3.09 | 11.14.19
Fifty years after Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins went to the moon, it’s hard to shake off the afterimage of the Saturn V rocket rising into the sky on a column of flame, and remember that the astronauts' bold adventure was also the product of decades of work by engineers, politicians, propagandists, and even science fiction writers. That’s the gap Lillian Cunningham of The Washington Post set out to fix in her podcast, Moonrise. And she’s here with us today to talk about how the show got made, what she thinks the Apollo story can teach us about the power of imagination, and how the stories we tell today help us to write the future. Listen in your browser using the player above, or subscribe on Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcast app.
Bonus segment: Hear outtakes from the published podcast episode. Lillian speculates about whether the Soviets could really have beaten the Americans to the moon (as they do in the new Apple TV+ fiction series For All Mankind).
Mentioned In This Episode
Moonrise, The Washington Post
The Dropout, ABC News
Land of the Giants, Vox Media
1619, The New York Times
Dolly Parton’s America, WNYC
Presidential, The Washington Post
Constitutional, The Washington Post
The Art That Launched a Thousand Rockets (Soonish Episode 3.04)
Words To That Effect, from Conor Reid
Subtitle, from Patrick Cox and Kavita Pillay
Chapter Guide
0:00 Hub & Spoke Sonic ID
01:31 Soonish Theme
01:45 The Golden Age of Limited-Run Podcasts
02:48 A World-Changing Podcast about the Moon Race
05:08 Welcoming Lillian Cunningham to Soonish
05:45 Lillian’s Journey to Podcasting
08:53 Why Make a Show about the Moon Race?
12:21 Beginnings: Why Start the Moon Story in 1933?
17:58 The Role of Science Fiction and Futurism in the Moon Program
20:52 The Soviet Side of the Moon Story
24:10 Midroll Message: Recommending Words To That Effect
26:07 What Makes an Expert an Expert?
31:14 The Story Never Stops
35:19 Will We Ever Go Back to the Moon?
39:14 End Credits and Patreon Thank-Yous
41:38 Promoting Hub & Spoke Newest Show, Subtitle
Notes
The Soonish opening theme is by Graham Gordon Ramsay.
Additional music is from Titlecard Music and Sound.
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Listener support is the rocket fuel that keeps this whole ship going! You can pitch in with a per-episode donation at patreon.com/soonish.
Give us a shout on Twitter and sign up for our email newsletter, Signals from Soonish.
Please check out Subtitle from Patric Cox and Kavita Pillay. It's the newest addition to the Hub & Spoke audio collective. The premiere episode Not So Anonymous is about the remarkable power of forensic linguistics software to unmask writers who'd probably rather stay unknown.
Full Transcript
Lillian Cunningham: I realized that so many of the stories we hear around going to the moon are really stories about how we got to the moon…But that felt like a story that had been told so many times…And the question that just kept kind of nagging at me was not how did we get to the moon, but, like, why did we go to the moon in the first place? You know, where did that idea even come from?
Wade Roush: 50 years after Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin went to the moon, it’s pretty hard to shake off the afterimage of the Saturn V rocket rising on a column of flame, and to understand how this huge engineering feat was also the direct product of decades of politics and propaganda and even science fiction.
That’s the gap Lillian Cunningham of the Washington Post set out to fix in her podcast, Moonrise. And she’s here with us today to talk about how the show got made, what she thinks the Apollo story can teach us about the power of imagination and how the stories we tell help us to write the future.
That’s all coming up…right now.
You’re listening to Soonish. I’m Wade Roush.
We’re living in the golden age of the limited-run podcast. In fact, it feels like a bit of a fad. Like you’re not a real media company unless you’ve put out your own limited run show.
And the truth is that a lot of these shows leave you wondering: did that really need to be a podcast?
I felt that way about a show called Dropout, the ABC News podcast about Elizabeth Holmes, the chief scammer at Theranos. And also Land of the Giants, the Vox podcast about the rise of Amazon.
On the other hand, some of these shows are so mind-blowingly original that they just change your world. Like 1619 from the New York Times. Or Dolly Parton’s America, from Jad Abumrad and WNYC.
And since this year marks the 50th anniversary of the first human footsteps on the moon, you just knew there was going to be a whole armada of limited-run podcasts in 2019 retelling the story of Apollo 11.
And there was.
But I’m here to tell you that only one of them was mind-blowing and world-changing in the way I’m talking about. It was called Moonrise. And it was a 12-part show created and hosted by Lillian Cunningham at the Washington Post.
Lillian is a familiar voice to podcast fans because of her shows Presidential and Constitutional. The Post called Presidential “an epic historical journey through the personality and legacy of each of the American presidents,” and that’s exactly what it was.
Constitutional was about the struggle to frame and interpret and reinterpret the US Constitution, a document that’s been getting a real workout the last few years.
Moonrise is Lillian’s third show for the Post. I binge listened to the first half of the series on a road trip through the Midwest and got completely hooked.
And for me there were two things that made the show stand out.
The first was Lillian’s writing. It was approachable yet authoritative; unpretentious, but poetic at just the right moments.
The second thing I liked was Lillian’s audacious decision to start the story long before NASA even existed, and to explain the moon landing as the culmination of ideas that took decades to develop.
These ideas took root in the Soviet Union just as deeply as they did in the United States. And they flowed from the life stories of a huge cast of characters, not just astronauts but rocket builders and politicians and even science fiction writers.
The narrative in Moonrise starts in 1933, and Lillian doesn’t get to 1969 until the twelfth and final episode. So the moon landing itself almost feels like an epilogue. And that’s fine.
Because, look, we’ve all read the books and seen the movies and heard the podcasts about the actual Apollo 11 mission.
I love learning about the how of Apollo. But I’m even more interested in the why.
And what makes Moonrise special is the loving attention it pays to key figures like Sergei Korolev, Verner von Brown, and Lyndon Johnson, and how you can look at the moon missions as the sum total of their hopes and fears and dreams.
So. The Washington Post emailed a few weeks ago to ask if I’d want have Lillian on the show to talk about the way science fiction writers and futurists provided a kind of blueprint for the Apollo program.
So that was kind of a no-brainer. Of course the answer was yes.
And now here’s that interview.
Wade Roush: So, Lillian Cunningham, thank you so much for being on the show this week. It's a huge honor to have you here.
Lillian Cunningham: Oh, thank you, Wade. It's an honor to be on your show. I love it.
Wade Roush: Ok. So I've got to start out by saying that I'm a huge space buff and I've listened to a lot of podcasts about the moon race this year. And I've watched a ton of movies and a ton of TV shows. And Moonrise was, you know, by far the most surprising, different and memorable treatment of Apollo that I came across. So I want to just congratulate you and thank you.
Lillian Cunningham: Oh, thank you. That that is very flattering. Thanks so much.
Wade Roush: Before we even talk about the show and how you made it, I was hoping you could describe your journey through The Washington Post newsroom. And how is it that you ended up as a podcaster?
Lillian Cunningham: Oh, sure. OK. Yes, I came to the post a little more than nine years ago now, essentially a print journalist, an editor. I mean, I did some work in multi-media, but I was in no way an audio reporter. That wasn't my training. It wasn't even really my original interest. But I I was doing this section we had for the post called on leadership. And I would do all these great interviews with business leaders and politicians and artists. And we would chop them down to like a five minute video.
Essentially, I ended up thinking about, you know, five years ago, we should really do something with these longer conversations and give the audience a chance to, like, really dive into the conversation more. And. Podcasting was getting popular. And I just thought this would be a great format for those interviews.
So, I mean, The Post didn't have any sort of podcasting program at the time, but we just kind of unofficially, informally cobbled together a little interview program. And that kind of got me interested a little bit. I got familiar with the format. And then I had an idea in all the end of 2015, but going into the 2016 election to do this podcast on the history of the presidency. The the idea for the podcast was that I would do one episode on each president for the 44 weeks in 2016 leading up to Election Day. And I actually tried to get other people at the post to do it because I didn't think I had the expertise either in terms of audio or in terms of politics to do it. But no one else took my idea and ran with it. So eventually I just pitched it myself to the editors here and thought it would just be like a side project for the election year. It turned out being a huge project and really fun and kind of got me full time interested in doing audio for the post and three years later, now I know am part of what we now have as an audio team at the Post. And this is like my full time job as a journalist here doing these sort of big enterprise, sort of long form narratives for the post and audio
Wade Roush: Yeah. When I mention Moonrise to people and recommend the show and I say it's hosted by Lillian Cunningham, you know, the first thing they always say is, you know, oh, isn't she the person who did Presidential and Constitutional? So I think you earned a following for those shows, for sure. But they were very much—those shows were really about leadership and government, and Moonrise is so different from those. So I want to know why you decided to make a show about Apollo. Other than, you know, this being the 50th anniversary of Apollo 11. And did you have to rethink how you were going to make this into a podcast?
Lillian Cunningham: Yeah, definitely. So, a couple things. I mean, one thing I would say is the topic is obviously very different from topics I've covered before. But I have come to think that part of what unites all of the projects I've done, Constitutional and Presidential, and now Moonrise, is that they really, I mean they are all a way of sort of re-examining stories from American history that most of us know in a kind of cursory way, or there's a mythology around them, and I kind of go through the exercise of trying to actually sort of learn them in a fresh way and bust some of them mythmaking around those stories. And also, I mean, you know, obviously, I'm at The Washington Post and it's a newsroom. So I think, too, about like, well, what's a story in this moment that there's something playing out in the news around us where a lot of us could maybe benefit from having a better sense of the context and the history that has shaped this present moment. So that's like a little bit of the backdrop for doing the Moonrise podcast.
The first thing that gave me the idea was actually a listener, someone who had listened to Presidential and Constitutional, wrote me an email and said, and this was in 2018, at the end of 2018, wrote me an email and said that, you know, the Apollo 11 anniversary was coming up and this would be a really interesting moment to do, his suggestion was a podcast on each of the Apollo missions and sort of the same way I had done each of the presidents and different constitutional amendments.
And I thought that was a fascinating idea and it kind of fell into the category of things that I you know, I didn't by any stretch consider myself a space buff. And I like challenges. I like learning new things. So there's like, I would love to learn more about the Apollo program and, you know, space history. But, yeah. Then as you said, the challenge was, how do I do this in a fresh way, especially when there will be so much anniversary coverage. And. That, you know, it took over. It took a while and it took just a lot of researching and reporting really before I even settled on what the approach would be, just to sort of feel out what are all the interesting storylines that I could pursue that aren't the ones everyone hears about all the time. And that's sort of, you know, what led me down the path of like the science fiction storyline I tell and some of the stories out of the Soviet Union. And then, of course, because of during the Presidential podcast, I had a particular soft spot for some of the presidential stories and like backroom politics stories in Washington. So decided to weave those into this one, too.
Wade Roush: So you say in the very first episode that beginnings can manipulate. And I'm going to quote something else you wrote for this script in that first episode. You said,
[Clip from Moonrise Episode 1]: If we begin our moon tale with a Soviet challenge and end with an American flag, we get one type of hero story. But if we start elsewhere, the story shifts, becomes more complex, truer, but also darker, more human, more profound. Like, what if we start the story here: This is Earth in the year one thousand nine hundred and thirty-three.
Wade Roush: And I mean, aside from the fact that that's just lovely writing. You know, I thought it was fascinating that you decide to start with an event that was way back in 1933. You know, you talked about John Campbell, who would go on to become one of the century's most important science fiction editors. And then you take like eight whole episodes to cover the years leading up to JFK is May 1961 speech to Congress where he says,
[Clip from President Kennedy’s address to Congress]: I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal before this decade is out of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth.
Wade Roush: …which is where most retellings of Apollo usually start. So. [00:10:00] Right. So why did you feel that it was so important to to devote so much of this series to that backstory? And how did you talk your editors into letting you do that?
Lillian Cunningham: Yeah, well, at first they were actually even more interested in having me do a story about present day astronauts. And I kind of had to first talk them into, well, it should maybe be an a history podcast. And then I had to talk them from there until like, well, maybe you should even be further back than that, start further back than you thought I was going to be. So, I mean, I think a big part of it is that as I drove into the research and started thinking about story structure, I realized that so many of the stories we hear around going to the moon are really stories about how we got to the moon, which is an incredible story. You know, like it's a a beautiful, inspiring and spectacular, dramatic kind of engineering feat. And like, you know, has courageous astronauts. But that felt like a story that had been told so many times that just kind of like hero narrative. Then the kind of comeback after Sputnik. And the question that just kept kind of nagging at me was not how did we get to the moon? But like, why did we go to the moon in the first place? You know, where did that idea even come from?
And so then it became like a little bit of investigation and reporting mission to trace that back. So it kind of started with the question like, well, why did JFK even, you know, propose that we should send Americans to the moon? And, you know, a simple sort of answer is like, well, because Lyndon Johnson suggested we should. Well, why did Lyndon Johnson suggest we should? Well, because someone at NASA suggested it. Well, why did someone at NASA… And, you know, so on and so forth. And and that was the thread I just kind of followed backward because it felt like it felt like the question, I just didn't really have an answer to that question of why, like why would we do this? And I ended up feeling like, the right place to start that tale was really with, when it was and how it was that the idea even of going to the moon entered the imagination. And so that sort of brought me back to science fiction and some of these early science fiction tales about going to the moon. And that felt both like a a fresh and different way to start the story. But it also felt like it helped to answer a question that we don't have the answer to in some of the other stories around Apollo.
Wade Roush: So you had 12 episodes to work with and I feel like that gave you a lot of space to explore what you just said, the themes that other historians and other podcasters and other reporters haven't had time to dig into. And one of them was the role of science fiction and futurism. And you talked about science fiction editors and writers like Campbell and Robert Heinlein and Arthur C. Clarke and so many others. And you also talked about the illustrator and architect, Chesley Bonestell. And I have a soft spot for him because I did a whole episode about him. And, you know, for the most part, Bonestell is a completely forgotten figure. But you explained what he was up to and how his art became such an important part of sort of building the case for going to the moon. And so I'm wondering if you could kind of sum up the role that you think science fiction and futurism played in preparing the way for Apollo, and why those parts of the story felt so important to you.
Lillian Cunningham: Yeah. Well, I mean, your podcast has the great tagline about how technology shapes the future, but we shape technology. And I think that's absolutely true. And, you know, I would also add, at least in terms of what I was doing with the Moonrise podcast, was kind of tacking on to that idea: how is it that we shape technology? And I think one of the ways we do that is through science fiction. You know, before we can create these new wild things and bring them into existence, we need to imagine them.
And I mean, I use science fiction kind of as a term very broadly. So I really think any sort of form of art and expression where we imagine a world that doesn't quite exist yet is like a form of science fiction. So to me, you know, Chesley Bonestell, even though he's a painter, I think he's he's very much a science fiction creator. Right? He painted these incredible images of space. And I think, whether it's a painting or it's a book, that these sort of forms of art and imagination around what the future could be like are the first step on the journey toward actually creating something. And I mean, I found that so fascinating in doing the podcast, just how many rocketeers and engineers, all these figures like cited science fiction as part of what inspired them to build rockets, to have this dream of space travel. And there's no question that planting, that seed either in individuals or like a society's consciousness is is just so important. It's how progress happens. It's the very first step.
Wade Roush: Well, I totally agree with you, and that's definitely one of the sub-themes of my show. Speaking of sub-themes, were there other stories or strands within Moonrise that you really particularly had fun exploring or telling? And I think I have one thing in mind. So here's my hidden agenda. It felt to me like you took some special delight in telling the whole story of the Soviet space program. And in particular, you spent a lot of time talking about Sergei Korolev, who was in a way the father of astronautics and definitely the presiding genius of the Soviet space program. So I'm curious sort of whether that part of the story was particularly fun for you. And if so, like why? What was so fun about it?
Lillian Cunningham: Yeah. So, I mean, when I started the podcast, I didn't actually anticipate I would spend so much time or as much time as I ended up spending on the Soviet side of the of their race. But I did know, you know, in terms of thinking about sort of why is this an important story today? How is there still an echo in our culture today if some of these themes? You know, obviously, U.S., Russia, tensions are in the news and all sorts of ways today. So I did think like looking back at this Cold War tale would be illuminating and interesting. So that was one reason.
Another tiny personal reason is, I studied Russian throughout college and I just liked the I was like, oh, this will be fun. I can dive back into a little bit of Russian. And I also think it kind of maybe the even bigger reason is that if I felt that it was important to shake up the way that we've sort of come to understand stories and storytelling around these like these big American stories. And so that's not to say like, oh, that, you know, the Soviet Union characters are the heroes in this and the Americans are the villains or anything like that. But I just thought it was important to sort of shake up and completely American-centric view of how the story played out.
And and also in some ways, what I loved about being able to work on a space podcast for about a year of my life is that it's you know, it gives you so much time and opportunity just to think about human existence and achievement and like what it means to be alive on this planet and where we're going. You know, as collectively as like earthlings. And so in that way, too, it seemed like this isn't just about an American success. This is a story about a human achievement. And whoever got to the moon first or not, the reality is that it took all of these forces and and in a lot of ways, all of this competition, to actually make such an achievement possible.
Wade Roush: I’m going to pause the interview right here for a quick message.
If you haven’t listened to Moonrise, you should absolutely go out and download all twelve episodes right now.
But if you’re looking for more fun stories about the future and how it’s shaped by popular culture, then I have another great podcast to recommend.
It’s called Words To That Effect, and it’s from Conor Reid, an Irish podcaster who has an English Lit PhD from Trinity College Dublin.
One episode that’ll be fun for Soonish listeners is called Pulp Fiction, or Amazing Stories of the Sisters of Tomorrow.
Conor Reid: If you want to understand how we ended up with anything from Star Wars to Star Trek, Superman to Batman, intergalactic travel to microscopic worlds, profound meditations on the nature of being human to thrilling tales about Martian princesses, you have to look at pulp fiction.
Wade Roush: Conor sets out to demolish the old myth that it was mostly men who were writing and consuming science fiction in the age of pulp fiction in the 1920s and 1930s.
And he does that with some help from Professor Lisa Yaszek, who has possibly the coolest job title on earth. She’s a Professor of Science Fiction Studies in the School of Literature, Media, and Communication at Georgia Tech.
Lisa Yaszek: We know that Hugo Gernsback, the father of modern science fiction, he was really interested in getting everyone to read. Men and women, boys and girls, scientifically inclined people, literarily inclined people. He really saw it as a great way to share ideas about what different futures might look like with different kinds of populations.
Wade Roush: So check out that episode of Words To That Effect and so much more at wttepodcast.com. Okay. Back to the show.
Wade Roush: So you said earlier, and you say this in the show, too, that you're not a space buff. And also, you know, you said in Presidential that you're not a history buff. Which I thought was—like, part of me wants to say, when I hear you say that: “Lily, you just made a 45-episode show about the presidency,” or you know, “You just spent a year reporting on the moon program. If that doesn't make you an expert or at least a buff I'm not sure what does.” So I just want to ask you, why do you feel it's important to say that to put that out there, that you're not a buff? And if you weren't one when you started, you feel like you are now?
Lillian Cunningham: Yeah. Well, I would at least say by the time I finished finish each of these projects, I'm like it enthusiast. So I'm definitely now like a space enthusiast and a presidential history enthusiast. I don't know, I guess I have a really high bar for what I feel like it takes to be an expert on something. But it also is true that at the start of each of these projects, I decided to take them on, not because I knew a lot about them, but actually because I felt like I didn't know as much as I wanted to, and as much as I should. And so. Yeah. I mean, the process of making each of these stories has definitely. I suppose you could say you turned me into a buff on the subjects. But but I really did start out with what I would kind of consider, probably like the average person's background on the subject.
I don't do these stories because I want to show off what I know. I do them because I'm genuinely interested in learning about the topics. In some places, particularly with Presidential, I am just felt like I you know, it was a little embarrassing to put on display to the public some of the things that I didn't totally know while I was like on this journey of learning. But I think that's also part of what I've realized, like the mission of these podcasts I'm doing is it's to help other people feel like they have an accessible way in to some of these topics and this history that frankly I think sometimes can feel intimidating because there are communities out there who know so much about it.
Wade Roush: Yeah, I get that. I guess I just feel like there's an interesting tension all the time for journalists and storytellers between, you know, wanting to make everything accessible and make people feel like you're taking them on a journey of learning with them, and also maybe on the flip side, just being a trustworthy guide and putting the knowledge out there and not pretending that you don't know. And it kind of helps the audience to know tha, you know what you're talking about. So do you see what I'm getting at?
Lillian Cunningham: Yeah, totally. I do. And I think I mean, it's like it's a kind of hard. I'm totally with you. Like it's a tricky balance and a tricky thing to try to explain to an audience. But, you know, to your point, each of these projects, I've started without considering myself an expert. But I do go through like an extremely rigorous process of research and reporting to get to a place where I feel very comfortable sort of sharing. Expertise. But the other thing is, like as a journalist, of course, we rely so much on the expertise of other people. And so while I'm learning a lot along the way and I'm double checking things and I'm talking to people on different sides of the aisle who have different perspectives on what happened. I am also at almost every turn figuring out like, well, who are the people who've like spent their careers studying this subject and sort of turning to them to really help with this storytelling as well?
Wade Roush: Of course, of course.
Lillian Cunningham: I mean, I've been like very lucky. I would say it's one of the really cool things about living in D.C. and working here is, you know, whether it's the Library of Congress or the National Air and Space Museum, there's just so many great people with amazing American history knowledge and all these different topics who I can just kind of like pop down the street and over to their office and bug them with questions.
Wade Roush: Yeah. Living in Boston feels that way, too. There's an expert on everything….So. So in the final episode, you said something really poetic about how what got us to the moon wasn't engineering so much as stories, you know, stories that made Apollo feel necessary and inevitable. And you also talked about how storytellers are always pulled between the past and the future. And that's obviously something I can relate to. So you said,
[Clip from Moonrise Episode 1]: The story never stops. It’s not even a story, really, except that we make it so. It’s a collection of events across the chaos of time and space that we, as humans, can’t help but want to connect, make sense of, find some meaning in. That’s who we are. Storytellers. Dreamers. Time travelers who feel pulled by both the future and the past. We make heroes and villains. We are heroes and villains. We kill and create. We die and endure.
Wade Roush: So, again, more lovely writing. But I'm wondering, sort of having met all these historians and journalists and some actual astronauts who some of whom were actually part of these events. Do you feel like you yourself are now part of that story of Apollo?
Lillian Cunningham: Oh, that's such a great question. You know, that is actually something I've thought about a bit, and it's probably partly what prompted that as an ending to the podcast is, is this awareness that in the course of trying to like deconstruct a myth that we've built up around going to the moon, in a way, my deconstruction of it and my retelling of it does sort of the same thing, right? Like I focused the podcast on some people who listeners might not have known before, but there are 400,000 people who worked on the Apollo program. There are, you know science fiction writers who wrote influential pieces that I didn't get to talk about. I guess that's where I was sort of going with that idea of it's not really a story except that we make it. Every time we tell it, we pick a starting place and we pick an ending place and we decide who we're focusing on. And I wanted at the very end of the podcast to at least sort of nod to the audience about the fact that I know and that I know my own storytelling here is creating another incomplete version, but hopefully we get enough different stories put together and we get a little bit closer to a full truer picture of what happened.
I wish there were a way I could tell a more complete story than I was able to tell. And so I told a different story because I thought that was important. But there are a million ways that we could tell the moon story. I probably have like 20 other versions of how we could have told it on my computer. But yeah, I don't know. I hope I hope it's a positive contribution. And part of what I hope the Moonrise podcast does is not cement a new version of the story in people's heads, but just prompt listeners to reflect upon, you know, what else there is to learn and know about the story and then kind of find their own rabbit holes to go down.
Wade Roush: So I want to I want to maybe move toward wrapping up. I want to ask you a question that's a little more future oriented. So we haven't sent anyone to the moon since Apollo 17 in 1972. And I'm curious what you make of that. I mean, do you think that we've changed fundamentally in terms of our ambitions or our courage or our level of skill? Or do you think maybe Apollo was the product of an incredibly unique sort of confluence of events and that when the time is right, maybe we'll go back?
Lillian Cunningham: Yeah. I do think Apollo is the confluence of a lot of unique events. I also one thing I've thought a lot about and unfortunately I didn't really find a place to put this in Moonrise. But there is one expert I talked to, Margaret Weidekamp, who’s at the Air and Space Museum, and I remember her saying to me that. One of the challenges with human spaceflight is that it tends to either be very sort of negatively dramatic or it tends to feel routine, like for as much as we you know, we have movies about things like Apollo 13, usually in space, things either like go right, or they go wrong and they go wrong in really devastating ways that, you know, we have a Challenger explosion or Columbia explosion. And as a country, we question why we're pursuing this. And so she said, it's sort of it's hard to sustain enthusiasm for a program where you don't get a lot of these like dramatic hero tales or like someone saves the day at the last moment or there are some like big surprise. And so the luster of spaceflight kind of wears off.
And so I think like, I don't know, that's stuck with me as like an interesting thing to think about. And how it, you know, kind of prompts the question like if we want more human space exploration, what would we have to do to keep sort of a public awareness about why it's important and why it's worth spending a lot of money on. Which I think is another thing. You know, going back and looking at the Apollo story that's really important is to realize, that even while we were in the process of sending people to the moon there were a lot of politicians, a lot of Americans saying, is this really what we should be spending our money on? And so I think if and when humans go back to the moon again, we probably will be surprised that it happens in an environment that doesn't feel like magically perfect and everything aligns because I don't think at the time Apollo felt that way either. I think it happened despite a lot of hurdles and pushback and a lot of questions about like why in the world are we doing this. And probably if it happens again and know that will also be the context in which it happens.
I think there's like there is sort of an enduring desire to do it, right? Like there's something just like romantic and magical about the moon and the idea of space travel. And I think it's part of being human, to want to pursue that and to be sort of enthralled by that idea. So I don't think that dream is going to die.
Wade Roush: I hope it doesn't. Okay. Lily, thank you so much. This has been an absolute pleasure and a privilege to talk with you.
Lillian Cunningham: Oh, thank you. I have to say, I really am so honored that you would spend all this time and give time on your podcast to talking about Moonrise. It's I'm very flattered and honored and appreciative.
Wade Roush: Well, I know my listeners are gonna love it. So it's a win-win, as they say.
Wade Roush: Soonish is produced by me, Wade Roush, with the help of our loyal supporters on Patreon.
If you’d like to help support the show with a donation of 5, 10, or 25 dollars per episode or more, please go to Patreon.com/soonish to check out the awesome rewards at each level.
We’re coming up on Patreon’s annual Thank You Patrons day on November 19. And so I’d like to send out a huge thank you to each and every one of our current supporters. Including:
Kent Rasmussen, Celia Ramsay, Paul and Patricia Roush, Jamie Roush, Victor and Ruth McElheny, Lucia Prosperi, Andy Hrycyna, Ellen Leanse, Graham Ramsay, Mark Pelofsky, Elizabeth Blanch, Chuck and Gail Mandeville, Steve Marantz, Joe Tankersley, Joel McKinnon, Toni Miraldi, Lori Mortimer, Tamar Avishai, Greg Huang, John Diniz, Joseph Fridman, Jean-Jacque deGroof, Wendy Perotta, Zach Davis, John Barth, David Assaf, Deborah Rossum, Daniel Imrie-Situnayake, Julianne Zimmerman, Tracy Staedter, David Stenman, Vijii Venkatraman, Scott Rankin, Tyrell McAllister, Kiran Wagle, Lynn Rozental, Niels Rot, Anders Klingberg, Evan Blanch, Ibby Caputo, and Emma Starr.
If you enjoyed my conversation with Lillian Cunningham and you want to go even deeper, there’s a bonus segment at our website, soonishpodcast.org. In the bonus tape we geek out a bit about podcast production, and I ask Lillian about the new show from Apple TV+ For All Mankind and how close the Soviets really got to beating the U.S. to the moon.
Soonish is a proud founding member of Hub & Spoke, a collective of compelling, sound-rich narrative podcasts. And this week I want to tell you about the newest member of the collective. It’s called Subtitle and it’s all about language and how it unites and divides us. The show is produced by Kavita Pillay and Patrick Cox and their very first episode is about how forensic linguistics software is making it harder and harder for writers who want to be anonymous to actually stay anonymous.
[Clip from Subtitle—voice of Mike Pence, then Kavita Pillay]: “That’s going to continue to be our lodestar.” “As our lodestar.” “It really was the lodestar.” Vice President Mike Pence really likes saying that. “Lodestar” is an unusual word. And if you’re like me, you may not remember what it means out of context. It’s a person or thing that serves as an inspiration or guide. And Pence has used it enough over the years for it to become part of his linguistic DNA. Others in the administration have come under suspicions. All of them, including Pence, have denied writing the op-ed. At least for now, Anonymous remains Anonymous. But on November 19, 272 pages of their handiwork will be available to the world. You can bet that the linguistic Sherlocks will be analyzing every word, every phrase, even every comma, to try and solve America’s biggest linguistic whodunnit.
Wade Roush: Check out Subtitle at subtitlepod.com and subscribe today in your favorite podcast app. And check out all of the Hub & Spoke shows at hubspokeaudio.org.
Here at Soonish our opening theme was written by the very not anonymous Graham Gordon Ramsay. And all of the other music in this episode was created by Titlecard Music and Sound in Boston.
Special thanks this week to Lillian Cunningham and everyone at the Washington Post.
And thank you for listening. I’ll be back with a new episode….Soonish.
