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If your a boomer who grew up learning about the future of space travel in books and on television in the 50's & 60's studied and dreamed along with Wiley Ley. I hope one day to restore this 16mm film short, but I know you'll enjoy it now.


Notes: Willy Otto Oskar Ley grew up in his native Berlin during the First World War later recalled he "grew up, so to speak, in the shadow of the Museum of Natural History in Berlin". When his school teacher asked him to compose an essay on the subject "What Do I Want to Be When I Am Grown and Why?", Ley responded: "I want to be an explorer."

The "rocketry fad" culminated with Fritz Lang's 1929 film Die Frau im Mond (Woman in the Moon), which became the first realistic depiction of spaceflight in cinematic history. Although Oberth is often credited as the main technical consultant to the film, Ley's role was of central importance. Oberth was tasked with building a small rocket to be launched at the film's premiere.

This project never materialized. However, Ley's work on the movie did. As director Fritz Lang later recalled, "The work he had done as consultant and advisor ... was amazing. The models of the spaceship, really a highly advanced model of a rocket, the trajectories and the orbits of the modular capsule from the earth, around the earth and to the moon and back ... were so accurate that in 1937 the Gestapo confiscated not only all models of the spaceship but also all foreign prints of the picture."

Despite the many successes the "rocketry fad" could not be sustained during the early years of the Great Depression. The German public lost interest amidst economic turmoil. Meanwhile, rocket researchers, such as Rudolf Nebel, formed closer ties with the military, which greatly expanded under the leadership of Wernher von Braun.

In 1936, he supervised operations of two rocket planes carrying mail at Greenwood Lake, NY.[ Ley was an avid reader of science fiction, and began publishing scientific articles in American science fiction magazines, beginning with "The Dawn of the Conquest of Space" in the March 1937 issue of Astounding Stories.

His book Rockets – the Future of Travel Beyond the Stratosphere (1944) describes the early rockets at VfR and more futuristic projects to reach the moon using a 3-stage rocket "as high as 1/3 of the Empire State Building" – a very good estimate of the height of the Saturn V rocket designed 20 years later. His works from the 1950s and '60s are regarded as classics of popular science and include The Conquest of Space 1949 (with Chesley Bonestell),

The Conquest of the Moon (with Wernher von Braun and Fred Whipple, 1953), and Beyond the Solar System (1964). His book, Rockets, Missiles, and Space Travel, (1957) was cited in the Space Handbook: Astronautics and its Applications, a staff report of the Select Committee on Astronautics and Space Exploration of the U.S. House of Representatives, which provided non-technical information about spaceflight to U.S. policy makers.

Ley had a regular science column called "For Your Information" in Galaxy Science Fiction from March 1952[16] until his death. Ley participated in "Man in Space", a 1955 episode of Disneyland which explained spaceflight to a large television audience. Fellow Galaxy columnist Floyd C. Gale wrote that Ley "has become as familiar to TV audiences as Howdy Doody".

In the late 1950s, he designed for Monogram models a range of space vehicles. The kits included informational booklets on space travel written by Ley.

He also consulted for the Tom Corbett, Space Cadet series of children's science fiction books and TV series, as well as the 1959 feature film entitled "The Space Explorers." Robert A. Heinlein honored him by mentioning a future "Leyport" on the Moon in his 1952 juvenile novel The Rolling Stones. Likewise and long after his death, Larry Niven and Steven Barnes named a future space shuttle the “Willy Ley” in their 1982 novel The Descent of Anansi.

In 1954, Ley wrote Engineers' Dreams in which he discussed 'Seven Future Wonders of the World'. These included accurate predictions of the Channel Tunnel between Britain and France and commercial wind, solar and geothermal power. Other schemes were less practical: damming the River Jordan to provide power and irrigation to Israel/Palestine and the plans of fellow German Herman Sörgel to drain the Mediterranean to link Europe with Africa and create the new continent of Atlantropa.

He was a member of the all-male literary banqueting club the Trap Door Spiders, which served as the basis of Isaac Asimov's fictional group of mystery solvers the Black Widowers.

Ley died at the age of 62 on June 24, 1969 – less than a month before men first landed on the Moon – in his home in Jackson Heights, Queens, where he had lived with his family since the mid-1950s. (information from Wikipedia)


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