From the Earth to the Moon: A Direct Route in 97 Hours, 20 Minutes (French: De la Terre à la Lune, trajet direct en 97 heures 20 minutes) is an 1865 novel by Jules Verne. It tells the story of the Baltimore Gun Club, a post-American Civil War society of weapons enthusiasts, and their attempts to build an enormous Columbiad space gun and launch three people — the Gun Club’s president, his Philadelphian armor-mak-ing rival, and a French poet — in a projectile with the goal of a Moon landing. Five years later, Verne wrote a sequel called Around the Moon.