Read "Round the Moon" by Jules Verne online for free on Textopian. Full text with search, annotations, highlights, and AI-powered reading aids.
For some time Barbicane and his companions, mute and pensive, looked at this world, which they had only seen from a distance, like Moses saw Canaan, and from which they were going away forever. The position of the projectile relatively to the moon was modified, and now its lower end was turned towards the earth.
This change, verified by Barbicane, surprised him greatly. If the bullet was going to gravitate round the satellite in an elliptical orbit, why was not its heaviest part turned towards it like the moon to the earth? There again was an obscure point.