Matthew Hersch

(Travel Fellow, 2020-21)

Matthew Hersch

Travel Fellow

Dark Star: A New History of the Space Shuttle

Matthew Hersch is an Associate Professor of the History of Science at Harvard University specializing in the history of aerospace technology. He received his JD from New York University and his PhD in the History and Sociology of Science from the University of Pennsylvania, where he later taught in the School of Arts and Sciences and the School of Engineering and Applied Science. He has held fellowships in history and space technology with the Smithsonian Institution’s National Air and Space Museum, NASA, and the University of Southern California, and is the author of Inventing the American Astronaut (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), and the co-author, with Ruth Schwartz Cowan, of A Social History of American Technology (Oxford, 2017).  His current project, which is under contract with MIT Press, investigates the troubled history of NASA’s space shuttle, locating its vulnerabilities in the planned obsolescence of its design rather than in later management failures.