Willy Ley was a prophet of space travel

That symposium and the annual meetings that followed “led to a series of articles, including many cover stories from 1952 to 1954, that became the public’s first exposure and awareness of a possible future in space,” Dr. Tyson said. In a very real sense, Willy Ley helped introduce the notion of space travel to the American public. In a 1952 article in Galaxy Science Fiction magazine he predicted what the first manned spacecraft would look like, almost a decade before it happened: The voyage of the first spaceship, as I have repeatedly said, will go literally nowhere. It will be a vertical takeoff from base, followed by a tilt in an easterly direction so that the ship will travel along the ellipse around the Earth. The captain will stay “up” until all the service tests have been completed, the observing program carried out, or until everybody aboard is thoroughly bored. Then he’ll land again, trying to make it as close to base as he can. Nearly nine years later, in April 1961, Yuri ... Read full article.