100 years ago