Status Updates From Moon: A Brief History

Focussing on Jules Verne's moon travel fiction as inspiring for its 'stunning' similarities to the 1960s missions seems naïve and fallacious: there is a certain velocity (and hence travel time) a vessel travelling Earth-to-Moon must take, and you only need Newton's laws to have a rough idea of it, and I am this close to unearthing my slide-rule and trying to reconstruct calculations by 1860s means and data