Willy Ley was a prophet of space travel
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
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
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...
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.
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.