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.

*[This podcast was produced by Wade Roush. Click here for a full list of episodes.] 

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