Psychology
Why do we explore, anyway
When I was twenty-something and working in a corporate job, I started looking at the people who were ten and fifteen years ahead of me on the ladder.
Constellations
Iridium just bought out the company tracking 190,000 flights a day, and the $367 million price tag is really a bet that GPS is quietly becoming unreliable
Iridium Communications has agreed to acquire the remaining 61% of Aireon, its satellite-based aircraft-tracking subsidiary, in a $367 million deal that is really a bet on a single proposition: GPS is becoming unreliable enough to create a massive new commercial market for alternatives.
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Human Behaviour
The Katy Perry flight wasn't a vanity project. It was the moment the space industry finally admitted who its real customer is — and the backlash, however satisfying it felt, missed the point entirely.
On 14 April 2025, six women boarded a Blue Origin New Shepard capsule at Launch Site One in West Texas and rode it past the Kármán line for ten minutes and twenty-one seconds.
Psychology
Why Chris Hadfield argues that fear is a knowledge problem, and how we might apply it to our own lives
"Okay, I can't see, but I can hear, I can talk, Scott Parazynski is out here with me.
Psychology
The quiet freedom of routine
I’ve been reading lately about how astronauts live, and the thing that has stayed with me isn’t the gear or the spacewalks.
Constellations
Voyager 1 is still transmitting from beyond the heliosphere on 22 watts — less power than the bulb in your hallway — and the engineers who built it in the 1970s never expected we'd still be listening half a century later.
On 17 April 2026, mission engineers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California sent commands to switch off the Low-energy Charged…
What’s up in
Space
Industry news, exploration, and the engineering of getting humans and machines beyond Earth.
The Robinhood co-founder just filed plans for 20,000 satellites — and the real bet isn't space, it's that grid interconnect queues have broken AI infrastructure on Earth
The same precision sensor that kept Webb locked on galaxies 13 billion light-years away has been quietly miniaturized — and it's about to solve the navigation problem nobody wanted to discuss on the way to the Moon
A Falcon 9 upper stage burned up over Europe last February, and German scientists just caught it doing something to the atmosphere nobody had directly measured before
SES just quietly killed two satellites Intelsat already paid to build, and the cancellation says more about the death of geostationary economics than any earnings call ever could
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Mind & Meaning
The psychology of ambition, isolation, and meaning under extremes — and what frontier life teaches us about being human.
NASA's inspector general called the Space Launch System unsustainable at $4.1 billion per flight. House appropriators just added another billion above what NASA itself asked for, and forbade reallocation.
JWST resolved a galaxy from 800 million years after the Big Bang while NEO Surveyor — the only NASA mission Congress has required by statute — remains roughly 30 years behind its city-killer catalog deadline, and the gap is a lesson in what makes a problem fundable inside the same agency
NASA imaged the Kuskokwim ice breakup at Aniak this spring; a year earlier the EPA had clawed back a $20 million erosion grant from Kipnuk, fifty miles downriver and a delta over
I'm 37 and I watched my parents retire with everything they worked for — a paid-off house, savings, good health — and then slowly, year by year, become two people who sit in separate rooms scrolling their phones because they forgot how to be interesting to each other
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Science
Physics, climate, planetary science, and the research that shapes how we understand the universe.
Abandoned coal mines may be releasing hidden carbon into the air, but researchers think the same drainage could also point toward a cheaper kind of climate fix
Psychology suggests people who still navigate by memory instead of relying on GPS usually aren't being stubborn — they've kept a relationship with the physical world that the rest of us quietly outsourced about fifteen years ago and haven't quite figured out how to replace
The clearest sign you're talking to a high-level thinker is that they'll change their mind in front of you mid-conversation — and most people will not do that in public at any cost
Resilience research has spent decades studying how people survive hard things — it has been much quieter about whether surviving was actually the best outcome available
About Space Daily
Space, science, and the human side of the frontier. Since 1995.
Space Daily is an independent publication covering three connected beats: the space industry, the science behind it, and the psychology of ambition, isolation, and meaning under extremes. Founded in Tokyo in 1995, we’ve built a thirty-year archive of rigorous reporting on the people, missions, and ideas pushing humanity outward — and on the human dynamics shaped by frontier life. The same ambitions, pressures, and patterns of mind that drive humanity to the stars also shape how we live on Earth. We employ modern AI technologies to support our editorial workflows; every published piece is editorially directed and reviewed.
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