Jules Verne was a XIXth century French classic writer and the founder of the science fiction genre in literature. He lived in a time of great scientific discoveries and the rapid development of science. Was it possible not to start imagining and thinking about what else could scientist discover? In what field will the next breakthrough happen? More and more new questions gave rise to more and more new ideas, inspiring both scientific minds and writers, whose creative horizons opened up.

Literature popularized science through acquaintance with scientific achievements. So science was no longer a privilege only for the scientific community. Space has worried the imagination of humanity from the dawn of time. Numerous astronomical observations, development of more and more powerful telescopes, space exploration programs testify to this. If distant planets like Jupiter, Neptune, Pluto are difficult to explore, the Moon, as the closest object to Earth, on the contrary, doesn’t seem to be an unattainable goal. The 1856 novel "From the Earth to the Moon" brings up a serious issue of the first possible flight to the Earth's satellite. Despite the fact that the novel was written in the mid – XIXth century, every line in it echoes to modern lunar exploration missions. Mr. Verne came up with a flying machine for his characters that would take them to the Moon. He described how his characters would have to breathe in this machine, what power of the shot should have to be to fly away from Earth, and even how characters would stay alive after the Columbiad shot. The description of the flying machine is very naive, and the calculations are full of flaws, but the idea itself was right and served as the basis for future research and calculations in cosmic area of knowledge. Unlike his predecessors: Cyrano de Bergerac and Edgar Poe, whose characters magically got to the Moon, Jules Verne was the first to deeply and seriously use innovatory scientific knowledge to create the plot of his book.

In modern cosmonautics, the ideas of launching people to the Moon, described by Jules Verne, were reflected in the concepts of the space gun and the Lofstrom’s launch loop. The use of a railgun makes such an idea quite feasible, and in 1969, a humankind first touched the lunar surface – fiction became a reality. Lunar missions continue up to this day, humanity strives to explore and conquer space – until recently an inaccessible space.

Чичерина Ксения,

студентка группы 0454-04ан направления 45.03.02 «Лингвистика», профиль «Иностранный язык и иностранный язык (английский / немецкий)»

Факультета русской филологии и иностранных языков Института гуманитарных наук и языковых коммуникаций

Федерального государственного бюджетного образовательного учреждения высшего образования «Псковский государственный университет»