Rocket Dreams from the 1600s

Cyrano de Bergerac, a French writer of the 1600s, imagined rockets long before scientists or filmmakers did. In his 1657 story about a journey to the Moon, he described a machine that could lift a person into space by attaching fireworks to it. Although the idea was fanciful, he also tried to explain how such a device might work using the physics of his time. The notion that rockets could travel beyond Earth was not new. Ancient Greeks talked about fire‑propelled devices, and Chinese engineers built the first real rockets in the 11th century. These early weapons were simple: a tube filled with gunpowder that shot out a projectile. The same principle—using fuel to push against air or vacuum—forms the basis of modern missiles, fireworks and space launch vehicles. In the early 20th century, Russian thinker Konstantin Tsiolkovsky developed a scientific theory of rocketry and argued that it could reach the Moon. A few years later, American Robert Goddard successfully fired a liquid‑fuel rocket in 1926, proving that rockets could be built and used for real missions. These breakthroughs turned the dream of space travel from fiction into engineering reality.Yet Cyrano’s 1657 novel predates all of that by more than a century and shows how imaginative writers often lead science. Arthur C. Clarke, in his 1952 book that helped convince President Kennedy of a Moon landing’s feasibility, praised Cyrano as the first to write about rockets that could carry people into space. Clarke even noted Cyrano’s prediction of a ramjet engine, a technology still used in modern military aircraft and missiles. Cyrano was not perfect. He imagined the rocket’s engine pointing upward to lift it, rather than using thrust from below as we know today. This mistake reflected the limited scientific knowledge of his era; people still speculated about landing on the Sun. Still, Cyrano’s attempt to base his story on real science was ahead of most writers of his time, who preferred pure fantasy. Today we have landed rovers on Mars and plan crewed missions to the Moon again with Artemis II. Looking back at Cyrano’s ideas reminds us that early visionaries, even when wrong in details, can inspire future generations. Their bold guesses push scientists to explore new possibilities and prove that what seems impossible now can become ordinary tomorrow.