Sir Richard van der Riet Woolley OBE FRS (24 April 1906 – 24 December 1986) was an English astronomer who became the eleventh Astronomer Royal. His mother's maiden name was Van der Riet. Biography Woolley was born in Weymouth, Dorset and attended Allhallows College, then in Honiton, for about 18 months, but then moved with his parents to the Union of South Africa upon their retirement. There he attended and received his degree in Mathematics and Physics from the University of Cape Town. Woolley returned to the United Kingdom and studied for a further MA degree in Mathematics and, later, a PhD at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge. After two years at Mount Wilson Observatory he again returned to the United Kingdom in 1931. From 1937 to 1939, he was Senior Assistant Observer and John Couch Adams Astronomer at the Cambridge Observatory. Woolley specialized in solar astronomy and in 1939 he was appointed director of the Commonwealth Solar Observatory in Canberra, Australia. He later returned to the United Kingdom to take up his appointment as Astronomer Royal from 1956 to 1971. Woolley was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1953 and won the Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society in 1971. From 1972 to 1976 he was director of the new South African Astronomical Observatory. He retired in the late 1970s and spent most of his retirement in South Africa. Woolley was appointed an OBE in 1953 and knighted in 1963. Views on the practicality of space flight Woolley is known for his initial disbelief in the practicalities of space flight, a notion he shared with Sir Harold Spencer Jones, his predecessor as Astronomer Royal. In a 1936 book review of P.E. Cleator's Rockets Through Space, Woolley wrote: "The whole procedure [of shooting rockets into space]...presents difficulties of so fundamental a nature, that we are forced to dismiss the notion as essentially impracticable, in spite of the author's insistent appeal to put aside prejudice and to recollect the supposed impossibility of heavier-than-air flight before it was actually accomplished" On appointment as Astronomer Royal, he reiterated his long-held view that "space travel is utter bilge". Speaking to Time in 1956, Woolley noted "It's utter bilge. I don't think anybody will ever put up enough money to do such a thing . . . What good would it do us? If we spent the same amount of money on