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.

Science

A damaged mitochondrion is worse than useless — it leaks and drags down the entire cell around it, like an engine slowly clogging on its own exhaust, until a recycling crew dismantles it

A damaged mitochondrion leaks reactive oxygen species that corrode the cell around it — so a quality-control system built on PINK1, Parkin, and autophagosomes tags and dismantles failing organelles before they poison their neighbours. When that recycling crew fails, Parkinson's, insulin resistance, and accelerated aging follow.

Jul 2, 2026

Moon Daily

A tiny “quasi-moon” called Kamoʻoalewa shadows Earth’s orbit and may be a piece of the actual Moon blasted into space by an ancient impact — and China’s Tianwen-2 spacecraft is now closing in to bring a sample back to Earth.

Earth has one Moon, but it does not travel entirely alone. A small asteroid called Kamoʻoalewa loops along beside our planet as a "quasi-moon," and there is real evidence that it may be a fragment of the actual Moon, flung into space by an ancient impact.

Jul 2, 2026

Science

In 2024, engineers rescued Voyager 1 after it spent months transmitting gibberish, remotely rewriting and relocating pieces of 46-year-old code around a failed memory chip from more than 24 billion kilometres away.

In late 2023, one of the most distant machines humanity has ever built started talking nonsense.

Jul 2, 2026

Science

The truth about “using only 10% of your brain”: virtually every part of the brain is active almost all the time — the organ is 2% of body mass but burns about 20% of your energy, which no body would spend on idle tissue; the line likely grew out of a misread William James remark about untapped potential

The idea that we use only a tenth of our brains is appealing. It suggests a huge reserve waiting to be switched on.

Jul 2, 2026

Science

In 2024, researchers reported something that should have been impossible: metallic nodules scattered across the deep Pacific seafloor appeared to be producing oxygen in total darkness, creating “dark oxygen” without a single ray of sunlight.

The deep ocean is usually treated as the end of the oxygen story. Sunlit organisms near the surface make oxygen through photosynthesis, currents carry some of it downward, and life on the abyssal seafloor slowly consumes it.

Jul 2, 2026

Aerospace

A software error ended Russia’s only Moon landing attempt in nearly fifty years in 2023, two years before the country agreed to help build a permanent lunar power station by 2036

On August 19, 2023, Russia's Luna-25 spacecraft crashed into the Moon during a routine maneuver meant to lower its orbit ahead of a landing attempt near the lunar south pole.

Jul 2, 2026

Culture

The board game Monopoly — now a byword for ruthless capitalism — was adapted from a game a progressive woman patented decades earlier to teach players the evils of monopoly and land-grabbing, and she was paid $500 for it and left out of the story entirely

Monopoly, as most people play it, rewards the winner who owns everything and drives everyone else off the board.

Jul 2, 2026

Aerospace

A fully built, fully tested lunar rover named VIPER faced dismantlement for parts after its 2024 cancellation, and NASA is now considering sending a Mars engineering testbed that has spent its working life in a JPL rock yard to the Moon instead

NASA announced on June 30, 2026, that it is considering sending PROMISE, an engineering test rover built at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory as a stand-in for the Curiosity and Perseverance Mars rovers, to the lunar surface.

Jul 1, 2026

Aerospace

Two hundred kilometers north of the Arctic Circle, the Esrange rocket range in northern Sweden has fired sounding rockets since the 1960s, and in 2028 it plans to launch Firefly’s Alpha and put the first satellite into orbit from Swedish soil

At a rocket range 200 kilometers north of the Arctic Circle, where Sweden has fired sounding rockets and floated research balloons since the 1960s, crews are…

Jul 1, 2026

Science

The interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS is now thought to be 10 to 12 billion years old, meaning it was already drifting between the stars for more than twice the age of the Sun before our solar system existed.

The newest estimate for interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS changes the scale of the object.

Jul 1, 2026

Technology

Most of us are sure we’d spot a deepfake. We probably wouldn’t: in iProov’s 2025 testing only 0.1% of people correctly told real images and video from AI fakes — and they stayed about 60% confident whether they were right or wrong

Start with the number that should give anyone pause. The biometric identity firm iProov showed 2,000 people in the UK and US a mix of real and AI-made images and video, and asked them to spot the fakes.

Jul 1, 2026

Science

Most of NASA’s first Moon-base robots will depend on solar power, which makes the two-week lunar night one of the whole project’s nastiest problems — but NASA is now considering an odd workaround: sending PROMISE, a JPL engineering twin of its nuclear-powered Mars rovers, to the lunar south pole.

The first hard problem for a Moon base is not building something that works in sunlight.

Jul 1, 2026

Culture

Printed at a Korean Buddhist temple in 1377, the Jikji is the world’s oldest surviving book made with movable metal type — predating Gutenberg’s Bible by some 78 years, though today only its second volume survives, held at the National Library of France in Paris

In July 1377, in a temple on the edge of Cheongju in what is now central South Korea, a group of Buddhist followers finished printing a book using individually cast metal letters.

Jul 1, 2026

Science

The unsettling possibility raised by quantum gravity is that time may not be a basic ingredient of reality. It may be something that emerges only inside the universe, from entanglement, entropy, and relationships between physical systems — while the deeper quantum structure underneath may have no ticking clock at all.

The unsettling possibility in quantum gravity is not just that our clocks might be inaccurate.

Jul 1, 2026

Tectonics

Around 640,000 years ago, the ground beneath Yellowstone blasted out more than 1,000 cubic kilometers of rock, then collapsed in on itself — carving the 45-by-85-km caldera that visitors still walk across today

Park rangers at Yellowstone field a question that catches first-time visitors off guard: where is the volcano?

Jul 1, 2026

Science

The universe appears to be expanding faster than our current model predicts — and James Webb has now strengthened the case that the discrepancy is real, not just a flaw in Hubble’s measurements.

The Hubble tension is not a disagreement about whether the universe is expanding.

Jul 1, 2026