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 political, social and economic context.

In his novel, the moonshot is proposed by the Baltimore Gun Club in the months after the U.S. Civil War, and Verne tells the story of how they make this colossal undertaking happen. Writing before even the age of powered flight, he foresaw that a project to send a small handful of carefully selected, exceptional individuals beyond Earth would have ripple effects throughout the entire world.

And with four astronauts having just circled the Moon as part of the Artemis II mission, the similarities between Verne’s vision and America’s current Moon-oriented dreams are striking – and revealing of the realities of the spacefaring age.

A nationalist and international project

In Verne’s novel, the moonshot is explicitly proposed as a nationalist project, even as it also becomes a pinnacle of human achievement that unifies the world. The speech in which it is proposed is one full of celebrations of American engineers, scientists and generals who have come before, and Americanness is key to its realization.

At one moment, it becomes clear that the launch must occur near the equator to minimize the distance to the Moon. Since this is an American endeavor, however, the protagonists are adamant that it must launch from the United States, and the Gun Club briefly considers invading Mexico to make this happen before remembering that Florida and Texas are both suitable.

Later, a Frenchman, Michel Ardan, telegraphs that he’d like to make the trip to the Moon. He’s welcomed and celebrated but allowed on the voyage only after he’s made an honorary citizen of the United States.

At the same time, the moonshot reaches the entire world. Every soul on the planet follows the news of it via telegraph, and it receives widespread support on the principle that “it was both the right and the duty of the entire Earth to intervene in the affairs of its satellite.” The world’s nations come together to raise funds for it and breathlessly await the launch.

Comparisons to the space race are obvious: During the 1960s, the Moon was another battleground in the Cold War, an ideological battle to answer the question of which system – communism or capitalism and democracy – can meet the challenge of putting a human being on the Moon first. Yet it was, and still is, also celebrated as a triumph of humananity’s willpower, ingenuity and bravery.

Artemis II is animated by this same tension between nationalism and a unifying vision of humanity. In the moments before launch, Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen told NASA and the world, “We are going for all humanity.” The fact that a Canadian astronaut has joined an American crew, too, is a departure from Cold War days.

Throughout the Artemis II mission, the astronauts and NASA’s ground control team repeatedly evoked the idea of a humanity united across international boundaries. After performing the translunar injection burn that committed Orion to its lunar trajectory, astronaut Christina Koch stated, “We will always choose Earth. We will always choose each other,” to which NASA’s Mission Control responded: “Integrity from Earth, our single system, fragile and interconnected, we copy. Those that can are looking back.”

And yet, Artemis II is an important step in a modern-day space race, this time with the United States and China as opponents. The Artemis program is actively trying to return Americans to the Moon before China gets there. NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman has been unequivocal that the United States doing so first is crucial to continuing to prove American excellence on the world stage and therefore maintaining its economic and soft power.

Planetary colonization

In Verne’s novel, the original motivation for going to the Moon is, in the words of the character Barbicane, to become “the Columbuses of this new world.” Though they call their project a scientific experiment, the characters see the Moon as a territory to be claimed, which will become the newest American state.

This perspective sees the natural world and the cosmos as another frontier to be conquered, and it echoes the imperial and colonial practices of Verne’s time, which saw populated places such as Africa and the American West as blank slates to claim.

Visions such as Verne’s influenced most of the engineers and scientists that made human spaceflight possible, such as Robert Goddard and Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, who believed that humanity’s destiny is in the stars.

This perspective, too, has been part of the rhetoric around Artemis II. While this mission has extensive scientific objectives – for the first time, there’s a science desk at Mission Control – NASA has also repeatedly billed this mission as a momentous achievement because it took human beings farther from Earth than any human being has ever traveled.

If space is “the final frontier,” to borrow a phrase from “Star Trek,” then Artemis II is historic because it has taken American astronauts farther into that frontier.

Environmental effects

In Verne’s novel, Tampa, Florida, is chosen as “Moon City,” from which the moonbound projectile will be launched. It is a profound economic boon for the city, just as real cities in Florida, Texas and elsewhere experienced economic and population growth in the 20th century due to the Apollo program.

Yet the moonshot also has a devastating and negative effect in the book: The force of the detonation that launches the three explorers to the Moon razes the city and even causes a powerful storm that spreads to the Atlantic Ocean and sinks ships.

Today’s space industry, too, offers many economic boons, with companies such as SpaceX and Blue Origin employing thousands. But it also often has similarly harmful effects.

For example, SpaceX’s Texas Starbase – the primary facility for developing its Starship, which is intended to help NASA land humans on the Moon – has had detrimental effects on the surrounding landscape and population. Test launches that don’t go as planned rain down shrapnel and debris, endangering people and damaging fragile ecosystems. Noise, water and air pollution are equally inconveniences to the local residents and a threat to many endangered species in the area.

The prescience of a work of science fiction such as Verne’s lies not in the technologies he dreamed up but in the way he thought through their consequences and repercussions.

This article is republished from The Conversation, a nonprofit, independent news organization bringing you facts and trustworthy analysis to help you make sense of our complex world. It was written by: Anastasia Klimchynskaya, Illinois Wesleyan University

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Anastasia Klimchynskaya does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.