WILLY LEY: PROPHET OF THE SPACE AGE.

AuthorDoherty, Brian
PositionBOOK - Brief article - Book review

Willy Ley was an early mover and shaker in the 1920s German Rocket Society. After emigrating to the U.S. in 1935. he became the most enthusiastic and most-heard public voice promoting rocketry and the exploration it would enable. Against the inclinations of nationalists both German and American. Ley pushed an open, international brotherhood of rocket scientists to speed up what he saw as a transcendent accomplishment for the human race: to promote rockets for space travel and not war. Willey Ley: Prophet of the Space Age (University Press of Florida), by the historian Jared S. Buss, is his first academic bio.

Ley's rocket education and advocacy operated on every level of American culture, from department store displays to cereal boxes, from leftist newspapers to MIT journals, from Disneyland to the Chicago Sun-Times, from Tom Corbett, Space Cadet to erudite historical texts. His willingness to be populist was key to why no less an...

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