Michel Ardan then suggests that the spaceship launching will be
             powered by a formidable quantity of guncotton, and that the occupants of
             this spaceship will be protected from the shock of the launch by a layer of
             water filling the space between the vehicle's double walls. There will also
             be thick glass portholes for observation, sealed during the liftoff and
             then opened by screws controlled from the inside of the vehicle. The air
             supply will be renewed by oxygen obtained by heating potassium chlorate, a
             powerful oxidizing agent. The flight, of course, will be monitored from the
             ground by a powerful Rocky Mountain telescope operated by the Cambridge
             Unfortunately, Verne was not much of an engineer, for the very idea
             of launching human beings into space via a cannon is completely
             unscientific. The spaceship, being the projectile, would be exposed to
             quite dangerous forces, not to mention that using guncotton as the
             explosive to launch the spaceship would not be sufficient to place the
             vehicle outside of the earth's atmosphere, due to the forces of gravity and
             inertia. Verne makes no reference to exactly how the vehicle would be
             operated and controlled once it reached outer space; landing on the moon
             would be another gigantic problem, due to the vehicle not having any sort
             of mechanism to slow its ascent to the lunar surface.
             All in all, Verne's "rocket to the moon" stands as the ultimate
             example of bad engineering, even when one takes into consideration that
             Verne was using his imagination as a means of conveying his sci-fi ideas to
             the reading public who at the time of the novel's publication were
             ...