The basement of the prewar co-op on the Upper West Side was so cluttered and dark in one area that the staff called it “the Dungeon,” and last year, the building’s new superintendent resolved to clear it out.
For weeks, he hauled the junk left behind by former tenants — old air-conditioners, cans of paint, ancient elevator parts and rolled-up carpets — through the winding hallway with its low ceilings to the dumpster out back.
About halfway through the job, he spied an old tin can on a shelf next to a leaf blower. He read the label:
“Remains of Willy Ley. Cremated June 26, 1969.”
This was not the sort of thing you toss in a dumpster.
The super brought his discovery to the co-op board president, Dawn Nadeau. She had plenty of co-op business to attend to — a lobby renovation, a roof replacement — but the disposition of someone’s ashes was new to her.
“We needed to handle the remains as respectfully as possible,” said Ms. Nadeau, a brand consultant. “So I set out trying to figure who this was and who it belonged to.”
She scoured records and found no references to anyone named Ley ever having lived in the building on 67th Street. Nor did calls to the crematory listed on the urn and the funeral home that had held Mr. Ley’s memorial service turn up any information.
But then she Googled his name and his date of death and was stunned by what she learned. The remains belonged to a man once hailed as “the prophet of the space age” — a science writer who had foreseen humanity’s first journeys beyond Earth.
A rocket ship visionary
Willy Ley was born in Germany in 1906, grew up during the First World War and studied at the Universities of Berlin and Königsberg. Though it would be decades before the first man was launched into orbit, Mr. Ley was convinced from an early age that space travel was within reach.
As a 20-year-old student in 1926, Mr. Ley wrote his first book, “A Trip Into Space,” which explained to the general public the concept and potential of spaceflight and rocketry. In 1927, he helped establish the “Society for Space Travel,” the purpose of which, he said, was “to spread the thought that the planets were within reach of humanity, if humanity was only willing to struggle a bit for that goal.”
He recruited a young Wernher von Braun — the rocket and aerospace pioneer — to join the Society, beginning the first of many collaborations between the two men.
In Berlin in 1930, Mr. Ley introduced a liquid-fuel rocket to a group of aeronautical engineers.
“It stood about 5 feet tall and, even when fueled, was light enough to be lifted with one hand. It could climb about 1500 feet and was brought back by parachute,” Mr. Ley recalled in a 1968 article he wrote for The New York Times. “What, the engineers wanted to know, was the aim of all of this? Eventually, I replied, rockets of this type will carry men to the moon.”
The rise of the Nazi party disturbed Mr. Ley deeply, and in 1935, worried about the weaponization of rockets by the government, he fled Germany. Eventually, he ended up in Queens.
In New York, he made a living primarily as a science writer, churning out articles and books, including “Rockets: The Future of Travel Beyond the Stratosphere” in 1944. In it, Mr. Ley reiterated his belief in the possibility of space travel: “I wish to affirm with great seriousness that the rocket to the moon is possible,” he wrote. “Whether it has any practical value is another question and whether the experiment will be made is another story altogether.”
Jared S. Buss, the author of the 2017 biography “Willy Ley: Prophet of the Space Age,” called Mr. Ley one of the architects of that era — a major player in America’s early attempts at space exploration. “In the late ’50s when Sputnik was launched, he was the person journalists turned to as an expert,” Mr. Buss said in an interview.
In 1951, Mr. Ley participated in the first symposium on space travel, said the astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, the director of the American Museum of Natural History’s Hayden Planetarium.
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 Gagarin did just that, becoming the first man in space. Taking off from what is now Kazakhstan, he flew eastward around the earth and landed in the Saratov region of Russia after 108 minutes in orbit.
As the space race mounted, Mr. Ley continued to publish books and articles that translated complex astrophysics and rocketry concepts for a broader audience. His work was cited by Congress, and many of his then-outlandish predictions — an undersea tunnel between Britain and France, the rise of commercial solar and wind power — have since been realized. Walt Disney hired him as a consultant any time a rocket ship or space ride was being built at Disneyland.
He spent the rest of his life living in Jackson Heights, Queens, with his wife, Olga, and two daughters. He wrote hundreds of articles and dozens of books, inspiring countless future scientists and even astronauts.
“I think all of the Apollo astronauts felt that they owed a debt of gratitude to Willy Ley and the teams that laid this out, that they were going as representatives of humanity,” said Carter Emmart, the director of astrovisualization at the American Museum of Natural History.
On June 24, 1969, as he was preparing to travel to Houston to be NASA’s guest during the launch of Apollo 11, Mr. Ley died of a heart attack in Queens. On July 16, the historic spaceflight blasted off from Cape Canaveral with three astronauts: Buzz Aldrin, Neil Armstrong and Michael Collins. By the time Mr. Armstrong took his giant leap, all that was left of the man who had foreseen it was ashes.
A few months later, an editorial in the magazine Popular Mechanics mourned Mr. Ley’s loss: “The man who persuaded the world, Americans in particular, that man could go to the moon missed seeing his prophecy come true by three and one-half weeks.”
On the far side of the moon, a crater was named in his honor. On earth, he would be consigned to a basement, forgotten in a can.
An ideal resting place
Mr. Ley has no living descendants. His younger sister, his wife, his daughters and his granddaughter are all deceased, so at first it was difficult for Ms. Nadeau to confirm that the ashes were definitely his.
But a deeper dive into files of the United States Columbarium, now called Fresh Pond Crematory in Middle Village, N.Y., verified that the identification number on the can, 136874, was indeed a match to Willy Ley. The paperwork lists the age of the deceased as 62, his nearest of kin as Olga Ley and his occupation as “space scientist.”
Before the ashes were found, Ms. Nadeau hadn’t thought much about space travel — between her job, volunteering, the co-op board and raising two teenagers, there was plenty to keep her busy on earth. Now, she thinks about it all the time.
Ms. Nadeau discussed the discovery with her daughters, Abigail and Julia. It was of particular interest to Julia, a molecular engineering student at the University of Chicago who attended a space camp when she was 12. After the conversation, Ms. Nadeau was determined to do right by Mr. Ley.
“I thought, we might not ever know how he got here, but we can at least make sure he ends up in the right place,” she said.
She sought out people who would have ideas for an appropriate final resting place. Margaret A. Weitekamp, the curator and chair of the space history department at the National Air and Space Museum, suggested she contact the Explorers Club in New York or the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics. But then Ms. Nadeau found the Popular Mechanics editorial, and the answer was there in black and white:
“Popular Mechanics thinks it would be fitting and proper to honor this great man by scattering his ashes on the moon.”
“When I read that, I knew we had to somehow get him into space,” Ms. Nadeau said. Mr. Ley, after years in the basement, should spend the rest of eternity among the stars.
Mr. Buss, the biographer, agreed: “If this container is authentic, it deserves to go into space,” he said, wondering idly whether Elon Musk’s SpaceX company might take up the cause.
Ms. Nadeau now has her own space mission, and it is not clear how or whether she will complete it. She found a company that said it would send the ashes into space, but the average cost listed on its website was a prohibitive $12,500.
For now, the can that holds what’s left of Mr. Ley’s earthly body is still in the co-op, tucked away in the workshop of the superintendent, Michael Hrdlovic, who first discovered it in the basement.
“I think about this person’s whole life; no matter who they are or what they accomplished, it’s an important life and now they are here in this can,” Mr. Hrdlovic said.
He held it in two hands, the old can, about the size of a gallon of paint. Inside, what’s left of Willy Ley is, even now, hurtling again and again around the sun.
The post He Was a Prophet of Space Travel. His Ashes Were Found in a Basement. appeared first on New York Times.
