The Apollo program and Jules Verne

In 1869, he imagined a mission to the moon that prefigured the flight of Apollo 9 one century later.  "Our space vehicle," Frank Borman, the astronaut, wrote to Verne's grandson, was launched from Florida, like [Verne's]; it had the same weight and the same height, and it splashed down in the Pacific a mere two and a half miles from the point mentioned in the novel."

Text from the Introduction to Jule's Verne's Paris in the Twentieth Century (Random House, 1996).  Photo of Apollo 9 from NASA's APOD website.