Editorial Note: Led by Editor Dr Mike Hankins, From Balloons to Drones, produces a monthly podcast that provides an outlet for the presentation and evaluation of air power scholarship, the exploration of historical topics and ideas, and provides a way to reach out to both new scholars and the general public. You can find our Soundcloud channel here. You can also find our podcast on Apple Podcasts and Google Podcasts.

The American spaceflight program is a popular, inspirational story that many of us are familiar with, but what about the Soviet Union’s space program? To explore it, we’re joined by Dr Cathleen Lewis, Curator of International Space Programs and Spacesuits at the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum and author of Cosmonaut: A Cultural History (2023) from the University of Florida Press. She tells us not only about how the Soviet space program worked but its cultural effect on the people of the Soviet Union and how it has been remembered since then.

We apologize for an audio problem with one of our microphones that we were unaware of until editing, when it was too late to fix.

Dr Cathleen S. Lewis is the Curator of International Space Programs and Spacesuits at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Air and Space Museum, specializing in Soviet and Russian history. She co-edited Spaceflight: A Smithsonian Guide and Air and Space History: An Annotated Bibliography.

Header image: Visitors at the 38th Paris International Air and Space Shown at Le Bourget Airfield line up to tour a Soviet An-225 Mriya aircraft with the Space Shuttle Buran on its back. (Source: Wikimedia)