Eerie Revelations About Role Of Lithia, Florida, In Moon Landing

LITHIA, FL -- As the nation celebrates the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing, it's worth noting that Lithia, not Cape Canaveral, was originally envisioned as the launch site for trips to the moon by one of the world's first science fiction writers, Jules Verne.

In his 1865 novel, "From the Earth to the Moon," or "De la Terre a la Lune" in the French novelist's native language, Verne chose Lithia, Florida, for the launch of man's first trip to the moon.

The NASA pioneers of the 1960s would have never considered Lithia as a launch site.

Its launch pad needed to be near a major body of water. That way, if there is an issue with the rocket after liftoff, space flight operators could safely put it down in the Atlantic Ocean without endangering the public.

Furthermore, rockets have multiple stages. When one stage runs out of fuel, it can be shed from the rocket and fall into the ocean without harm.

The closest body of water to Lithia is the Gulf of Mexico. But launching a rocket in a westerly direction to reach the moon would be contrary to the Earth's rotation.

Verne apparently didn't take this into consideration when he penned his novel, which tells the story of the Baltimore Gun Club and its mission to build something called the Columbiad space gun to send two Americans and a Frenchman to the moon.

When it came to choosing a location to launch the fictional space gun rocket, the gun club members decided it should be a place between the equator and the 28th parallel north (the area 28 degrees north of the equator) where the earth rotates at the greatest speed. That left only Florida and Texas.

In the novel, several south Texas cities attempted to sway the gun club to build the enormous space gun in their state. Instead, the gun club members chose the small settlement of Lithia east of Tampa, described in the novel as sparsely populated and ringed with forts to fight off Seminole Indian attacks.

The presence of Seminole Indians is true. But the nearest forts to Lithia at that time were Fort Foster in Thonotosassa and Fort Brooke in Tampa Town.

From Tampa Bay, the gun club members (pictured in jungle pith helmets and carrying rifles in ly illustrations of the novel) traveled 12 miles inland from Tampa Bay to the fictional Stone's Hill, which the club determined was the ideal spot to build the giant cannon.

Of course, if Verne had visited the area -- and there's no evidence that he ever did -- he'd have known that hills are non-existent around Tampa Bay.

At the time Verne penned his novel, Lithia would have been little more than a frontier settlement. The first white settlers didn't arrive until 1847, according to the Hillsborough County Historic Resources Survey Report.

That same Hillsborough County document also reports that the post office officially changed the town's name from Pelot to Lithia on June 18, 1904. The name comes from the mineral lithium, an alkaline white powder found in the town's spring water (Lithia Springs).

The fact that Verne wrote about Lithia in 1865, however, indicates the town must have been known as Lithia at least 40 years before the post office made the official change.

After clearing away the jungle surrounding the Lithia launch site, construction began on the Columbiad space gun, a massive cast-iron cannon measuring 6 feet thick, 900 feet long with a bore diameter of 9 feet. Instead of shooting cannon balls, the 68,000-ton cannon shot people huddled inside a bullet-shaped projectile.

Verne's space gun was ignited with 400,000 pounds of pyroxyle, a flammable material also known as flash paper, to provide enough force to propel the capsule through the Earth's atmosphere. When it was launched, it was so powerful that it shook the ground like an earthquake and the explosion was so bright it could be seen across Florida.

A scaled-down version of the Columbiad space gun was actually built for the French version of Space Mountain at Disney Paris.

When NASA was founded in 1958 and began looking for a permanent launch site, Lithia wasn't in the running. NASA considered eight other sites, all between the equator and 28th parallel north, as predicted by Verne in 1865.

“The west-to-east rotation of the Earth causes all points on Earth (except the poles themselves) to move eastward with some velocity,” NASA said.

This eastward velocity is greatest at the equator with the Earth rotating at a speed of roughly 1,040 mph. This rotational speed decreases as objects move closer to the poles, reaching zero directly over one of the poles.

NASA uses the Earth’s natural rotation when it launches toward the east from Cape Canaveral. The speed at which the Earth rotates at Cape Canaveral is about 914 mph, giving rockets an added boost to reach their destinations in space.

In addition to sitting on the Atlantic Ocean, Cape Canaveral met NASA's criteria of a sparsely populated area. The population of Cape Canaveral was limited when President Harry Truman signed the Joint Long-Range Proving Ground legislation May 11, 1949, and Cape Canaveral became a test site for missiles. The Cape, home to the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, already had more than 40 military launch installations before NASA was founded.

Nevertheless, the space agency vacillated on choosing Cape Canaveral due to the danger of lightning. Florida has more thunderstorms than any other state, not to mention the threat of hurricanes. If lightning were to strike a rocket in mid-flight, it'd be catastrophic, according to NASA.

This was proven in 1987 when lightning struck the AC-67 rocket less than a minute after liftoff, causing it to explode.

President John F. Kennedy's announcement in his now-famous speech May 25, 1961, that the U.S. would put a man on the moon during his administration forced NASA's hand. The space agency promptly chose Cape Canaveral and began construction to fulfill Kennedy's promise.

Cape Canaveral went down in history as the birthplace of the space program and Lithia's role remained forever fictional.