George Edward Pendray

George Edward Pendray was an American public relations counselor, author and rocketry advocate, born in Omaha, Nebraska, who on April 4, 1930, co-founded the American Interplanetary Society together with fellow science fiction writers including David Lasser, Laurence Manning and Nathan Schachner. Pendray and his wife, Leatrice Pendray, were themselves pioneer experimenters with liquid-propellant rockets in the society's early flight tests, and Pendray went on to author numerous books and articles promoting rocket power for peaceful and scientific purposes, including collaborating with Robert Goddard and his wife Esther Goddard on published accounts of Goddard's rocket research. The society he helped found was renamed the American Rocket Society in 1934 and, under later leadership that included Pendray himself, eventually merged with the Institute of the Aerospace Sciences in 1963 to form the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics. Beyond rocketry, Pendray was also known for organizing the Westinghouse time capsule buried at the 1939 New York World's Fair. The AIAA's Pendray Aerospace Literature Award is named in his honor.