Miles Ahead

Miles Ahead is a science and exploration show hosted by Miles O'Brien, and its subjects run from a 1927 aviation mystery to commercial rockets, a deep-sea submersible disaster and a melting Antarctic glacier. It works in two modes. The first is the investigative series. The Hunt for the White Bird spends three parts on the French biplane that left Paris in May 1927 trying to fly nonstop to New York, two weeks before Charles Lindbergh's solo flight in the other direction, and vanished. Its guide is Rick Gillespie, a former insurance investigator turned historical sleuth who founded and directs TIGHAR, and the clues he follows suggest the two aviators got as far as Newfoundland. The evidence is handled at ground level. There is the wind on a likely landing approach, the rival crews chasing the same $25,000 prize, and a pond that looked like the only place with room to put the plane down, 'except for one important feature'. There is silt that may bury a Lorraine Dietrich 12-cylinder engine, remote sensing that failed for reasons the searchers did not grasp until 2021, and a call that year from Josh Gates of Expedition Unknown that brings a drone-mounted magnetic survey into the story. The series ties itself to the approaching Lindbergh centennial, and each part closes with an appeal to help fund the search. The second mode is the conversation. O'Brien visited Rocket Lab in New Zealand and asked founder Peter Beck whether there is enough business to compete against Elon Musk. Beck's answer is that commercial and government customers want alternatives. That episode, 'We Have No Money, So We Have To Think - with Peter Beck', is introduced from the bridge of a Korean icebreaker bound for Antarctica, where O'Brien is on a ship full of scientists studying how fast a glacier is melting. With OceanGate co-founder Guillermo Söhnlein, author of Titan Unfinished, the subject is the implosion that killed five people and a media response that O'Brien says lost its mind. Here the host brings his own past into the room. He recalls covering the loss of Columbia at CNN: when telemetry and radar tracking went silent, he knew the crew was gone before he could tell viewers. With Bill McKibben, a New Yorker staff writer who became a climate activist, the talk turns to solar costs that fall with every doubling of capacity and insurance bills that keep climbing. The register is plainspoken and curious, with room for a wry aside. O'Brien is open about the money, calling the show a labor of love he cannot do for free forever. He also explains the name: too many other podcasts shared the old one, and the new one nods to forward motion and a little optimism. Episodes are made to be watched as well as heard. His sign-off to the Titan conversation states the method plainly: 'the truth doesn't just bubble up on its own.'