Space, science, and the human mind. Since 1995.

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.

A 1959 programming language still quietly runs modern finance: COBOL handles ATMs, card networks, bank ledgers and government payments, with an estimated $3 trillion in commerce passing through it daily. Now, as the specialists who understand that old code retire, banks are paying premium rates just to keep it from breaking.

The strange thing about COBOL is not that it is old. Many things in finance are old.

Jun 29, 2026

In February 2023, a detector 3.5 kilometres beneath the Mediterranean caught the aftermath of the most energetic neutrino ever seen — a 220-petaelectronvolt ghost particle, roughly 16,000 times beyond CERN’s strongest collisions, with no confirmed source anywhere in the sky.

In February 2023, a single particle crossed a detector resting on the floor of the Mediterranean, and it carried more energy than any neutrino ever recorded.

Jun 29, 2026

A 2025 solid-state lithium–sulfur study hit about 505 Wh/kg at the cell level, and a Tsinghua quasi-solid-state battery reached 604 Wh/kg, more than double many conventional lithium-ion cells. If either chemistry survives the jump from lab to mass-produced EV packs, it could mean the same range with a much lighter battery, or far longer range without the extra weight.

The first thing to say about a 604 Wh/kg battery cell is that it is not a 604 Wh/kg electric vehicle pack.

Jun 29, 2026

We tend to think the US is safely ahead in the new Moon race, but China has already put its Lanyue lander through simulated lunar landing and takeoff tests — then fired its Mengzhou crew capsule away from a Long March 10A prototype at maximum aerodynamic pressure, in an integrated abort-and-recovery demo that NASA’s expendable Space Launch System was never designed to match.

It is comfortable to assume that the United States is safely ahead in the return to the Moon.

Jun 29, 2026

We assumed humpback whales had to reach warm tropical waters before giving birth, but a 2025 UNSW-led study found newborn calves as far south as Tasmania — around 1,500 kilometres beyond the accepted calving zone — suggesting some mothers give birth mid-migration and keep swimming north with their calves.

For decades, the clean version of humpback whale migration was easy to describe.

Jun 29, 2026

The record Apollo 13 set for the farthest humans had ever travelled from Earth was never meant to be a record — it was a survival manoeuvre after an explosion, and Artemis II quietly surpassed it on a clear April morning in 2026

The farthest humans had ever travelled from Earth used to be a record born out of failure.

Jun 28, 2026

SpaceX launched 165 Falcon 9 rockets into orbit in 2025 — nearly one every other day — accounting for roughly 85% of all U.S. orbital launches and almost twice as many orbital launches as the entire nation of China managed that year.

SpaceX flew 165 Falcon 9 missions in 2025. That is a launch roughly every other day, sustained across a full year, and it amounts to about 85 per cent of all…

Jun 28, 2026

NASA has already watched dormant herpes viruses, including the one behind chickenpox and shingles, reactivate in astronauts aboard the International Space Station. Artemis II has now carried that question into deep space: more than 252,000 miles from Earth, the crew collected saliva samples to test whether radiation, isolation and distance trigger the same hidden immune response beyond low Earth orbit.

For years, NASA has used the International Space Station to watch a quiet signal of astronaut stress: dormant herpes viruses becoming detectable again during spaceflight.

Jun 28, 2026

The little blue pill prescribed today around the world for erectile dysfunction was originally developed in the early 1990s by Pfizer as a treatment for chest pain — and during the early trials, the male volunteers reported a side effect they were extremely reluctant to give up.

The most commercially successful pharmaceutical product of the late 20th century was, in essential respects, invented by a group of middle-aged Welsh men in a…

Jun 28, 2026

In 1977, a team of American marine geologists in a small research submarine descended to the seafloor of the Galápagos Rift and discovered something no biology textbook on Earth had ever predicted — an entire thriving ecosystem of giant tube worms, ghostly white crabs, and microbial life sustained not by sunlight but by heat and chemicals leaking out of the planet’s interior

There were no biologists on board the research vessel that day. There were no biologists on board because no one in 1977 expected to find any biology.

Jun 28, 2026

For centuries, European sailors told stories of a sea monster called the kraken — a vast tentacled creature that dragged ships down into the deep — and although marine biologists confirmed in the 1850s that the kraken was a real animal they named the giant squid, no one managed to photograph a living one until two Japanese scientists succeeded in September 2004

Imagine spending two years of your life and 23 separate deployments of a self-rigged underwater camera system, lowered nearly a kilometre into the deep ocean…

Jun 28, 2026

In April 2026, four Artemis II astronauts flew farther from Earth than any humans in history, reaching 406,771 kilometres from home — breaking a record Apollo 13 had held since 1970, without Artemis II ever landing on the Moon.

Artemis II did not land on the Moon. It did something quieter but historically precise: it carried four people farther from Earth than any humans had ever travelled, then brought them home.

Jun 28, 2026

In an ancient Martian river channel, Perseverance drilled into a mudstone called Cheyava Falls and found tiny “leopard spot” minerals tangled with organic carbon — patterns that, on Earth, can be left behind when microbes consume organic matter, though scientists still can’t rule out non-living chemistry.

A drilled rock core from an ancient Martian river channel has given Perseverance scientists one of the mission's most interesting and difficult findings: a…

Jun 28, 2026

The many-worlds interpretation tackles one of physics’ hardest puzzles — why quantum objects seem to stop behaving like waves when they are measured — by arguing that they never stop at all: every possible outcome happens, but we only experience the branch we end up in.

The many-worlds interpretation begins with a refusal to add a special rule for measurement.

Jun 28, 2026

The most effective anti-aging drug ever tested on a mammal was discovered by accident in 1964 in a soil sample collected from the volcanic ground of Easter Island — and the chemical, now called rapamycin, has been shown to extend the maximum lifespan of laboratory mice by up to 38 per cent

The most effective anti-aging drug ever tested on a mammal was not invented in a laboratory.

Jun 28, 2026

In 2020, something near the centre of the Milky Way switched on and off six times in radio waves, then disappeared from every follow-up search in X-rays and infrared — leaving astronomers with only the name ASKAP J173608.2−321635 and the possibility of an entirely new kind of object.

ASKAP J173608.2-321635 is not a name built for memory. It is a coordinate label, the kind astronomers use when an object has not yet earned a more familiar identity.

Jun 28, 2026