The above cover art suggests various predictions of the author Jules Verne. Among these was spaceflight which is suggested by the sketch of the astronaut at the upper left. JOURNEY FROM THE EARTH TO THE MOON was published in 1863. Some call it the "first believable novel of the future ever written" because of its attention to scientific accuracy. Consider the following amazing predictions by Verne in his novel which came to pass:
The United States would launch the first vehicle to go to the moon.
The shape and size of the vehicle would closely resemble the Apollo command/service module spacecraft.
The number of men in the crew would be three.
The vehicle would launch from Florida near the present location of Kennedy Space Center.
A competition for the launch site would ensue between Florida and Texas which actually was resolved in Congress in the 1960s with KSC as the Flordia launch site and Houston, Texas as the Mission Control Center.
A telescope would be able to view the progress of the journey. When Apollo 13 exploded, a telescope at Johnson Space Center witnessed the event which happened more than 200,000 miles from Earth.
The Verne spacecraft would use retro-rockets which became a technology assisting Neil Armstrong and his crewmates in their journey to the Moon.
Verne predicted weightlessness although his concept was slightly flawed in thinking it only was experienced at the gravitational midpoint of the journey (when the Moon and Earth gravity balanced).
The first men to journey to the Moon would return to Earth and splash down in the Pacific Ocean just where Apollo 11 splashed down in July of 1969 one hundred and six years after the initial publishing of Jules Verne's FROM THE EARTH TO THE MOON.
