page_title: Willy Ley
section_title: In the United States
hierarchical_section_title: Willy Ley / In the United States
caption_attribution_description: English: Cover of Galaxy, April 1956
context_page_description: Willy Otto Oskar Ley was a German-American science writer and proponent of cryptozoology. The crater Ley on the far side of the Moon is named in his honor.
context_section_description: 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.  In the February 1937 issue of that same magazine, he had published a science fiction short story "At the Perihelion" under the pseudonym Robert Wiley, which was later reprinted as "A Martian Adventure" in the 1962 anthology Great Science Fiction by Scientists (Collier Books, Groff Conklin, ed.). He was a member of science fiction fandom as well, attending science fiction conventions, and was eventually a Guest of Honor at Philcon II, the 1953 World Science Fiction Convention.
  In 1940 Ley joined the staff of PM.  In the winter of 1941 he met the paper's fitness columnist and model, Olga Feldmann (1912–2001).  They became engaged on December 11 and married on Christmas Eve.
  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 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.
caption: Ley's "Let's Build an Extraterrestrial!" took the cover of the April 1956, issue of Galaxy, illustrated by Ed Emshwiller
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