Artemis II moonshot reflects a spacefaring vision present in Jules Verne’s 19th-century novel

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. Discourse around science fiction coming true often focuses on the gadgets and technologies it predicted. But as sci-fi author Frederik Pohl reputedly said, it’s not about imagining the car, but the traffic jam. As a literature professor who has studied science fiction for a decade and editor of a forthcoming edition of Verne’s novel annotated for the spacefaring age, I find that what makes Verne’s 1865 novel prescient is that a century before the Moon landing, he understood that a moonshot would not be an act of pure and abstract science. It would exist within a…

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