The science of sci-fi spaceships

From Jules Verne to Avatar, Dallas Campbell traces how fiction shaped our dreams of space travel – and even drove real advances in rocket science

- Dallas Campbell

As long as humans have looked up, we've pictured space as an ocean to be navigated - stars, planets and moons as destinations, islands of exile and adventure, where shipwrecked astronauts await rescue or cosmic empires clash.

Popular culture in all its forms - but particularly in cinema - has imagined all manner of fanciful ways for us to sail the breadth of the heavens, from the outlandish to the futuristic - whether borne by geese, fired by cannons or hurled by warp drives.

Reality, however, is trickier (and more expensive), bound as we are by the laws of physics rather than the more forgiving laws of storytelling. The Voyager probes, after almost 50 years of steady plodding, are only now brushing the outer shores of our Solar System. And we fragile, fleshy humans have ventured no further than the Moon, in that brief moment between 1968 and 1972 when we became an interplanetary species.

Our earliest imagined spacecraft didn't rely on advanced aerospace engineering but on the supernatural. In the second century AD, Syrian satirist Lucian of Samosata wrote of a sailing ship caught in a giant waterspout and whisked to the Moon. Johannes Kepler, the father of planetary motion, wrote a science-fiction story where space travel was made possible through a 'shadow corridor’ caused by an eclipse that connected Earth and the Moon (effectively a 17th-century wormhole). In 1638's The Man in the Moone, Francis Godwin imagined his protagonist capturing a flock of geese, tying them to a chair and soaring Moonward. In this elegant fusion of fantasy and scientific enquiry, gravity, magnetism and the new Copernican science of the day were cheerfully debated mid-flight. And in a 17th-century satire, Cyrano de Bergerac launched his hero by strapping glass bottles of evaporating dew to his body.