Willy Ley

Willy Ley was a German-American science writer and rocketry theorist who became one of the twentieth century's most influential popularizers of spaceflight, translating and explaining the technical work of theorists such as Hermann Oberth for a general audience beginning with a book he wrote at age nineteen. He joined Germany's Verein fur Raumschiffahrt, the Spaceflight Society, in 1927, eventually serving as its vice president and writing extensively for its journal, and in 1929 served as a technical consultant on Fritz Lang's film Woman in the Moon, building spacecraft models and calculating orbital mechanics with enough precision that the Gestapo later confiscated the models and film prints as a security concern. He fled Nazi Germany for the United States in 1935, and his subsequent books, including Rockets: The Future of Travel Beyond the Stratosphere in 1944 and The Conquest of Space in 1949, brought the technical case for spaceflight to a mainstream American audience years before Sputnik, with his later work Rockets, Missiles, and Space Travel cited by congressional committees shaping early American space policy. He died in 1969, weeks before the Apollo 11 Moon landing his writing had helped prepare the public to understand; a lunar crater is named in his honor.