known as the 'Iraqi supergun' by the media. During Project Babylon, Bull used his experience from Project HARP to build a massive cannon for Saddam Hussein, leader of Ba'athist Iraq. Bull was assassinated before the project was completed. Quicklaunch (1996-2016) After cancellation of SHARP, lead developer John Hunter founded the Jules Verne Launcher Company in 1996 and the Quicklaunch company. As of September 2012, Quicklaunch was seeking to raise $500 million to build a gun that could refuel a propellant depot or send bulk materials into space. Ram accelerators have also been proposed as an alternative to light-gas guns. Other proposals use electromagnetic techniques for accelerating the payload, such as coilguns and railguns. In fiction The first publication of the concept may be Newton's cannonball in his 1728 book A Treatise of the System of the World, although it was primarily used as a thought experiment regarding gravity. Perhaps the most famous representations of a space gun appear in Jules Verne's 1865 novel From the Earth to the Moon and his 1869 novel Around the Moon (loosely interpreted into the 1902 film Le Voyage dans la Lune), in which astronauts fly to the Moon aboard a ship launched from a cannon. Another famous example is used by the Martians to launch their invasion in H. G. Wells' 1897 book The War of the Worlds. Wells also used the concept in the climax of the 1936 film Things to Come. The device was featured in films as late as 1967, such as Jules Verne's Rocket to the Moon. In the 1991 video game Ultima: Worlds of Adventure 2: Martian Dreams, Percival Lowell builds a space gun to send a spacecraft to Mars. The 1992 video game Steel Empire, a shoot 'em up with steampunk aesthetics, features a space gun in its seventh level that is used by the main villain General Styron to launch himself to the Moon. In Hannu Rajaniemi's 2012 novel The Fractal Prince, a space gun at the "Jannah-of-the-cannon", powered by a 150-kiloton nuclear bomb, is used to launch a spaceship from Earth. The 2015 video game SOMA features a space gun used to launch satellites. Gerald Bull's assassination and the Project Babylon gun were also the starting point for Frederick Forsyth's 1994 novel The Fist of God. In Larry Bond's 2001 novella and 2015 novel Lash-Up, China uses a space gun to destroy American GPS satellites. In