Forty years ago Monday, Neil Armstrong became the first human to set foot on the Moon. But for millennia before him, people had been imagining that giant leap in fiction, fables and film. They flew to the Moon in rocket ships, winged chariots and projectiles fired from huge guns. There they met giants, insect-men, Nazis and topless women.

Although pre-1969 stories of lunar voyages were often silly or satirical, Frederick I. Ordway III, a former NASA researcher, argues that they played a critical role in inspiring the scientists who actually put men on the Moon.

“They all read H. G. Wells and Jules Verne,” Ordway said recently.

Ordway devoured science-fiction pulp magazines like Amazing Stories and Thrilling Wonder Stories as a youngster. After graduating from Harvard in 1949 with a degree in geosciences, Ordway went to work for Reaction Motors, which built engines for the X-1 and X-15 experimental rocket planes. From the mid-1950s to the mid-1960s, he worked with rocket scientist Wernher von Braun and then at the NASA George C. Marshall Space Flight Center.

In 1965, at author Arthur C. Clarke’s suggestion, the filmmaker Stanley Kubrick hired Ordway as the scientific consultant on 2001: A Space Odyssey.

He said that the earliest known Moon voyage in written history is by the satirist Lucian of Samosata of the second century A.D. Lucian begins his True History with a disclaimer that it’s all lies. He goes on to describe sailing on a ship that’s carried to the Moon by a giant waterspout. He finds the Moon inhabited by men who ride three-headed vultures and giant fleas, and are at war with the inhabitants of the Sun.

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