His book "Rockets – the Future of Travel Beyond the Stratosphere" (1944) describes the early rockets at VfR and more futuristic projects to reach the moon using a 3-stage rocket "as high as 1/3 of the Empire State Building" – a very good estimate of the height of the Saturn V rocket designed 20 years later. His works from the 1950s and '60s are regarded as classics of popular science and include "The Conquest of Space" 1949 (with Chesley Bonestell), "The Conquest of the Moon" (with Wernher von Braun and Fred Whipple, 1953), and "Beyond the Solar System" (1964). His book, "Rockets, Missiles, and Space Travel", (1957) was cited in the "Space Handbook: Astronautics and its Applications", a staff report of the Select Committee on Astronautics and Space Exploration of the U.S. House of Representatives, which provided non-technical information about spaceflight to U.S. policy makers. Ley had a regular science column called "For Your Information" in "Galaxy Science Fiction" from March 1952 until his death. Ley participated in "Man in Space", a 1955 episode of "Disneyland" which explained spaceflight to a large television audience. Fellow "Galaxy" columnist Floyd C. Gale wrote that Ley "has become as familiar to TV audiences as Howdy Doody". In the late 1950s, he designed for Monogram models a range of space vehicles. The kits included informational booklets on space travel written by Ley. He also consulted for the Tom Corbett, Space Cadet series of children's science fiction books and TV series, as well as the 1959 feature film entitled "The Space Explorers." Robert A. Heinlein honored him by mentioning a future "Leyport" on the Moon in his 1952 juvenile novel "The Rolling Stones." Likewise and long after his death, Larry Niven and Steven Barnes named a future space shuttle the “Willy Ley” in their 1982 novel "The Descent of Anansi".