"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.
