The best space podcasts for people who look up

Space is a strange subject for audio, because the whole appeal is visual. You cannot play someone a photograph of Saturn. What audio can do instead is explain why the photograph is astonishing, which turns out to be the better half of the experience.

The genre splits cleanly into three kinds of show, and most people who bounce off space podcasts bounced off the wrong kind.

The ones that explain the science

StarTalk is a place to begin. Neil deGrasse Tyson plus a comedian plus a working scientist, which sounds like it should not work and mostly does. The comedian exists to ask the question you were embarrassed to ask. Best used as an entry point rather than a regular listen, because the format repeats.

Astronomy Cast is the opposite and the better long-term subscription. Fraser Cain and Pamela Gay have been working through the subject topic by topic since 2006, one thing per episode, no celebrity guest, no sound design. It is the closest thing audio has to a proper astronomy course. Start with whichever episode title you do not understand.

Ologies is not a space show, but Alie Ward's episodes on cosmology, planetary science and meteoritics are among the best introductions to any of those fields, largely because she asks the questions a curious non-scientist actually has and refuses to move on until the answer makes sense.

The ones that cover the industry

Main Engine Cut Off is for people who care about launch manifests and contract awards. Genuinely excellent, completely unsuitable as a first space podcast.

Planetary Radio sits between the two. It is the Planetary Society's show, so it leans toward robotic exploration and advocacy, and Sarah Al-Ahmed gets working mission scientists to talk about what their instrument is actually doing this week. The best show on the list for feeling like the solar system is a place with weather rather than a diagram.

Houston We Have a Podcast is NASA's own, which means it is a bit institutional and also that the guests are the people who built the thing. The episodes on life support systems and on spacesuit design are better than they sound.

The ones that tell the story

This is the category most people actually want and the thinnest one on offer.

13 Minutes to the Moon is the best space audio ever made and it is not close. The BBC took the descent of Apollo 11 and reconstructed it minute by minute using the flight loop recordings and interviews with the people on the consoles. Season two does Apollo 13. If you listen to one thing from this whole post, it is this.

The Space Shuttle Podcast and Moonrise both do decent work in the same vein. Neither reaches the same standard, and both are worth the time.

What happens when you run out

The story-shaped category has maybe forty good hours in it total. People finish it. That is usually the point at which the whole subject goes quiet for them, which is a shame, because the history of getting to space is enormous and almost none of it has been narrated well.

HearLore is a listening library of short narrated entries, and this is one of the corners it is deepest in. Apollo 11, about thirteen minutes, is the mission in full rather than the eleven minutes of descent. The Space Race, about seventeen minutes, is the whole competition, which is the frame that makes every individual mission make sense. Sputnik 1, about thirteen minutes, is a polished metal sphere the size of a beach ball that changed American education policy within a year. Yuri Gagarin, about thirteen minutes, is the first human in orbit and a life that went strangely afterwards. Neil Armstrong, about twelve minutes, is the most famous man on Earth spending the next forty years trying not to be.

For the science rather than the flying, Carl Sagan runs about sixteen minutes and is the best argument for why any of this matters. The Hubble Space Telescope, about sixteen minutes, is a mirror ground to the wrong shape and the repair mission that saved it. Black hole, about eleven minutes, and Big Bang, about twelve, are the two ideas most people half-know and would like to actually know. Halley's Comet, about fourteen minutes, is two thousand years of the same object being recorded by people who did not know it was the same object.

Each entry ends by pointing at what it touches, so Sputnik pulls toward the Cold War and Sagan pulls toward the Voyager program, whose entry runs about ten minutes and ends with two spacecraft still transmitting from interstellar space.

Start with Apollo 11 tonight. Then let it take you wherever it wants.

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