42: "They weren't told they were being recruited for space," Cathy Lewis on Soviet Cosmonauts

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, from University of Florida Press. She tells us not only about how the Soviet space program worked, but about it's cultural effect on the people of the Soviet Union, and how it has been remembered since then. We do apologize for an audio problem with one of our microphones that we were not aware of until editing, when it was too late to fix.