No, not Loui Armstrong's cousin Neil. I read about it on Amazon book review, so it must be true.

https://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-r...SIN=1906512477

"The author is partially correct in that Neil Armstrong was not the first man on the moon - however, he and Buzz Aldrin were the first people to return from the Moon alive. Through my own research, I have uncovered a history of humanity's ventures into space, far richer than the standard narrative.

Since mankind first gazed at the heavens, he has dreamed of setting foot on the moon. The first serious attempt to accomplish this was by the Chinese nobleman Wen Fu in the third century B.C. Wen attached 126 fireworks rockets to a sedan chair, climbed aboard, and had 126 servants light each of the rockets simultaneously when the full moon was directly overhead. We can laugh at his naivete, however, at the time there was no reason not to think that earth's atmosphere extended upwards indefinitely, and Wen had carefully calculated the amount of thrust he would need, based on his figures for the moon's distance (he believed that its distance from the earth was the same as that from Beijing to Shanghai). However, after the resulting explosion, Wen was never seen again.

The next attempt was that of the Zomzini Brothers, Giuseppe and Vito, in Renaissance-era Milan. They designed a cannon, from which Vito would be fired along with a parachute, newly invented by Leonardo da Vinci, to cushion his descent to the lunar surface. As Wen had demonstrated over a millenium previously, explosive propulsion resulted in the complete destruction of the prospective "astronaut," and Zomzini did not survive his courageous attempt to escape the earth's bounds.

Starting with David Bushnell's invention of the "Turtle," the first submarine, in 1775, American ingenuity quite naturally began to focus on exploration of space as well as the oceans, with the moon as a primary objective. The best minds in the American military were tasked with the development of a practical rocket. This top secret work proceeded slowly, and was close to its culmination when the Civil War broke out. The center of research was Fort Sumter, not coincidentally the first Union installation captured by the Confederacy. Decades of research fell into the hands of the rebel forces. Jefferson Davis was strongly committed to lunar exploration, seeing the moon as not only a stronghold commanding a strategic view of the entire North American continent, but also opening up a new front in the War Between the States. Vast resources were devoted to this project, leading to shortages in other areas, and probably contributing in no small part to the Confederacy's eventual defeat. The research center was also moved from South Carolina to Atlanta, at the time thought to be a safer and more easily defended area.

Development proceeded apace, with the first lunar rocket ready for liftoff in February of 1864. As finances did not permit a return trip, the unlucky astronaut who managed to reach the moon would remain there until he ran out of air or starved to death. For this reason, a slave, Benjamin Cubbins, was selected to make the trip. He was more than a helpless pawn, however - if a successful lunar colony could be established, any slave who chose to emigrate there was to have been given his freedom. Cubbins landed on the historic date of March 2, 1864, becoming the first human being to set foot onto the lunar surface, in the Ocean of Storms, within sight of the same spot where Pete Conrad and Alan Bean would land over 100 years later in Apollo 12. Lacking radio, Cubbins communicated his success through an innovative wig-wag system that was monitored from earth via telescope. Cubbins spent over two weeks on the moon, covering large areas on foot and sending his descriptions of the landscape back to earth until, shortly before his air supply ran out, he ended his own life with a reciprocating pistol he had been supplied with for this purpose.

Plans for a second mission were aborted when Sherman's siege of Atlanta began shortly thereafter in May of that same year. Tragically, nearly all records of the Confederate space program were lost in the burning of that city, with the exception of a few pages from the mission log, and several rocket blueprints that were smuggled out by a private in General Hood's army, one Bureauguard [sic] Beatle, who deserted and carried them back with him to his family's farm in rural Tennessee. The significance of these blueprints was not recognized by Beatle's mother, who used them to make dress patterns, however, they were still readable when I examined them in 1985 in Seattle, where one of Beatle's descendants who had possession of these records was living. Most of my knowledge of the Confederate space program comes from this, along with the recollections passed down as family lore across the generations.

Fun fact: Bureauguard Beatle's great-nephew, Josiah Beatle, was a drum manufacturer in Philadelphia. Ringo Starr's grandfather purchased a drum kit at the Beatle store while on a business trip to the States, and later gifted the young Ringo with it, inspiring the famous group's name.

After the Civil War ended, there was great interest in reconstructing the space program and setting up an American colony on the moon. General George Armstrong Custer was tasked with overseeing this enterprise. Progress was slow, and ended with Custer's death in the Battle of the Little Bighorn in 1876. Many Native American leaders at the time considered the white man's attempt to reach the moon a sacrilege, and the total destruction of the 7th Cavalry was carried out deliberately to bring an end to the program. With Custer's death, the American space program went into hiatus, as the best engineering minds of the day were by then attracted to the development of the bicycle. It would not be resurrected until Robert Goddard successfully launched his first rocket, fifty years later in 1926. The advances of the following decades, culminating in Armstrong and Aldrin's historic landing on July 21, 1969, were undertaken from scratch, as virtually no knowledge of Confederate technology or Cubbins' voyage were available to later researchers. It is only now that the full tale can be told."

We haven't been to the moon yet.