A Different Story - Spacecraft Lifting Off From Major European Cities

"A Different Story" is a collection of European cities the way they might look with different rockets in the middle of urban areas, where buildings and monuments become the launch platforms. All of this was made with existing Google pictures.

The dream of stepping into the outer reaches of the Earth's atmosphere was driven by the fiction of Jules Vernes and H.G.Wells, and rocket technology was developed to try to materialize this vision. From the first space mission, everyone in Europe followed, watched or read about space exploration. "A Different Story" is a tribute to all the European scientists who worked out of their countries to realize huge projects like these.

The mission's commander, astronaut Neil Armstrong, said, "A hundred years ago, Jules Verne wrote a book about a voyage to the Moon. His spaceship, Columbia, took off from Florida and landed in the Pacific Ocean after completing a trip to the Moon. It seems appropriate to us to share with you some of the reflections of the crew as the modern-day Columbia completes its rendezvous with the planet Earth and the same Pacific Ocean tomorrow.”

From the 1990s onwards, private interests began promoting space tourism and eventually even private space exploration of the Moon.