PODCAST · science
Earth and Orbit
by Paul Luker
Every morning at about 6:30 Central, three minutes on what happened in space and on this planet - the launches, the discoveries, the storms and the science - with an eye on the St. Louis sky. Written and narrated automatically from public sources, with a synthetic voice; no clickbait. Part of the stluker.com network.
Episodes
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Oct 25: Bonin Islands Quake and Weakening Storms Champi and Vance
A magnitude six point five quake near Japan's Bonin Islands, weakening Tropical Storm Champi and Hurricane Vance, a stale Florida wildfire report, solar flare ribbons, and this morning's ISS pass over St. Louis.
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Oct 24: Twin Vanuatu Quakes and a Weakening Typhoon Champi
Two strong earthquakes near Vanuatu, Super Typhoon Champi weakening near Taiwan, Hurricane Vance in the Pacific, NASA's faster Moon plans, and Mercury's turn in the evening sky.
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Oct 23: Magnitude 7 Quake in China, Champi Nears Taiwan
A magnitude 7 earthquake near Nagqu, China, and Super Typhoon Champi closing on Taiwan, plus Agueda weakening, Webb's lopsided exoplanet, and a Moon-Neptune pairing tonight.
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Oct 22: Typhoon Champi Weakens Near Taiwan, Agueda Strengthens
Super Typhoon Champi drops in wind speed southeast of Taiwan while Tropical Storm Agueda strengthens, two California fires have no update, Iapetus passes behind the Sun, and Canada signs a launch pad deal.
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Oct 21: Orionid Meteors Peak as Typhoon Champi Nears Okinawa
The Orionid meteor shower peaks this morning, Super Typhoon Champi and two other storms are tracked, and SpaceX posts a quarterly profit. Also a look at ESA's Galileo teams.
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Earth and Orbit -- October 18, 2026
Tonight is about translation: taking something real and rendering it in a form a person can take in, whether that's a moon crossing a planet, a nebula turned into sound, or a storm reduced to a position and a wind speed.
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Earth and Orbit -- October 17, 2026
Three storms are spinning over open Pacific water, and a lot of what's in the sky today is about seeing something from a distance versus getting close enough to touch it.
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Earth and Orbit -- October 16, 2026
Some things in the sky keep appointments, and today's stories are about the appointments, and the people trying to make them more frequent.
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Earth and Orbit -- October 15, 2026
Two Pacific storms are running side by side off Mexico, and two older storm reports have gone quiet.
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Earth and Orbit -- October 14, 2026
Today is about the difference between how a thing first looks and what it turns out to be, and how much depends on where you happen to be standing when you look.
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Earth and Orbit -- October 13, 2026
Today is a day about who gets to look after the places where things happen, and what it takes to keep a place running: orbit's next tenants, a launch pad being doubled, and a ridge in the middle of the ocean that keeps building itself without a landlord.
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Earth and Orbit -- October 12, 2026
Some things get rehearsed before they happen, and some just happen.
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Earth and Orbit -- October 11, 2026
Three storms are spinning in the Pacific with real strength behind them, and a handful of space stories today are about the same trick: learning something by catching what's left behind, or what's hard to see directly.
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Earth and Orbit -- October 10, 2026
Overnight, the ground under one part of Panama would not settle, and the rest of today's stories are about things that stay put, or finally get back to ground that does.
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Earth and Orbit -- October 9, 2026
Plans bend, and a few of the stories coming in right now are about exactly how they bend: a crew that came home on a different timetable than first imagined, a launch that stopped short, a rocket that has taken its time, and a discovery that showed up years before anyo
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Earth and Orbit -- October 8, 2026
Today's sky stories keep circling back to the same practical question: what does it actually take to see something clearly, whether that something is ninety million miles away or embedded in the solar wind itself.
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Earth and Orbit -- October 7, 2026
What ties today's sky stories together is that the most violent things out there turn out to be the ones doing the building.
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Earth and Orbit -- October 6, 2026
What's different about today isn't any one event, it's how unevenly certain we get to be about each of them.
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Earth and Orbit -- October 5, 2026
Start with the heat shield story, because it's the clearest version of that idea.
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Earth and Orbit -- October 4, 2026
Today's got one station getting fuller and one space agency quietly working out how to build a second one, plus a theoretical world that doesn't need the kind of single, well-behaved sun we usually assume life requires.
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Earth and Orbit -- October 3, 2026
Today's thread is about shelter - where it's being sought, where it isn't available at all, and where none was ever an option to begin with.
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Earth and Orbit -- October 2, 2026
Today the throughline is about what a surface hides versus what's actually underneath it - a rock that looks like one object but isn't, a cloud bank that looks opaque but isn't, a planet that looks still but isn't.
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Earth and Orbit -- October 1, 2026
Today the thread running through the science is revision - things we thought we had measured correctly turning out to be a little different once better instruments or longer study got a look at them.
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Earth and Orbit -- September 29, 2026
Today isn't built around one big event so much as a handful of things getting quietly reclassified - a black hole that might build galaxies instead of just gutting them, an AI system nobody's fully sure they trust yet, a lens in the sky turning faint smudges into wh
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Earth and Orbit -- September 28, 2026
Today's thread is energy, in every form we've got a story about - the wind driving four different storms at four different strengths, the thrust waiting to lift a brand new rocket off the pad, the steady trickle of nuclear power that could outlast two weeks of lunar
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Earth and Orbit -- September 27, 2026
Today is mostly about things that are bigger, older, or stranger than they first appear once someone actually goes looking closer.
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Earth and Orbit -- September 26, 2026
Today's got two very different kinds of movement in it - things stuck waiting on somebody's signature, and things going ahead whether anyone signs anything or not.
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Earth and Orbit -- September 25, 2026
Today's got an odd little thread running through it: a lot of watching, done by very different kinds of eyes.
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Earth and Orbit -- September 24, 2026
We're watching a strange split in what we can actually do in space right now.
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Earth and Orbit -- September 23, 2026
We have a congestion problem that's not in traffic but in orbit, and it's the kind of problem that solves itself only badly if we don't intervene first.
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Earth and Orbit -- September 22, 2026
A century ago, a hurricane hit Miami and changed how we forecast weather.
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Earth and Orbit -- September 21, 2026
You're looking at a moment when space technology is solving two completely different problems at once, and they're pulling in opposite directions.
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Earth and Orbit -- September 20, 2026
We've got a magnitude 6.4 earthquake in Papua New Guinea this morning, about forty-nine kilometers north-northeast of Kainantu, and while the numbers alone don't tell us much, the context does.
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Earth and Orbit -- September 19, 2026
We're watching impacts reshape what we think we know about small moons, while on Earth right now, fire and water are moving faster than anyone's definitions can keep up with.
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Earth and Orbit -- September 18, 2026
Incoming gas flowing toward a triple star system is aligning with the star's outer ring in a way that suggests something deeper about how planets form around multiple suns.
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Earth and Orbit -- September 17, 2026
A planet that's barely a million years old is teaching astronomers what the first moments of a planetary system actually look like.
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Earth and Orbit -- September 16, 2026
A star is compressing millions of years of stellar aging into a timescale human instruments can actually watch.
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Earth and Orbit -- September 15, 2026
We're tracking what happens when people start planning their exits from the places they were supposed to stay.
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Earth and Orbit -- September 14, 2026
There's a particular kind of longevity at work in today's material - not the dramatic kind where a spacecraft keeps going against the odds, but the kind where infrastructure builds itself so well that it never quite needs replacing, and the missions that depend on i
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Earth and Orbit -- September 13, 2026
There's a strange symmetry in today's material between what we've already seen and what we're only now learning we saw.
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Earth and Orbit -- September 12, 2026
There's a split in today's material between things that broke in the past and things that are still breaking now - some of it ancient history in space terms, some of it happening while we're talking.
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Earth and Orbit -- September 11, 2026
We've got a day that splits between Earth moving and space waiting - two very different kinds of momentum happening at scales that don't usually get compared side by side.
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Earth and Orbit -- September 10, 2026
We've got a day where the infrastructure we build to protect things and the infrastructure we build to understand them are finally working in opposite directions - and it takes watching across completely different scales to see why that matters.
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Earth and Orbit -- September 9, 2026
Space exploration and Earth observation are both revealing something about the infrastructure we build to notice things - and about the gaps between noticing and understanding.
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Earth and Orbit -- September 8, 2026
We're looking at a day where space infrastructure and Earth observation are both revealing something about detection itself - about what we see when we're actually watching, and what we miss when we're not.
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Earth and Orbit -- September 7, 2026
You're looking at a Wednesday where everything's in motion at once, but the motion isn't random - it's constrained by the same invisible ceiling in two completely different places.
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Earth and Orbit -- September 6, 2026
Three storms are moving across the Pacific right now, and none of them are waiting for each other.
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Earth and Orbit -- September 5, 2026
BepiColombo is eight years into its cruise and entering the most dangerous part of its journey - the final approach to Mercury.
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Earth and Orbit -- September 4, 2026
Three earthquakes shook different parts of the world yesterday, and they illustrate something worth thinking about: how much we can actually see depends entirely on what we've built to look.
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Earth and Orbit -- September 3, 2026
Three tropical systems are already in motion across the Pacific right now, and they're operating in a specific constraint that yesterday's briefing touched on and today bears out more sharply.
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ABOUT THIS SHOW
Every morning at about 6:30 Central, three minutes on what happened in space and on this planet - the launches, the discoveries, the storms and the science - with an eye on the St. Louis sky. Written and narrated automatically from public sources, with a synthetic voice; no clickbait. Part of the stluker.com network.
HOSTED BY
Paul Luker
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Frequently Asked Questions
How many episodes does Earth and Orbit have?
Earth and Orbit currently has 60 episodes available on PodParley. New episodes are automatically indexed when they're published to the podcast feed.
What is Earth and Orbit about?
Every morning at about 6:30 Central, three minutes on what happened in space and on this planet - the launches, the discoveries, the storms and the science - with an eye on the St. Louis sky. Written and narrated automatically from public sources, with a synthetic voice; no clickbait. Part of the...
How often does Earth and Orbit release new episodes?
Earth and Orbit has 60 episodes. Check the episode list to see recent publication dates and frequency.
Where can I listen to Earth and Orbit?
You can listen to Earth and Orbit on PodParley by clicking any episode. We provide an embedded audio player for direct listening, and you can also subscribe via your preferred podcast app using the RSS feed.
Who hosts Earth and Orbit?
Earth and Orbit is created and hosted by Paul Luker.
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