A Space Daily column

Mission Notes

Spaceflight and industry

Mission Notes follows the business and engineering of spaceflight. Rockets, satellites, contracts, and the industry behind the missions. Space Daily has reported on this beat since 1995, when the launch industry was a fraction of its current size.

Marsdaily

The stripes on Perseverance’s parachute were mostly there so engineers could see how the canopy was oriented, but the pattern also hid a message in binary, and the internet decoded it within hours of the landing — a motto, and a set of coordinates pointing at a spot on Earth

NASA engineers hid a secret message in the Perseverance rover's parachute stripes—one that amateur codebreakers cracked before the dust had settled on Mars.

Aug 11, 2026

Solar Science

In 1868, French astronomer Pierre Janssen pointed a spectroscope at a solar eclipse in India and saw a yellow line that matched no known element on Earth, and the gas he identified in the Sun’s chromosphere — named helium, after helios — would not be found on this planet for another 27 years, when a Scottish chemist finally coaxed it from a lump of uranium ore

During a total solar eclipse in Guntur, India on 18 August 1868, Pierre Janssen saw a yellow spectral line that matched no known element on Earth. The gas he had spotted in the Sun's chromosphere would not be isolated on this planet for another 27 years.

Aug 9, 2026

Science

In 1977, Carl Sagan and Frank Drake sat in a Cornell office arguing over what to put on the Voyager Golden Record, and among the greetings in 55 languages, the whale song, and the Bach they included the sound of a young woman’s brainwaves recorded while she thought about being in love.

In 1977, Ann Druyan recorded an hour of her brainwaves at Bellevue Hospital days after agreeing to marry Carl Sagan. A compressed minute of that recording now rides both Voyager spacecraft into interstellar space.

Aug 9, 2026

Science

The Soviet Buran shuttle flew exactly once, in November 1988, completing two unmanned orbits and landing itself in a crosswind on a Kazakh runway with such precision that engineers found it stopped within 3 metres of the centreline — and then the program was cancelled and the orbiter was crushed 14 years later when its hangar roof collapsed.

In November 1988, the Soviet Buran shuttle launched from Baikonur, orbited Earth twice, and landed itself in a crosswind snowstorm with no crew aboard. It never flew again. Fourteen years later a collapsing hangar roof crushed the only spacecraft that had ever completed a fully automated orbital mission.

Aug 9, 2026

Aerospace

NASA’s whole 2026 budget was 24 billion dollars, a new poverty-economics study puts the real price of ending extreme poverty at up to 318 billion dollars a year, and the math behind ‘fund poverty instead of space’ turns out to run the wrong direction

A popular argument for cutting space spending reveals a hard truth: the money gap for ending global poverty is orders of magnitude larger than most people realize.

Aug 9, 2026

Spacemart

In Renens, Switzerland, a company called SWISSto12 is building geostationary satellites the size of an industrial washing machine and a fifth the mass of the multi-ton spacecraft they replace, and this week it raised $70 million on a bet that governments would rather own one outright than lease capacity on someone else’s constellation

The HummingSat is a geostationary communications satellite roughly the size of an industrial washing machine, and it weighs about a ton — around a fifth the…

Jul 17, 2026

Internet Space

Rocket Lab to acquire Iridium in an $8 billion deal, gaining a global satellite network and rare spectrum

The cash-and-stock agreement, valued at about $8 billion and expected to close in mid-2027, would turn the launch company into a vertically integrated operator of its own communications constellation.

Jul 3, 2026