Historians of science are now more concerned than ever before with popular science, both its production and its dissemination, as well with how it has differed from elite science. In Willy Ley: Prophet of the Space Age, Jared S. Buss examines the career of one of the leading writers of popular science in the twentieth century, who also, Buss argues, was prominent in the rise of science journalism in the United States.

Ley was born in Berlin in 1906. The young Ley was attracted to stories and works that presented scientists as adventurers who strode fearlessly into the unknown as ‘humanity's advance guard’ (p. 17). He was especially fond of Kurd Lasswitz's 1897 Auf zwei Planeten. Lasswitz's novel at its heart is an analysis of European imperialism via a fantasy about an encounter with Martians who visit the Earth. But what Ley found most compelling was the way the Martians travelled, as Lasswitz described rocket launches and flying through space.

Ley was captivated by the prospects for space flight. He also eagerly read about all sorts of science and visited zoological gardens, museums and observatories. Ley hoped for a professional career in science, but in the turmoil of post-war Germany that proved impossible. Instead, he turned to writing.

His first book was Journey into Space, published in 1926. In sixty-eight pages Ley covered, among other things, the theories of space flight of the rocketry pioneer Hermann Oberth, the basics of rocketry and space travel and the possibility of extraterrestrial life. The following year, Ley joined the newly founded German Rocket Society, also known as the Society for Space Travel. He wrote enthusiastically, too, about natural history. In 1927, for example, he published The Book of Dragons, in which he explored the worlds of dinosaurs, reptiles and amphibians.

Ley was briefly a member of the National Socialist German Workers Party, but by the early 1930s he was deeply troubled by the political situation internationally as well as in Germany. By 1934, he was, moreover, out of a job. Ley had been the chief publicist of the space flight movement in Germany. But in 1934 the Propaganda Ministry imposed strict censorship on public discussions of rocketry as the German military was now actively promoting rockets for war.

Ley plotted to leave Germany. He used his contacts among American rocketry devotees to flee to the United States in 1935, where he carved out a living as a freelance writer. For much of his first fifteen or so years in the US, Ley pumped out books as well as articles, mainly for pulp magazines such as Astounding and Thrilling Wonder Stories. In doing so, he lauded science as the driving force of universal progress and celebrated scientific heroes engaged in stirring journeys of discovery; that is, he penned stories of just the sort the young Ley would have enjoyed.

He wrote most extensively on rockets and space travel. One of Ley's most successful books was Rockets, Missiles and Space Travel, first published in 1944. It went through twenty-one editions, was published in numerous languages, and over the years grew from 271 to 557 pages in length.

In 1944, Germany launched the first V-2 rockets at London, Antwerp and Paris. At war's end, many of the engineers involved in the V-2 programme, most notably Wernher von Braun, entered the United States. Ley had known von Braun from the days of the Society for Space Travel. Von Braun and other rocket engineers explained to Ley what had happened in Germany between 1933 and 1945. In time, as space flight became a topic of rapidly growing interest to the US public with the onset of the ‘space race’, Ley became in effect a sort of public spokesman for this group. Ley, however, had been fed bowdlerized accounts of the German rocket programme that left out the brutality and inhumanity of the treatment of the slave labourers forced to build both the rockets and the construction facilities. Thousands died in the process.

Buss makes clear that it was not only through his writings and interviews that Ley exerted influence. The director Fritz Lang credited Ley as the inspiration for Lang's famous 1929 film Frau im Mond. Although Ley had little direct role in the 1950 Destination Moon, Hollywood's big launch into space travel, the chief technical adviser, science fiction author Robert Heinlein, used Ley's Rockets, Missiles and Space Travel as a reference text. Ley was, however, the principal adviser for Tom Corbett, Space Cadet, a television series that premiered in 1950 and ran on the CBS network just before the main evening news broadcast. It became one of the longest-running shows of the era. Airing three times a week, it featured the adventures of a space cadet and his crew in 2350 as they toured the solar system. Among other things, Ley reviewed the ideas of the shows’ writers to check if they were scientifically plausible.

For the first in-depth work on Ley's career, Buss has crafted an absorbing, well-researched and carefully contextualized study. He makes a convincing case that Ley was not just a famous rocket expert, but a publicist of space flight, a ‘showman of the space age’ (p. 8) and someone who, through his writing, put himself at the centre of the scientific enterprise.