Writer at Space Daily

Lachlan Brown

Editor-in-Chief

Lachlan Brown is a co-founder of Brown Brothers Media and one of Space Daily's three Co-Publishers. He is Space Daily's Editor-in-Chief and the author of several books on Buddhism, mindfulness, and relationships, and oversees content operations and publishing strategy across the network. At Space Daily, Lachlan focuses on the Mind & Meaning pillar — the psychology of ambition, isolation, and meaning under extremes.

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Science

Jupiter pulls so hard on Io that the moon’s solid ground rises and falls by as much as 100 metres every orbit — a tide in rock the height of a 30-storey building, and the repeated flexing powers the most volcanically active world in the Solar System

Io's ground can move by as much as 100 metres as Jupiter's changing tide flexes the moon, converting orbital energy into the heat that drives its volcanoes.

Aug 21, 2026

Science

NASA plans to send a working nuclear reactor toward Mars in late 2028. Space Reactor-1 Freedom will split uranium atoms in deep space to generate electricity for its engines — the first test of a technology NASA hopes will eventually help power human missions across the Solar System.

SR-1 Freedom would start a 20-kilowatt-electric HALEU reactor after Earth escape, power a Hall thruster and deliver three SkyFall helicopters at Mars in 2029.

Aug 21, 2026

Science

Earth’s atmosphere does not end anywhere near the edge of space: a ghostly hydrogen cloud called the geocorona stretches 630,000 kilometres out — far enough to envelop the Moon and make every lunar mission, technically, a journey through the outermost air of home

SOHO traced Earth's neutral-hydrogen geocorona beyond the Moon, but its density at lunar distance is only about 0.2 atom per cubic centimetre.

Aug 21, 2026

Science

The Moon is rusting even though it has no air and almost no liquid water — and the leading explanation is that oxygen escaping Earth rides our magnetic tail 385,000 kilometres into space during the few days each month when the solar wind is blocked

Chandrayaan-1 found hematite near the lunar poles. Orbital patterns and laboratory tests point to oxygen ions escaping Earth and reaching the Moon through our magnetotail.

Aug 21, 2026

Science

Scientists thought the exceptionally quiet Sun of 2008 might be slipping into a decades-long lull. Instead the trend reversed, and a NASA study published in September 2025 found that its underlying solar-wind activity has been strengthening for nearly two decades.

Solar-wind speed, density, temperature, pressure and magnetic-field strength all rose after the deep 2008 minimum, reversing a decline that had persisted since the 1980s.

Aug 21, 2026

Science

JWST found an object in the early universe whose dense hydrogen cocoon made it look eerily like an enormous star — until astronomers realized it was radiating roughly 100 billion times the Sun’s luminosity, with a growing black hole hidden inside.

MoM-BH*-1's extreme Balmer break shows how dense hydrogen can reprocess an accreting black hole's light into a spectrum with the outward appearance of an enormous star.

Aug 21, 2026

Science

The James Webb Space Telescope has found an object from just 660 million years after the Big Bang that looks remarkably like a star but shines with roughly 100 billion times the Sun’s luminosity — far too bright to be powered by normal stellar fusion. The best explanation is a growing black hole wrapped in an extraordinarily dense hydrogen envelope spanning roughly the size of the Solar System.

MoM-BH*-1 emits roughly 100 billion Suns' worth of power. Webb measured the spectrum; the Solar-System-scale hydrogen envelope comes from the model that best fits it.

Aug 20, 2026

Science

On most of the Moon, sunset begins a 354-hour night. For nearly 15 Earth days the Sun doesn’t rise and surface temperatures can fall toward −173°C — one reason engineers are deliberately hunting for unusually sunlit ground near the lunar south pole.

A normal lunar night lasts about 354 hours. Near the south pole, terrain can keep the Sun visible far longer, but even the brightest sites still need stored power.

Aug 20, 2026

Science

The world banned CFCs and put the ozone layer on a path to recovery. Now thousands of dying satellites are introducing aluminium oxide nanoparticles into the upper atmosphere — particles scientists warn can catalyse the chlorine chemistry that destroys ozone.

Satellite reentries are adding alumina nanoparticles to the upper atmosphere. The ozone-depletion pathway is credible, but current models disagree sharply on its scale.

Aug 20, 2026

Marsdaily

Mars dirt looks deceptively ordinary, yet samples contain around 0.5% perchlorate salts that can disrupt the human thyroid — meaning the red dust astronauts track inside their habitat could be chemically toxic as well as annoyingly impossible to keep out.

Phoenix measured 0.4 to 0.6 per cent perchlorate in Martian soil. NASA's 2026 dust limit shows why the thyroid hazard is real but manageable through habitat engineering.

Aug 20, 2026

Science

In 2024, a piece of a 5,800-pound battery pallet jettisoned from the International Space Station survived re-entry and punched through a Florida family’s roof and two floors — exposing an awkward feature of space law: the treaties governing falling space objects hold launching nations responsible, rather than giving victims a direct international claim against the private companies involved.

A NASA battery-pallet fragment struck a Florida home, revealing how international space law routes liability through launching states while victims rely on diplomatic or domestic claims processes.

Aug 19, 2026

Saturn Daily

NASA’s Dragonfly rotorcraft will launch on a SpaceX Falcon Heavy in July 2028 and spend six and a half years crossing the solar system to land on a moon that has weather, seasons, rivers and seas — with methane and ethane flowing across its surface instead of water.

Dragonfly's July 2028 target launch begins a six-and-a-half-year journey to Titan, where a nuclear-powered flying laboratory will compare organic dunes, weather and impact terrain.

Aug 19, 2026

Tech Space

Sending a kilogram to orbit cost roughly $55,000 in the Space Shuttle era. Reusable rockets have brought the theoretical cost down to a few thousand dollars today. If Starship eventually achieves rapid full reusability, some projections put the figure below $100/kg — potentially turning access to orbit from an extraordinary expense into something approaching ordinary transportation.

Launch cost has fallen dramatically, but Shuttle, Falcon and Starship figures measure different things. The sub-$100/kg case still depends on full reuse, cadence and full payloads.

Aug 18, 2026

Science

Solar power disappears every night, but a data centre cannot. That engineering mismatch is turning Google, Amazon and other technology giants into some of the world’s most important buyers of battery storage, financing gigawatt-scale systems to keep increasingly power-hungry AI infrastructure supplied around the clock.

AI data centres need electricity after sunset. Google and Amazon are helping finance gigawatt-scale storage, but duration, firm generation and flexible demand still matter.

Aug 18, 2026

Stellar Chemistry

Astronomers discovered a reservoir of water vapor 12 billion light-years away containing 140 trillion times as much water as all of Earth’s oceans combined — surrounding a quasar that releases as much energy as a thousand trillion Suns.

The 140-trillion-oceans figure is a modelled inventory of diffuse water vapour around a gravitationally lensed quasar at redshift 3.91.

Aug 15, 2026

Outer Planets

The idea that Earth is the Solar System’s ultimate water world is misleading: Europa likely holds more than twice our ocean’s volume beneath a crust of ice, while Enceladus is continuously venting material from its hidden ocean directly into space.

Europa may contain about 3 billion cubic kilometres of liquid water, while Enceladus offers spacecraft direct access to material from a hidden ocean.

Aug 15, 2026