Willy Ley (1906-1969) was a German-American rocket engineer, science writer, and popularizer who played a central role in 20th-century astronautics. A co-founder of the Berlin Verein für Raumschiffahrt (VfR) in 1927 alongside Hermann Oberth, Wernher von Braun, and other pioneers, he took part in the earliest German rocket experiments. He left Nazi Germany in 1935 for the United States, where he naturalized and built a prolific career as a science journalist, technical advisor, and author. His books, Rockets (1944), The Conquest of Space (1949, with Bonestell) and Beyond the Solar System (1964), powerfully shaped the pre-Sputnik American imagination of spaceflight and made him America's leading popular spokesman for space. He died in New York in June 1969, weeks before the Apollo 11 landing.