Editorial Team

Space Daily Editorial Team

Editorial Team

The Space Daily Editorial Team produces content across our two editorial pillars: space industry news and Mind & Meaning. We cover launches, missions, satellites, defense, and the technology of getting humans to space, alongside the psychology of ambition, isolation, and meaning under extremes. Articles reflect our team's collective editorial process, source verification, drafting, technical review, and editing, rather than a single writer's work. Space Daily takes editorial responsibility for content under this byline. For more on how we work, see our editorial policy.

Tech Space

Starship’s 13th flight is being sold as a Starlink deployment test, but the engine relight problem it needs to solve is the one quietly rewriting NASA’s Artemis timeline

SpaceX is targeting Thursday for the 13th full-scale test flight of Starship, a mission that will carry Starlink satellites into a suborbital trajectory and…

Jul 16, 2026

Culture

Nearly half of South Korea’s roughly 51 million citizens share just four family names — Kim (about 21.5 percent of the population), Lee (14.7 percent), Park (8.4 percent) and Choi (4.7 percent) — a legacy of the country’s history: commoners were only formally granted surnames within the last 150 years, and many took those already held by nobility

In South Korea's 2015 census, one in five people was named Kim: 21.5 percent of the population, or 10.69 million people.

Jul 16, 2026

Space Scopes

In March 2025, four rookie astronauts on SpaceX’s Fram2 polar mission carried a portable X-ray machine into orbit, and three of them, after just four hours of preflight training, produced the first diagnostic radiographs ever taken in space, imaging each other and a smartwatch without any support from the ground

On March 31, 2025, four first-time astronauts flying the first human mission ever to loop directly over Earth's poles carried a commercial off-the-shelf X-ray…

Jul 16, 2026

Saturn Daily

Titan is the only place beyond Earth where a spacecraft has landed on a surface with liquid nearby, and the probe sent back the sound of alien wind before falling silent forever

On 14 January 2005, a small European probe dropped through an orange atmosphere, broke through the haze and settled onto a world nearly 1.5 billion kilometres from the Sun.

Jul 16, 2026

Moon Daily

In February 1966, the Soviet Luna 9 probe bounced across the Ocean of Storms on airbags and unfolded like a metal flower, and within hours a British radio observatory intercepted its picture signal and published the first photograph from the surface of the Moon before Moscow had finished developing its own copy

In February 1966, the Soviet Luna 9 probe bounced across the Ocean of Storms and unfolded four petal antennas — and Britain's Jodrell Bank observatory intercepted its picture signal, recognised the newspaper-fax format, and published the first photograph from the Moon's surface before Moscow could.

Jul 16, 2026

Science

As few as four or five raw or undercooked red kidney beans can trigger severe vomiting and diarrhoea — and the safest preparation is soaking them, then giving them a 30-minute rolling boil

Four or five raw red kidney beans carry enough phytohaemagglutinin to hospitalise a healthy adult within hours. A 2018 outbreak in Brittany showed exactly what happens when the cooking temperature stays below a full boil.

Jul 16, 2026

Mind & Meaning

In rural China, women created Nüshu, a script known as “women’s writing” — passed quietly from woman to woman for centuries in a society where many were never taught to read or write Chinese

He Yanxin died in October 2025, aged 86, in Jiangyong County in China's Hunan province.

Jul 16, 2026

Human Behaviour

Denmark’s concept of hygge has no exact English equivalent: it describes a quality of warmth, safety, and unhurried togetherness that is often credited with some of the highest reported life-satisfaction scores measured anywhere in the world

Hygge has become one of those foreign words English-speakers reach for when their own language feels thin.

Jul 16, 2026

Mind & Meaning

Bangladesh was once dismissed as a “basket case.” Today it is a lower-middle-income economy, transformed in large part by a garment industry that employed millions of women and, so the story goes, turned cheap clothing into a national ladder out of poverty

For half a century, a single insult has trailed Bangladesh through the development literature: the country once written off as a basket case.

Jul 16, 2026

Space Travel

In November 1970, a Soviet rover the size of a bathtub rolled off the Luna 17 lander and crawled across the Sea of Rains at 100 metres per hour, driven by five men in a bunker near Simferopol who had never seen the Moon and faced a 2.5-second delay between command and the wheels responding

In November 1970, the Soviet Union rolled Lunokhod 1 off the Luna 17 lander onto Mare Imbrium, becoming the first vehicle to drive on another world — steered from a control room in Simferopol through a 2.5-second radio delay, at a top speed slower than a walking human.

Jul 16, 2026

Mind & Meaning

The biggest club soccer matches draw audiences that dwarf most American sports finals — and only recently have U.S. investors begun treating soccer not as a niche, but as the world’s dominant sports market

On Sunday, 19 July, Spain will play Argentina in the FIFA World Cup final at MetLife Stadium in East Rutherford, New Jersey, the first men's World Cup final…

Jul 16, 2026

Earth News

Explorers who lowered themselves into a Vietnamese cave found a passage so vast it holds its own jungle, its own river and its own weather, a hidden world large enough to swallow a skyscraper

In the early 1990s, Hồ Khanh found a dark opening while moving through the forest of central Vietnam.

Jul 16, 2026

Human Behaviour

Loneliness among older adults isn’t rare — surveys find nearly half of people over 60 report it, and the standard advice to join a club rarely touches the pattern underneath

Nearly half of adults over 60 report loneliness — but the standard prescription of joining a club rarely helps, because subjective loneliness and objective isolation are two different problems with two different cures.

Jul 16, 2026

Earth Observation

When the sun, moon and Earth line up at new and full moon, their tidal pulls stack into the month’s biggest highs and lowest lows — spring tides that are simply solar system geometry printed on a weekly tide table

Twice a month, at new and full moon, the Sun and Moon align with Earth and their tidal pulls stack together — producing spring tides that are simply solar system geometry printed on a weekly tide table.

Jul 16, 2026

Human Behaviour

Good people are usually excellent at the responding half of connection — validating, listening, making others feel seen — while never offering anything vulnerable of their own, which is why they feel unknown in a room full of people who like them

The psychologist Sidney Jourard called it the disclosure paradox — people exceptional at listening and validating others often walk home feeling completely unknown, because being liked and being known are not the same experience.

Jul 16, 2026

Space Industry

In July 2026, Cambridge economist Alessio Terzi and colleagues published the largest launch-cost dataset ever assembled — 4,400 rockets flown since 1960 — and projected that the price of putting a kilogram into orbit will fall from $3,868 last year to $273 by 2040, if the company driving the collapse does not become its own bottleneck

In July 2026, a research team led by Alessio Terzi, an assistant professor at Cambridge's Bennett School of Public Policy, and Francesco Nicoli of the…

Jul 16, 2026