Abstract
From the moment people realized that the brightest object in the night sky was a solid body rather than just a glowing orb of light, they began envisioning ways to get there. Dreams of using a cannon to reach orbit around the Earth can be traced to 1687, when Sir Isaac Newton included the example of an “orbital cannon” in his milestone work, Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica [Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy]. But Newton’s idea presumed that the cannon would be set atop a high mountain, one so tall that its peak reached above Earth’s atmosphere.
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