How Jules Verne predicted the Artemis 2 mission to the moon almost 160 years ago

"From the pages of Jules Verne to a modern-day mission to the moon, a new chapter of our exploration of our celestial neighbor is complete." So said NASA commentator Rob Navias as Artemis 2’s Integrity spacecraft landed safely in the Pacific this past April. It is striking just how similar the mission profile of Artemis 2 was to the journey described by the French author in the mid-19th century. At a time when his peers were writing about fanciful balloon trips to other planets, Jules Verne dealt realistically with escape velocity, orbital slingshots, and course-correction burns. Yes, he made mistakes — some of them laughably obvious to the modern reader — but many aspects of his stories were eerily prescient of the real space missions that were still a century or more away. Often called the father of science fiction, the prolific Verne wrote of extraordinary voyages on modes of transport that did not yet exist, like the submarine in "Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea", and took readers to unexplored regions, such as "Journey to the Center of the Earth". Verne’s fourth novel, " From the Earth to the Moon", was published in 1865. Its darkly comic opening chapters describe how the members of the Baltimore Gun Club find their ballistic talents surplus to requirements at the conclusion of the American Civil War (a conflict still ongoing as Verne wrote). …