If Verne Could Look at NASA

One hundred years before the Apollo 8 flight, Jules Verne imagined a future day on which a man-carrying missile would be fired from Florida at 28 degrees North Latitude at a calculated moment in December, would depart Earth at 25,000 miles per hour, and orbit the moon three and one half days later, without landing.

In his detailed account of this adventure, a crew of three men ride in a bullet-shaped vehicle, nine feet in diameter, fifteen feet high, weighing ten tons. They describe the sensation of weightlessness; meticulously record data on the now familiar peaks, craters, cracks and faults of the moon’s surface from a height of thirty miles; conclude that it is “grey, forbidding and uninhabitable”; and jokingly decide what kind of cheese it is made of. They circle the backside, and at a precise instant, fire rockets which bring them back into the earth’s gravitational field, and thus to a pre-dawn splashdown in the Pacific Ocean, their fiery re-entry of the earth’s atmosphere marking their location for a retriever ship.

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Thomas Sweeney

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One hundred years before the Apollo 8 flight, Jules Verne imagined a future day on which a man-carrying missile would be fired from Florida at 28 degrees North Latitude at a calculated moment in December, would depart Earth at 25,000 miles per hour, and orbit the moon three and one half days later, without landing.

In his detailed account of this adventure, a crew of three men ride in a bullet-shaped vehicle, nine feet in diameter, fifteen feet high, weighing ten tons. They describe the sensation of weightlessness; meticulously record data on the now familiar peaks, craters, cracks and faults of the moon’s surface from a height of thirty miles; conclude that it is “grey, forbidding and uninhabitable”; and jokingly decide what kind of cheese it is made of. They circle the backside, and at a precise instant, fire rockets which bring them back into the earth’s gravitational field, and thus to a pre-dawn splashdown in the Pacific Ocean, their fiery re-entry of the earth’s atmosphere marking their location for a retriever ship.