Willy Ley was a prophet of space travel
10 comments
·April 22, 2025Stratoscope
Willy Ley was my childhood hero. His books about space travel invigorated my young mind and imagination.
I even talked my parents into taking me to a space convention where he signed my copy of The Conquest of Space, with illustrations by the great Chesley Bonestell. I wish I still had that book!
RIP, Willy
JKCalhoun
His "Rockets, Missiles & Men in Space" [1] is still one of the most approachable (and interesting) history of rocketry and manned space flight.
CamperBob2
My favorite Willy Ley quote:
When things get so tough that there seems to be no way out, the Russian embraces the vodka bottle, the Frenchman a woman, and the American the Bible. The German tends to resort to magic.
It's not especially complimentary in context, though (page 72): https://epizodyspace.ru/bibl/inostr-yazyki/Buss_Willy_Ley_Pr...
8bitsrule
As a kid, one of my 'proudest possessions' was a copy of an edition of'Conquest of Space'. And those illustrations! However he got hooked up with Bonestell, it was a match made in the heavens.
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PaulHoule
Loved his book "Rockets, Missiles and Men in Space"
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.161.3844.874
which had a great description of the activities of his rocket club while the Nazis were closing in. At some point the police shut them down because "somebody might get hurt" but somebody from the rocket club convinced the authorities that this was a feature and not a bug and pretty soon they were spirited away to
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usedom
and the rest was history. Increasingly though my favorite prophet of the space age is
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Konstantin_Tsiolkovsky
because he figured out pretty much everything about space travel based on the kinetic theory of gases and the conservation of momentum and energy without building a single piece of hardware.
southernplaces7
You've taken me down a bit of a rabbit hole, thanks for that.
I've always been impressed by Robert Goddard and his advanced (for the time) work on rocketry, which was little appreciated by many of his contemporaries, except, it's suspected, secretly by select people from within Nazi Germany who used it to advance their V programs.
However, of Tsiolkovsky, I didn't know anything at all, and what he imagined and then actually modeled with remarkable precision and accuracy is downright incredible, all the more for this being done in the 19th fucking century. If even Goddard wasn't appreciated in the 20s and 30s, it's no wonder that nobody had a clue about what to make of Tsiolkovsky's work until much later in his life and afterwards, and just ignored so much of it for so long.
danielschreber
"Beyond the Solar System", about interstellar travel, came out in 1964.
Gift link: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/21/nyregion/willy-ley-rocket...