Jules Verne Apollo 11 Predictions: What He Got Right (And Wrong)
I grew up in the mid-1970s. My dreams, though, were built from words written in the 1860s. Jules Verne had that effect. The Nautilus. The balloon. The cannon pointed straight at the Moon. Every kid who found those novels understood instinctively that fiction wasn't just made-up stuff — it was a rehearsal for the future. Then there was Mars Attacks! Tim Burton's 1996 film starring Jack Nicholson: gloriously ridiculous, proudly absurd, a love letter to B-movie mayhem. I saw both as a kid. I laughed at one and believed the other. That gap — between the vision that aged into prophecy and the vision that aged into camp — is exactly what this article is about. This article looks at what historians, scientists, and NASA's own astronauts have documented about Jules Verne's 1865 novel From the Earth to the Moon — and how its fictional moon mission lines up against the real Apollo 11 flight a century later, and now against NASA's Artemis program, which sent a crew around...