Jules Verne’s From the Earth to the Moon plods along, but it correctly predicts many of the technical and political details of the later moon mission:
Yet Verne gets high marks for how much he anticipated the details of the later Apollo journey, from the starting point (he launches his astronauts within a two hour drive of Cape Canaveral) to the size of the capsule and the duration of the trip. Not all the science here adds up — when I tried to check some of the sources cited by Verne, I came up empty-handed, so he clearly bent his “facts” to match his story. And you will be amused to find the launch team counting up to forty rather than down to zero for blastoff into space, while five million bystanders sing “Yankee Doodle.” Even so, I have a hunch that, if a gathering of leading technologists and industrialists had been convened in 1865 to come up with the most realistic plan for a moon trip based in on means available to them at the time, they would have arrived at a plan largely similar to the one Verne concocts.
Verne was also sensitive to the cultural and political ramifications of his subject. His nineteenth century space program is the result of the armaments industry in the US trying to cope with the end of the Civil War. They need a new goal to justify their role in a time of peace. The exact same scenario played out after World War II, when advances in rocketry were achieved by Werner von Braun and others who had been closely involved in weapons production. So Verne not only predicted many of the specifics of space travel, but also must be seen as one of the first to call attention to what was later dubbed the “military-industrial complex.”