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.

Mind & Meaning

In 2023, researchers placed a GPS collar on a young bull elephant in Zambia. Two years later, his path stretched across four countries and six national parks, revealing the ancient routes elephants still remember, and the human borders now cutting through them

A young bull elephant in southern Africa has spent the past two years walking. Fitted with a GPS collar north of Sioma Ngwezi National Park in Zambia in June 2023, the animal, known to researchers as Z16, has since covered close to 12,000 kilometres on foot.

Jul 15, 2026

Science

In November 1957, a stray dog from Moscow’s streets was strapped into Sputnik 2 and launched into orbit in a capsule never designed to come home — and Soviet officials claimed for 45 years that Laika had died painlessly after several days, until a scientist admitted in 2002 she had died within hours when the thermal control failed.

{"content":"On 3 November 1957, a small mongrel dog named Laika lay strapped inside a pressurised capsule roughly the size of a washing machine, riding a modified R-7 intercontinental ballistic mis

Jul 15, 2026

Human Behaviour

In 2019, Victor Vescovo made the deepest solo dive in human history, descending nearly 11 kilometres into the Challenger Deep, and at the bottom of the ocean he reported seeing what looked like a plastic bag

In late April 2019, Victor Vescovo took a two-person titanium submersible called the DSV Limiting Factor alone to the floor of the Challenger Deep, the lowest point in the Mariana Trench, and stayed there for about four hours.

Jul 15, 2026

Science

Your blood is never blue, not even in the veins under your skin. Starved of oxygen it turns a dark burgundy red — never blue — and the bluish tint you notice is just a trick of light, not the blood’s colour

Look at the veins on the back of your hand. They probably read as blue, maybe faintly green, and the anatomy poster on the classroom wall backs you up: arteries in red, veins in blue.

Jul 15, 2026

Deep Space

Human radio signals have expanded into space for more than a century, but they have crossed only a tiny bubble of the Milky Way and most of the galaxy has no possible way to know we exist

Humanity has been changing the radio sky for a little over a century. Early experimental transmissions, commercial broadcasting, military radar, television, satellite links and communications with spacecraft have all sent some energy beyond Earth.

Jul 15, 2026

Moon Daily

The moon is drifting away from Earth by about 3.8 centimetres a year — measured to the millimetre by bouncing laser light off mirrors the Apollo astronauts left sitting in the lunar dust more than half a century ago

The corner-cube reflectors Buzz Aldrin, Alan Shepard and David Scott left on the Moon between 1969 and 1971 are still returning laser pulses fired from Earth — and 57 years of measurements show our nearest neighbour is receding at exactly 3.8 centimetres a year, the rate a human fingernail grows.

Jul 15, 2026

Human Behaviour

Researchers who follow people into retirement keep finding the same curve: the first year feels like freedom, and somewhere around year two the loneliness arrives, once work invitations quietly thin out

Longitudinal studies of retirees keep finding the same two-year arc: a euphoric first year of travel and rest, followed by a sharp dip around month fourteen when workplace weak ties dissolve and loneliness moves in.

Jul 15, 2026

Space Travel

Apollo 12 was struck by lightning twice within a minute of launch and survived because one flight controller recognized an obscure electrical pattern almost nobody else in Mission Control understood

Thirty-six and a half seconds after Apollo 12 left Kennedy Space Center on 14 November 1969, lightning travelled through the Saturn V and its exhaust trail.

Jul 15, 2026

Flora And Fauna

In 1960, anthropologist Louis Leakey sent a 26-year-old English secretary named Jane Goodall — who had no university degree and no scientific training — to a stretch of forest called Gombe to study wild chimpanzees. Within months she had observed a chimpanzee stripping leaves off a stalk to fish termites from a mound, overturning the long-held belief that only humans made and used tools

For most of the twentieth century, science had a simple test for what made us human: we made tools, and no other animal did.

Jul 15, 2026

Deep Space

Voyager 1 crossed the edge of the Sun’s protective bubble and entered interstellar space, but instead of fading gently into the void it met a strange, porous boundary scientists had not anticipated

For six years one of Voyager 1's instruments had counted the same steady drizzle of low-energy particles streaming off the Sun.

Jul 15, 2026

Mind & Meaning

In the 1820s, a man who could not read invented a writing system for the Cherokee people — and within a generation, they had become more literate than the Americans around them

The man who devised a complete writing system for the Cherokee language could not read a word of any language when he began.

Jul 15, 2026

Human Behaviour

Japan has a word for the kind of person who spends a lifetime perfecting one craft — shokunin — whether making sushi, knives, ramen, or pottery, and the culture treats that devotion not as obsession, but as a genuine respect for the work itself

There is a certain kind of worker who has spent forty years doing one thing. Not forty years in a field, or a company, or a broad profession, but forty years…

Jul 15, 2026

Physics News

Line up Jupiter, Venus and every other planet in perfect alignment and their combined tug on Earth’s ocean is smaller than the effect of a passing weather front — Jupiter alone manages two-thousandths of one per cent of the moon’s pull

Jupiter, at 318 Earth masses, produces a tidal pull on our oceans equal to two-thousandths of one per cent of the Moon's — and combining every planet in perfect alignment still loses to an ordinary weather front.

Jul 15, 2026

Human Behaviour

The word ‘meme’ appeared in print for the first time in Richard Dawkins’ 1976 book The Selfish Gene, describing how ideas compete for survival the same way genes do — a metaphor so precise the internet proved it true 30 years later

The word arrives late in the book. Richard Dawkins, the esteemed evolutionary biologist, spends most of The Selfish Gene, published by Oxford University Press…

Jul 15, 2026

Moon Daily

Titan holds hundreds of times more liquid hydrocarbons than every known oil and gas reserve on Earth combined, yet you couldn’t light a single drop — its air is nitrogen and methane, with almost no oxygen, so a campfire is physically impossible

Titan's methane seas hold hundreds of times more hydrocarbon than every oil and gas reserve on Earth, but with almost no oxygen in the air, none of it can burn.

Jul 15, 2026

Science

Scientists searching for alien life are looking ever further out, to Europa, a moon of Jupiter hiding an ocean beneath its ice that could resemble the dark seas where life survives on Earth

The case for looking for life on Europa runs through the bottom of Earth's own ocean.

Jul 15, 2026