Did Jules Verne Predict Apollo 11? The Wild History of Sci-Fi Space Travel
The World's First Sci-Fi Story Had Space Wars, Giant Spider-Webs, and Aliens With Cabbage Tails
Meet Lucian of Samosata. Second century CE. Syrian-Greek. Massive troublemaker. In an era when most writers were busy copying Homer or praising emperors, Lucian sat down and wrote a story called A True Story (Vera Historia) — a satirical account of a ship getting swept into space by a giant whirlwind and landing on the Moon, where an all-out interplanetary war is raging over the colonization rights to Venus. Carl Sagan himself identified this as the earliest known work of science fiction. That's right. The genre that gave us Star Trek and Star Wars started with a guy in the Roman Empire making stuff up to mock bad historians.
But Lucian wasn't just goofing around. Hidden inside the absurdity is a truly revolutionary idea: outer space needs physical infrastructure to be used as a battlefield. Since troops can't march on nothing, the Moon King hires giant space spiders to spin a colossal web across the void between the Moon and Venus — creating an artificial floor for infantry combat. That's not just weird. That's a conceptual leap. Recognizing that the vacuum of space requires manufactured structure? That's the same logic behind today's space stations.
Street-smart analogy time. Imagine you want to play a soccer match, but instead of a field, there's just an open swimming pool. You'd need to build a platform first, right? That's exactly what Lucian's Moon King did — except the "swimming pool" was the infinite vacuum of space, and the "platform" was a web spun by cosmic arachnids. Wild? Yes. Conceptually sound? Also yes.
Here's the misconception most people have: they assume early fiction about space was purely magical, with zero logic behind it. Not true. Lucian built an internally consistent alien ecosystem. The Moon-dwellers (Selenites) had no navels — their bellies were openable pouches lined with shaggy hair, used to store weapons and shelter their children from the cold. Their ears were made of plane-tree leaves. They had detachable, removable eyes they could swap out or lend to friends. When they sweat from fighting, it came out as thick, curdleable milk. Their noses ran with honey. Their shields? Giant mushrooms. Their spears? Hardened asparagus stalks. Their cavalry rode birds with wings made of lettuce leaves.
Bizarre? Sure. But Lucian gave every detail its own biological logic. That matters enormously in the history of science fiction. He established the template that alien life should operate by its own consistent rules, not just be a human in a costume. That philosophical framework — build the world, then follow its rules — is the core DNA of every serious sci-fi universe ever created since.
The Cyrano de Bergerac Rocket Invention History Nobody Talks About (And Poe's Pressurized Spacecraft Design)
Fast-forward about fifteen hundred years. The year is 1657. A French philosopher-playwright named Savinien de Cyrano de Bergerac publishes a posthumous novel called The Comical History of the States and Empires of the Moon. And in it, he accidentally invents the rocket. No, really. The Cyrano de Bergerac rocket invention history is one of the most underrated stories in all of science.
Cyrano proposes two methods of getting to the Moon. The first: strap bottles of morning dew to your body. His logic was that the sun draws dew upward through evaporation every morning — so if you concentrate enough dew, you get pulled skyward too. It's a genuine attempt to apply natural physics to flight. It just doesn't have quite enough oomph for a lunar transit; it only gets him as far as Canada. Solid effort, Cyrano.
His second method is the one that changed history. Stranded in Canada, Cyrano builds a catapult-launched vehicle. Soldiers find it and, thinking it's a strange effigy, strap fireworks to it as a prank. Cyrano jumps in to save his invention. The fuses are lit. And then — "tier upon tier of explosives ignited like rockets," blasting the craft off the Earth and toward the Moon. That's it. That right there is the world's first literary description of staged, sequential rocket thrust for spaceflight. Sir Isaac Newton wouldn't formally describe his Third Law of Motion (every action has an equal and opposite reaction) until 1687 — thirty years later. Cyrano got there first. By accident. In a comedy novel.
Think of it like a giant Roman candle. You know how fireworks launch in stages — pop, pop, POP — each burst pushing higher than the last? That's staged rocketry. That's how the Saturn V works. That's how the Falcon 9 works. And Cyrano described the core concept in 1657, simply by writing "tier upon tier." The man was centuries ahead of his time.
The common misconception is that Cyrano's work was pure comedy with no scientific value. Wrong. He was a student of the French atomist Pierre Gassendi and was secretly pushing Copernican sun-centered cosmology in a Catholic country that could get you in serious trouble for that. The comedy was a disguise. The science was real.
Then comes Edgar Allan Poe. His 1835 story, The Unparalleled Adventure of One Hans Pfaall, tackles a problem the earlier writers completely ignored: what happens to your body in the vacuum of space? The Edgar Allan Poe pressurized spacecraft design in this story is stunning in its detail. His hero builds a sealed wicker basket encased in a "very strong, perfectly air-tight, but flexible gum-elastic bag" — essentially a rubber spacecraft capsule. He then invents a mechanical air condenser: a pump that sucks in the thin vacuum outside, compresses it into breathable air, and pushes it inside the sealed cabin. He also installs an exhaust valve at the bottom to dump toxic carbon dioxide. This is a closed-loop life support system. In 1835. Before anyone had ever been to space.
Poe even tested his system on a cat. He suspended a smaller external basket with a cat and kittens from the balloon, observing their physiological distress as the air thinned. That's animal testing for spacecraft life support — in a short story written in the 1830s. The guy was relentless.
Jules Verne Apollo 11 Predictions: The Most Accurate Guess in Human History (And What It Means for Artemis II)
And then there's Jules Verne. From the Earth to the Moon, 1865. This is where things stop being "interesting historical trivia" and start being genuinely eerie. The Jules Verne Apollo 11 predictions accuracy is so specific, so detailed, and so correct that aerospace historians still shake their heads about it. Let's go through the list.
- Launch Location: Verne correctly deduced you need to launch as close to the equator as possible in the United States to use Earth's rotational momentum. His fictional site: Stone's Hill, near Tampa, Florida, on the 28th parallel. NASA's actual site: Kennedy Space Center, Merritt Island, Florida, also on the 28th parallel. Distance apart: less than 130 miles.
- Rejected Launch Site: In the novel, Brownsville, Texas is explicitly considered and rejected. NASA also considered and rejected Brownsville, Texas. In 1865. One hundred years early.
- Spacecraft Name: Verne named his giant space cannon the Columbiad. NASA named the Apollo 11 command module Columbia, at the direct suggestion of NASA's assistant administrator of public affairs — as a literary homage.
- Crew Size: Verne: 3 men. Apollo 11: 3 men (Armstrong, Aldrin, Collins).
- Hull Material: In 1865, aluminum was so rare it was nearly as expensive as gold. Verne predicted it would be the metal of choice for a spacecraft, citing its high tensile strength and low weight. Apollo command modules: aluminum-honeycomb alloy.
- Splashdown Recovery: In Verne's 1870 sequel, the crew splashes down in the Pacific Ocean and is picked up by a US Navy ship (the USS Susquehanna). Apollo 11 splashed down in the North Pacific and was recovered by the USS Hornet.
Street-smart analogy. Imagine writing down every detail of a sports championship in 1865 — the city, the team name, the player count, the stadium location, who wins — and then in 1969 your notebook is found and every single detail matches. That's what Verne did. Not with sports. With rocket science.
The misconception here is that these parallels are vague coincidences — like horoscopes that are broad enough to apply to anything. They're not. The Florida location, the Texas rejection, the aluminum metallurgy, the Navy recovery, the crew of three — these are extremely specific data points that all line up simultaneously. That's not luck. That's what happens when you do rigorous scientific homework inside a novel.
And it doesn't stop at Apollo. The Artemis II mission free-return trajectory is straight out of Verne's 1870 sequel, Around the Moon. In that book, Verne's crew fails to land because a gravitational disturbance alters their path. Instead, they loop around the dark side of the Moon in a free-return trajectory — using the Moon's gravity as a slingshot to come back to Earth — and splash down in the Pacific. NASA's Artemis II mission (the first crewed Artemis flight) will fly four astronauts on the exact same orbital architecture: translunar injection, a flyby at approximately 120 kilometers above the lunar surface, a gravitational slingshot home, Pacific Ocean splashdown. No surface landing. Verne wrote that narrative in 1870. NASA is flying it today.
Isaac Asimov called Verne "the first futurist in the modern sense" — the first person to seriously ask what might be achieved with continued technological advancement and then apply historical data and contemporary physics to build a credible answer. Robert Goddard, who launched the world's first liquid-fueled rocket in 1926, traced his lifelong obsession to an afternoon in October 1899 when he was pruning a cherry tree on his Aunt Effie's farm, daydreaming about building a device to reach Mars — a dream planted directly by reading Verne. Wernher von Braun, the man who designed the Saturn V, said he taught himself calculus and trigonometry as a teenager specifically so he could understand the physics in Verne's novels well enough to one day actually build the rockets.