ROMANTICS have long dreamed of flying to the moon, but few lobbied as relentlessly for the technological advances that would allow us to reach outer space as Willy Ley.

He was a largely self-educated, technically savvy polymath, a great communicator and writer of successful pulp science fiction. From the start, his vision was of a fully fledged space age, but after fleeing Nazi Germany for the US, he drifted at the fringes of real technical work.

He was also a visionary, garnering popular support through aspirational narratives that bridged the chasm between the cold equations of space flight and its romantic possibilities. Over time, Ley has been eclipsed by better-known actors such as Wernher von Braun (whom he knew well) and Isaac Asimov. Now a fascinating new biography by Jared Buss restores him as a central figure in the history of rocketry and its popularisation.

Ley鈥檚 role was complex, and his life took an intriguing and meandering path through many of the 20th century鈥檚 key events: the rise of airborne technology after the first world war; rocketry鈥檚 beginnings; the Nazis鈥� ascent; the cold war; the popularisation of the idea of space travel; and, finally, as apotheosis, the first moon landing, which occurred mere weeks after his death.

Ley鈥檚 prodigious output reflected the two sides of his character. As a public speaker and a writer for magazines such as Popular Mechanics and Amazing Stories, he romanticised the natural world, and gloried in the idea of brave explorers setting off into an unknown that awed and fascinated him. At the same time, his expertise and attachment to hard facts when discussing, for example, the technical details of weapons, revealed a man with hard-nosed engineering instincts.

Those instincts were hampered by a lack of technical education 鈥� he studied astronomy, zoology, physics and palaeontology at the University of Berlin. His wide-ranging curiosity never found its academic niche, and his ideas on the history of science remained those of autodidact and outsider.

Buffeted by the currents of contemporary politics, he was often frustrated by his failed attempts to kick-start or be involved in research on rocket engines. But Ley was always driven by a greater vision, which went beyond the bid for outer space. There is a wistfulness about his strenuously argued belief that education and critical reasoning are the source of democracy and progress. The reality was more complex, as Sputnik showed.

鈥淟ey was always driven by a greater vision, which went beyond the bid for outer space鈥�

While close to the main actors, but excluded from contributing technically to the development of rockets, Ley settled on the role of proselytiser, fearlessly (or maybe shamelessly) preaching from all possible pulpits: television, radio and print media, but also via toy companies and Walt Disney, as a consultant for 鈥淭omorrowland鈥� in Disneyland in the 1950s.

He remained a public figure to the last, though his views became visibly dated as the heroic space narratives of the 1940s and 1950s, powered by an unbounded belief in technology, were replaced by more measured and critical views.

Buss鈥檚 book has weaknesses, particularly in its earlier chapters. Short repeated sentences, clich茅d expressions and overly detailed recountings of the plots of several of Ley鈥檚 stories add to a sense of meandering. Some incorrectly spelled German text also suggests a lack of basic editorial checks.

More surprisingly for the work of a historian, the book, at least to start with, spins its tale from a thin set of sources, relying often on speculation rather than facts. Buss is happy to distance himself from Ley鈥檚 world view and his reminiscences of the intellectual climate and rise of pseudoscience in Nazi Germany, but he doesn鈥檛 offer the reader enough historical context to understand how those views might have taken hold.

In an odd way, Ley saves the book from beyond the grave, as it were. His indefatigable vision of space flight as part of humanity鈥檚 next step into the cosmos, his optimism about the future and conviction that science is the key to bettering humankind are compelling values. Caught up in Ley鈥檚 enthusiasm, the reader is almost tempted to consider them timeless.

This article appeared in print under the headline 鈥淎 rocket man鈥�

IT HAPPENED before, of course. At the end of the 19th century, Victorian spiritualists challenged the strictures of science, driven by the hope of establishing a richer fabric of reality. The leavings of that movement 鈥� N-rays, mitogenetic rays, Joseph Banks Rhine鈥檚 newly minted extrasensory perception, and many others 鈥� are patently pathological, but all, in the first heady days, represented legitimate pathways of enquiry.

At least as much can be claimed for the 鈥済roovy science鈥� that held sway a generation later. Think of John Lilly鈥檚 attempt to communicate with dolphins (with its obligatory diversion through LSD), the parapsychology studies of physicist Peter Phillips, and Immanuel Velikovsky鈥檚 鈥渃atastrophism鈥�.

This, at any rate, is the argument of Groovy Science, though the task of evaluating the intellectual and cultural worth of these escapades is anything but easy. While the military-industrial complex is entertaining (and funding) experiments in sensory deprivation, dolphin training and space colonisation, we may as well abandon any attempt to distinguish between the establishment and its counterculture. Indeed, look hard and you will find that there is no counterculture 鈥� only a loose overlapping of opposed subgroups, each with its own expectations, each interacting rather warily with the others. Psychologist Abraham Maslow lectured at Esalen, a retreat in Big Sur, California, but kept away from the New Age movement that Esalen spawned; psychedelia鈥檚 champion Timothy Leary and space-colonisation prophet Gerard K. O鈥橬eill shared almost nothing beyond their avid readership.

The explorations and experiments discussed here hardly rivalled the mainstream breakthroughs of the time (recombinant DNA, the quark model, the creation of buckminsterfullerene) 鈥� but their prevailing ethic of curiosity and iconoclasm had a historical influence that this volume, unexpectedly, sells rather short. There is, to pick the most glaring example, no discussion of the homebrew computing scene, which appeared in the early 1970s and led to the development of the personal computer.

鈥淲e may as well abandon the distinction between the science establishment and its counterculture鈥�

Less obvious, but equally odd, is the way the book satirises the picture of the scientist as 鈥渁 white-coated man in a laboratory, bald, tired, and unfit to marry鈥�, but then singularly fails to celebrate very many non-white non-males. Yes, there are cameos about natural childbirth and cheesemaking, but given the huge societal changes taking place at the time 鈥� the women鈥檚 liberation movement, the Black Panthers, Stonewall 鈥� I expected more. If these huge segments of society were really not involved in 鈥済roovy science鈥�, their wholesale absence might well be the subject for another, as-yet-unwritten book.

Reading Groovy Science leaves the reader enthused, but daunted at the work still to be done. The authors鈥� chosen focus on the US leaves whole traditions of 鈥済roovy science鈥� unexamined. (Explorers Thor Heyerdahl and Michel Siffre are conspicuous by their absence.)

This compendium of individual scholarly articles is a trove of information, and the references are useful and exhaustive. But the prose of several of these pieces wobbles uncertainly between the academic and the popular, as if a community of scholars was not quite ready to distil its research into a mainstream account.

That account is, for my money, well worth looking forward to. In the meantime, we have this frustrating but always enthralling archaeological travel guide to an epoch that, although only 40 years old, already feels like an alien continent.

This article appeared in print under the headline 鈥淩evolutionary, and wrong鈥�