If you want to understand why humans actually made it to the lunar surface in 1969, you kinda have to go back to 1870. That’s when a Frenchman named Jules Verne published Autour de la Lune. In English, we call it Jules Verne Around the Moon. It wasn't just a sequel to his earlier book about a giant space gun; it was basically the first time someone sat down and tried to do the math on how we’d survive a trip through the void.
Verne was obsessed.
He didn't want to write a fairy tale about moon-men or magic mirrors. He wanted to write about ballistics. He wanted to write about physics. Honestly, it's pretty wild how much he got right—and even weirder what he got wrong.
The Giant Cannon and the Physics of Departure
The premise of Jules Verne Around the Moon picks up right where From the Earth to the Moon left off. Our three protagonists—Barbicane, Nicholl, and Michael Ardan—are trapped inside a hollow aluminum projectile. This "bullet" was fired out of a massive cannon called the Columbiad, buried deep in the soil of Tampa, Florida.
Wait. Florida?
Yeah. Verne picked Florida for the launch site because of its proximity to the equator. He knew that the Earth's rotation provides a bit of an extra "shove" to a departing spacecraft. Fast forward about a century, and NASA is launching the Apollo missions from Cape Canaveral, just a few hours away from Verne’s fictional site. That’s not a coincidence; it's just good orbital mechanics.
The projectile itself was made of aluminum. In 1870, aluminum was incredibly rare and expensive—basically a precious metal. Verne chose it because it’s lightweight and strong. Today, it’s the backbone of the aerospace industry. He was thinking about weight-to-strength ratios before the Wright brothers were even out of diapers.
What happened inside the bullet?
The characters spend most of the book just... hanging out. They drink wine. They argue about math. They even brought dogs with them, which, predictably, didn't end well for one of the dogs (Satellite) when the acceleration kicked in.
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Verne understood the concept of "air scrubbers." He knew that three men in a sealed box would eventually suffocate on their own breath. His solution was a chemical process using potassium chlorate to generate oxygen and caustic potash to absorb carbon dioxide. It’s remarkably similar to the systems used on the International Space Station today.
The Weightless Problem (And Verne's Big Miss)
One of the most famous scenes in Jules Verne Around the Moon involves the characters experiencing weightlessness. But here's the catch: Verne thought gravity only disappeared at the "neutral point" between the Earth and the Moon.
He describes a specific moment where the pull of the two celestial bodies cancels each other out. At that exact second, the travelers start floating. They play around, enjoying the novelty of being weightless.
But science tells us something different now.
In reality, they would have been weightless the entire time. Once the projectile stopped accelerating out of the cannon and was simply "falling" through space toward its target, the occupants would have been in freefall. It’s the same reason astronauts on the ISS float today—they aren’t "away" from gravity; they are falling around the Earth at the same speed as their ship.
Verne missed this. He thought gravity was like a physical rope that you eventually grew too far away from. It’s a rare moment where his intuition failed him, but considering the era, you can't really blame the guy. He was inventing a genre from scratch.
The Dark Side of the Moon
The plot takes a turn when the projectile gets knocked off course by an asteroid. Instead of landing on the moon, they end up in a circumlunar orbit. They become the first humans to see the "far side" of the moon.
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Back then, the far side was a total mystery.
Verne uses this section to speculate wildly. As the travelers drift over the dark hemisphere, they use flares to light up the landscape. Verne describes a frozen, dead world, but he hints at the possibility that it once held oceans and life. He portrays the moon as a "dying" world, a stark contrast to the vibrant, chaotic Earth they left behind.
The Return Journey: A Splashdown in the Pacific
Eventually, the crew realizes they can’t land. They use "retro-rockets" (small explosive charges) to push themselves back toward Earth. This is another massive win for Verne’s accuracy. He understood that in a vacuum, you need an equal and opposite reaction to change your trajectory.
The book ends with the projectile hitting the ocean.
When the U.S. Navy finds them, the capsule is floating in the Pacific. Think about that for a second. When Apollo 11 returned from the moon in 1969, how did they land? They splashed down in the Pacific Ocean and were picked up by the USS Hornet.
Verne predicted the launch location, the material of the ship, the number of crew members, the use of oxygen scrubbers, and the exact method of recovery. It’s almost spooky.
Why We Still Read This Stuff
You might think a book from 1870 would be a slog. Parts of it are. Verne spends a lot of time on mathematical calculations that will make your eyes bleed if you aren't a calculus fan.
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But the heart of the story is the human drive to go where we shouldn't.
Barbicane and his crew aren't superheroes. They’re nerds. They are members of a "Gun Club" who got bored after the American Civil War and decided to aim at the sky. There’s something very grounded and relatable about that. They aren't seeking "magic"; they are seeking the results of their own equations.
Real-World Influence
- Konstantin Tsiolkovsky: The father of Russian rocketry credited Verne as his primary inspiration.
- Robert Goddard: The American who built the first liquid-fueled rocket was obsessed with Verne’s stories as a child.
- Frank Borman: The commander of Apollo 8 (the first mission to actually orbit the moon) wrote a letter to Verne’s grandson, noting the incredible similarities between their flight and the book.
Practical Takeaways for Modern Readers
If you're going to dive into Jules Verne Around the Moon today, here’s how to get the most out of it:
Don't skip the "boring" parts. The long-winded debates about lunar geography and math are where the "science" in science fiction was born. It gives you a sense of what people actually knew (and didn't know) in the 19th century.
Read a good translation. Early English translations of Verne were often terrible. They cut out the science to make them "adventure stories" for kids or messed up the metric conversions. Look for translations by Walter James Miller or Frederick Paul Walter. They keep the technical grit that Verne intended.
Compare it to Apollo 8. If you read the book alongside the mission logs of Apollo 8, the parallels will blow your mind. Both crews orbited the moon without landing. Both saw the far side for the first time. Both returned to a watery grave/hero's welcome.
Check the illustrations. The original engravings by Émile-Antoine Bayard and Alphonse de Neuville are iconic. They capture the Victorian-industrial aesthetic of the "space bullet" in a way that modern CGI just can't touch.
Verne didn't just write a story; he wrote a dare. He told the world that the moon wasn't a god or a dream, but a destination. It took us 99 years to catch up to his imagination, but the map was already there, printed on the pages of a 19th-century novel.