> The reality is that no such projection is plausible. Could a human being living in 1903, before the Wright Brothers have predicted a moon landing only 66 year

> The reality is that no such projection is plausible. Could a human being living in 1903, before the Wright Brothers have predicted a moon landing only 66 years later? I mean, Jules Verne suggested trips to the Moon earlier than that in 1965 via cannon (from the coast of Florida!). Konstantin Tsiolkovsky in 1903, rejecting cannons on technical grounds (the speed of gunpowder's gases too slow to break from Earth's gravity as well as the impractical extremes in acceleration), proposed using liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen in a multistage rocket for reaching the Moon... Which is what 2 of the 3 stages of the Saturn V used, so he was pretty accurate. He also suggested the need for oxygen, CO2 scrubbers, automatic machine guidance, thrust vector control using both external fins and fins in the flow of the gases (both methods became used on rockets for early spaceflight) as well as suggesting the use of a sun sensor (star tracker) and gyroscopes for guidance. It's remarkable how many critical features of spaceflight were invented by Tsiolkovsky in that document. Granted, I don't remember an actual forecasted date for these predictions, but he foresaw most of the technical features of spaceflight correctly. https://spacemedicineassociation.org/download/history/history_files_1920-1930/Tsiolkovsky%20Oberth%20Goddard.pdf https://spacemedicineassociation.org/download/history/histor... Projections from Nikola Tesla suggested similar things to the smartphone around that timeline. If you look at technical pioneers using logical consequences of actual known physics and engineering, they can make pretty remarkably prescient predictions.