(static hissing)
(light music)
- [Narrator] Mankind has always looked up
and yearned to reach beyond.
Who knows how long humanity,
cursed to live on terra firma, under gravity's pull,
has yearned to live there, beyond the clouds lacing the sky
or amongst the stars hanging in the blackness of night.
(stirring drum music)
Man will hope, dream, and face insurmountable odds
in the quest to transcend humanity's own Earthbound reality.
Mankind will begin to find a way
to travel amongst the stars.
(exciting modern music)
To prehistoric man, the open sky is more
than just open space, it is the home of the gods.
Around 3500 B.C. Babylonian King Etana
is portrayed as flying on an eagle's back
on his journey to seek the counsel of the god Anu.
Ancient Greece develops the myth
of the architect Daedalus, and his son Icarus.
Trapped in a high tower, Daedalus crafts wings
made of wax and feathers as a means of escape.
Daedalus gives his son Icarus one warning:
"Do not fly too close to the sun."
Enraptured and giddy by his flight,
Icarus soars too closely to the sun,
itself the symbol of the god Apollo.
His wings melt to nothing,
and he falls to his death in the ocean below.
Daedalus is forced to fly on alone
lest he suffer his own son's fate.
(keyboard clicking)
Author Jules Gabriel Verne pens the story
of American gun enthusiasts, the Baltimore Gun Club,
who dream of reaching the moon
the only way that they can imagine.
They build a giant cannon and bullet-like craft
with which to escape Earth's gravity,
and, at the book's end, successfully reach the stars.
The book is entitled From the Earth to the Moon,
and it's only the start of Verne's otherworldly musings.
Verne continues the story five years later
with Around the Moon, which will have a second life
beyond the printed page.
- [Jules] Indeed, nothing could equal the splendor
of this starry world bathed in limpid ether.
Its diamonds set in the heavenly vault
sparkled magnificently.
The eye took in the firmament
from the Southern Cross to the North Star,
those two constellations which in 12,000 years,
by reason of the succession of equinoxes,
will resign their path to the polar stars,
the one to Canopus in the southern hemisphere,
the other to Wega in the northern.
Imagination loses itself in this sublime infinity,
amid which the projectile was gravitating
like a new star created by the hand of man.
From a natural cause these constellations shone
with a soft luster, they did not twinkle
for there was no atmosphere,
which, by the intervention of its layers unequally dense,
and of different degrees of humidity,
produces this scintillation.