In our latest piece of bonus content, senior producer Benjamin Austin-Docampo interviews space travel historian Dr. Teasel Muir-Harmony about the United States' tremendous undertaking traveling to the moon, the mutual propaganda war that ensued, and the U.S.S.R.'s unique approach to space craft development.

Dr. Teasel Muir-Harmony is a historian of science and technology and the curator of the Smithsonian Institute's Apollo Collection at the National Air and Space Museum. Before coming to the Smithsonian, she earned a Ph.D. from MIT. She has also held positions at the Royal Institute of Technology in Sweden, the American Institute of Physics, and the Adler Planetarium and Astronomy Museum in Chicago. And her book "Operation Moonglow: A Political History of Project Apollo" won the American Astronautical Society's Eugene M. Emme Award for Astronautical Literature in 2020. Her scholarship has been featured by CBS, the New York Times, NPR, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, and numerous other media outlets. Muir-Harmony’s research and writing have been supported by the Daniel and Florence Guggenheim Foundation, the Consortium for the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine, the MIT Presidential Fellowship, the Smithsonian Institution Graduate Research Fellowship, NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, and the National Science Foundation. At the Air and Space Museum, she is the lead curator for the One World Connected gallery and serves on exhibit teams for Destination Moon and the Allan and Shelley Holt Innovations Gallery. Her collection comprises over 2,000 artifacts related to the Apollo program, the Skylab program, and the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project. She co-organizes the Space Policy & History Forum, serves on the Executive Council of the Society for the History of Technology, is a member of the American Astronautical Society History Committee, and participates in the US State Department’s Speakers Program. In addition, she teaches in Georgetown University’s Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service. 

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices