From the Earth to the Moon, by Jules Verne

Jules Verne's From the Earth to the Moon is remarkable in its accurate predictions of what would happen 104 years later. He correctly forecast:

• the nation which would send Man to the Moon many decades before it became a dominant world power
• the state from which the expedition would launch,
• the latitude from which it would launch to an astounding precision of 20 miles,
• the length of the trip there (between 3 and 4 days)
• the number of astronauts that would make the trip (3)
• the order of magnitude of the cost: Verne said the program launched with an initial investment of USD$5.5M, which, 100 years later, would have been approximately $218M. The Apollo 11 Mission cost 355 Million dollars in 1969, 104 years after Verne's estimate during the American Civil War.
• that the trip to the Moon would come on the heels of advances in the understanding of projectiles following a war.
• that Texas would compete for the launch site and lose. Apparently this is exactly what happened in reality, and so Houston got the control center.

I won't count the name of the spaceship, which he also got right, since that was an influence of his, not a prediction, as the Columbia lunar module was named in homage to Verne's Columbiad. It's astounding.

Verne also captured America's entrepreneurship:

"Cuando un americano tiene un proyecto, pronto encuentra otro americano dispuesto a secundarle; en cuanto hay tres que se ponen de acuerdo, nombran un presidente y dos secretarios; si llegan a cuatro, eligen un archivero y, al conseguir un nuevo adepto, convocan una junta general y queda, definitivamente, constituida una sociedad o compañía." -Jules Verne, De la Tierra a la Luna, 1865. Lo notable es que Verne caracteriza tan brillantemente el espíritu emprendedor que se convertiría en el motor del progreso americano ante de jamás haber visitado América.