Remembering Willie Ley
Remembering Willie Ley. He never flew in space, and died just weeks before the Apollo 11 landing. Yet he probably did as much if not more to make it happen than any other man.
On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.
The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.
The audiobook is also available at all these vendors, and is also free with a 30-day trial membership to Audible.
"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News
Remembering Willie Ley. He never flew in space, and died just weeks before the Apollo 11 landing. Yet he probably did as much if not more to make it happen than any other man.
On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.
The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.
The audiobook is also available at all these vendors, and is also free with a 30-day trial membership to Audible.
"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News
I was researching an article last year that touched on early concepts of spaceflight (as in hundreds of years ago, before anyone had any realistic idea on how it could be done), and of course quickly discovered that Willy Ley had already thoroughly mapped that territory. His book ROCKETS, MISSILES AND SAPCE TRAVEL covers the subject in detail. Not only that, Ley was a consultant for Disney’s MAN IN SPACE TV documentary (1955), he and (if I recall correctly) the above book appear on camera, and it’s pretty obvious that the amusing cartoons in the show depicting naive early ideas about space travel were based on what he had written in said selfsame above book. He also wrote a popular science column for the science-fiction magazine GALAXY, and the columns were later collected in book form. They cover a wide range of subjects, and with his European background, Ley could tap otherwise obscure references in strange languages that American writers would have missed. All these years later I still find his books informative and valuable, and behind the slightly Germanic prose I get a sense of a brilliant man eager to learn new things and just as eager to share what he found out with you. I don’t think there’s anyone quite like him around now…