Willy Ley Was a Prophet of Space Travel. His Ashes Were Found in a Basement.

Summary

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 visionaryWilly 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...