Rocket man: Willy Ley’s fervour helped put men on the moon

Michael Doser — Wed, 27 Sep 2017 18:00:00 +0000

Willy Ley spanned the gap between equations and aspirations

Bettmann/Getty

ROMANTICS have long dreamed of flying to the moon, but few lobbied as relentlessly for the technological advances that would allow us to reach outer space as Willy Ley.

He was a largely self-educated, technically savvy polymath, a great communicator and writer of successful pulp science fiction. From the start, his vision was of a fully fledged space age, but after fleeing Nazi Germany for the US, he drifted at the fringes of real technical work.

He was also a visionary, garnering popular support through aspirational narratives that bridged the chasm between the cold equations of space flight and its romantic possibilities. Over time, Ley has been eclipsed by better-known actors such as Wernher von Braun (whom he knew well) and Isaac Asimov. Now a fascinating new biography by Jared Buss restores him as a central figure in the history of rocketry and its popularisation.

Ley’s role was complex, and his life took an intriguing and meandering path through many of the 20th century’s key events: the rise of airborne technology after the first world war; rocketry’s beginnings; the Nazis’ ascent; the cold war; the popularisation of the idea of space travel; and, finally, as apotheosis, the first moon landing, which occurred mere weeks after his death.

Ley’s prodigious output reflected the two sides of his character. As a public speaker and a writer for magazines such as Popular Mechanics and Amazing Stories, he romanticised the natural world, and gloried in the idea of brave explorers setting off into an unknown that awed and fascinated him. At the same time, his expertise and attachment to hard facts when discussing, for example, the technical details of weapons, revealed a man with hard-nosed engineering instincts.

Those instincts were hampered by a lack of technical education – he studied astronomy, zoology, physics and palaeontology at the University of Berlin. His wide-ranging curiosity never found its academic niche, and his ideas on the history of science remained those of autodidact and outsider.

Buffeted by the currents of contemporary politics, he was often frustrated by his failed attempts to kick-start or be involved in research on rocket engines. But Ley was always driven by a greater vision, which went beyond the bid for outer space. There is a wistfulness about his strenuously argued belief that education and critical reasoning are the source of democracy and progress. The reality was more complex, as Sputnik showed.

“Ley was always driven by a greater vision, which went beyond the bid for outer space”

While close to the main actors, but excluded from contributing technically to the development of rockets, Ley settled on the role of proselytiser, fearlessly (or maybe shamelessly) preaching from all possible pulpits: television, radio and print media, but also via toy companies and Walt Disney, as a consultant for “Tomorrowland” in Disneyland in the 1950s.

He remained a public figure to the last, though his views became visibly dated as the heroic space narratives of the 1940s and 1950s, powered by an unbounded belief in technology, were replaced by more measured and critical views.

Buss’s book has weaknesses, particularly in its earlier chapters. Short repeated sentences, clichéd expressions and overly detailed recountings of the plots of several of Ley’s stories add to a sense of meandering. Some incorrectly spelled German text also suggests a lack of basic editorial checks.

More surprisingly for the work of a historian, the book, at least to start with, spins its tale from a thin set of sources, relying often on speculation rather than facts. Buss is happy to distance himself from Ley’s world view and his reminiscences of the intellectual climate and rise of pseudoscience in Nazi Germany, but he doesn’t offer the reader enough historical context to understand how those views might have taken hold.

In an odd way, Ley saves the book from beyond the grave, as it were. His indefatigable vision of space flight as part of humanity’s next step into the cosmos, his optimism about the future and conviction that science is the key to bettering humankind are compelling values. Caught up in Ley’s enthusiasm, the reader is almost tempted to consider them timeless.

Jared S. Buss

University of Florida Press

This article appeared in print under the headline “A rocket man”

1970s science follies look groovy in a new light

Michael Doser — Wed, 20 Jul 2016 18:00:00 +0000

A good idea at the time? John Lilly’s attempt to talk to dolphins

Bill Curtsinger/National Geographic Creative

IT HAPPENED before, of course. At the end of the 19th century, Victorian spiritualists challenged the strictures of science, driven by the hope of establishing a richer fabric of reality. The leavings of that movement – N-rays, mitogenetic rays, Joseph Banks Rhine’s newly minted extrasensory perception, and many others – are patently pathological, but all, in the first heady days, represented legitimate pathways of enquiry. At least as much can be claimed for the “groovy science” that held sway a generation later. Think of John Lilly’s attempt to communicate with dolphins (with its obligatory diversion through LSD), the parapsychology studies of physicist Peter Phillips, and Immanuel Velikovsky’s “catastrophism”. This, at any rate, is the argument of Groovy Science, though the task of evaluating the intellectual and cultural worth of these escapades is anything but easy. While the military-industrial complex is entertaining (and funding) experiments in sensory deprivation, dolphin training and space colonisation, we may as well abandon any attempt to distinguish between the establishment and its counterculture. Indeed, look hard and you will find that there is no counterculture – only a loose overlapping of opposed subgroups, each with its own expectations, each interacting rather warily with the others. Psychologist Abraham Maslow lectured at Esalen, a retreat in Big Sur, California, but kept away from the New Age movement that Esalen spawned; psychedelia’s champion Timothy Leary and space-colonisation prophet Gerard K. O’Neill shared almost nothing beyond their avid readership. The explorations and experiments discussed here hardly rivalled the mainstream breakthroughs of the time (recombinant DNA, the quark model, the creation of buckminsterfullerene) – but their prevailing ethic of curiosity and iconoclasm had a historical influence that this volume, unexpectedly, sells rather short. There is, to pick the most glaring example, no discussion of the homebrew computing scene, which appeared in the early 1970s and led to the development of the personal computer.

“We may as well abandon the distinction between the science establishment and its counterculture“

Less obvious, but equally odd, is the way the book satirises the picture of the scientist as “a white-coated man in a laboratory, bald, tired, and unfit to marry”, but then singularly fails to celebrate very many non-white non-males. Yes, there are cameos about natural childbirth and cheesemaking, but given the huge societal changes taking place at the time – the women’s liberation movement, the Black Panthers, Stonewall – I expected more. If these huge segments of society were really not involved in “groovy science”, their wholesale absence might well be the subject for another, as-yet-unwritten book. Reading Groovy Science leaves the reader enthused, but daunted at the work still to be done. The authors’ chosen focus on the US leaves whole traditions of “groovy science” unexamined. (Explorers Thor Heyerdahl and Michel Siffre are conspicuous by their absence.) This compendium of individual scholarly articles is a trove of information, and the references are useful and exhaustive. But the prose of several of these pieces wobbles uncertainly between the academic and the popular, as if a community of scholars was not quite ready to distil its research into a mainstream account. That account is, for my money, well worth looking forward to. In the meantime, we have this frustrating but always enthralling archaeological travel guide to an epoch that, although only 40 years old, already feels like an alien continent.

Edited by David Kaiser and W. Patrick McCray

University of Chicago Press

This article appeared in print under the headline “Revolutionary, and wrong”

Michael Doser, Author at New �Ӱ�ԭ��

Rocket man: Willy Ley’s fervour helped put men on the moon

1970s science follies look groovy in a new light