De la terre à la lune, trajet direct en 97 heures 20 minutes

In the smoky aftermath of the American Civil War, a group of engineers, merchants and former artillery officers gathers in Baltimore to celebrate a new obsession: making the biggest, most powerful guns the world has ever seen. Their society, the Gun‑Club, swells to thousands of members, each eager to push the limits of ballistics and prove that American ingenuity can out‑shoot any European cannon. The meetings hum with debates over projectile weight, powder charges and the mathematics of range, turning a wartime pastime into a national pastime.

The club’s most audacious scheme soon eclipses even its colossal artillery: a plan to fire a solid projectile far enough to reach the Moon. Led by a charismatic inventor and backed by meticulous calculations based on Newton’s law of gravitation, they begin designing a massive launch tube, gathering funds, and enlisting the brightest minds to solve the technical riddles of vacuum, recoil and trajectory. Listeners will follow the wild optimism, the engineering challenges, and the cultural excitement that fuels this early vision of lunar travel.