Artemis 3 has been pushed to late 2027. Can NASA still land astronauts on the moon in 2028?
(Image credit: Émile-Antoine Bayard and Alphonse de Neuville / NASA) "From the pages of Jules Verne to a modern-day mission to the moon, a new chapter of our exploration of our celestial neighbor is complete." So said NASA commentator Rob Navias as Artemis 2’s Integrity spacecraft landed safely in the Pacific this past April.It is striking just how similar the mission profile of Artemis 2 was to the journey described by the French author in the mid-19th century. At a time when his peers were writing about fanciful balloon trips to other planets, Jules Verne dealt realistically with escape velocity, orbital slingshots, and course-correction burns. Yes, he made mistakes — some of them laughably obvious to the modern reader — but many aspects of his stories were eerily prescient of the real space missions that were still a century or more away.Often called the father of science fiction, the prolific Verne wrote of extraordinary voyages on modes of transport that did not yet exist, like the submarine in "Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea", and took readers to unexplored regions, such as "Journey to the Center of the Earth".Verne’s fourth novel, "From the Earth to the Moon", was published in 1865. Its darkly comic opening chapters describe how the members of the Baltimore Gun Club find their ballistic talents surplus to requirements at the conclusion of the American Civil War (a conflict still ongoing as Verne wrote). Club president Impey Barbicane proposes a new outlet for their skills: "I began to wonder whether, with a sufficiently large cannon, it might be possible to shoot a projectile to the moon."Verne was obsessed with facts and figures. He explains the math and science of Barbicane’s 900 ft (274 m) cannon, or "Columbiad", in great detail, including the trajectory of its projectile.His reasoning about where to locate the Columbiad was sound enough to be replicated by NASA decades later: launch from as close to the equator as possible to get a speed boost from the Earth’s rotation. Verne picked a spot near Fort Myers, on the opposite side of the Floridian peninsula to Cape Canaveral, but at a very similar latitude.G-force extremes Image credit: Émile-Antoine Bayard and Alphonse de Neuville Image credit: Space.com / Josh Dinner As "From the Earth to the Moon" proceeds, French adventurer Michael Ardan volunteers to man the Columbiad’s hollow projectile. Barbicane and his nemesis, Captain Nicholl, soon agree to join him.But here we hit the first major problem in Verne’s vision. Unlike a rocket, which accelerates to escape velocity over a few minutes, subjecting its crew to strong but survivable g-forces, a projectile fired from a cannon accelerates almost instantaneously. Barbicane, Nicholl, and Ardan would have been crushed to a paste.Nonetheless, the fictional launch is successful, and "All Around the Moon", published four years later in 1869, picks up the story. Instead of hitting the moon, as Barbicane had rather recklessly intended, the projectile turns out to be on a free-return trajectory, taking it around the far side of our natural satellite.Some of the sequel’s details are charmingly naive. Although Verne equips his travelers with chemical apparatus to produce oxygen and scrub carbon dioxide, he has no qualms about them opening portholes on several occasions, as long as they’re quick! His projectile’s interior is spacious and richly appointed like a Victorian study, and its occupants enjoy gourmet meals with fine wines, a far cry from the rehydrated rations that Reid Wiseman and company munched on during Artemis 2.Verne also has his crew mostly bound to the capsule’s floor by gravity. He mistakenly has them experience weightlessness only at the "neutral point", the spot where the Earth's and moon’s gravitational pulls are equally balanced. Still, it is quite amazing to read zero g imagined at a time when it was completely beyond all human experience (except perhaps briefly, if one of the recently invented "saf
