With the launch of NASA’s Artemis II mission on April 1, 2026, human beings have finally returned to the Moon for the first time in 50 years – since the age of Apollo.
When Apollo 11 first landed on the lunar surface, the astronauts portrayed their accomplishment as the realization of a science fictional dream. In a televised broadcast during their return, Neil Armstrong explicitly evoked Jules Verne’s 1865 novel “From the Earth to the Moon,” calling his spaceship and crew a “modern-day Columbia” – a direct reference to the spaceship Verne imagined taking off in from Florida and landing in the Pacific Ocean.
