Scientist and writer, Willy Ley was born in Berlin, Germany in 1906. Originally studying a number of sciences including geology, paleontology, astronomy, and physics at universities in Berlin and Konigsberg, he became fascinated with rocketry in the mid-1920s. He was one of the founders of the German Rocket Society, and was friend and mentor to Werner von Braun. Helping design, build, and fire some of the first liquid-fuel rockets made him one of the most important members of early rocket research in Germany. He left for America in 1935 when the Nazi party started using rocketry for military applications, and became an American citizen in 1944. In the United States, he wrote about a wide variety of scientific subjects, but is most noted for his fiction and non-fiction work regarding space travel, including his 1949 book Conquest of Space. He also found work as a valuable adviser to Walt Disney and the Tom Corbett series, among others. He died in 1969, shortly before the launch of the Apollo 11 mission, and a collection of his jounals can be found at the University of Alabama at Huntsville.