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

Complex life may have started before Earth had much oxygen at all. A University of Bristol-led Nature study found that the ancient archaeal lineage behind all plants, animals and fungi began developing complex cellular machinery in anoxic oceans almost 2.9 billion years ago — nearly a billion years earlier than some scientists thought.

Complex life is usually told as an oxygen story. First Earth changed, then life became more complicated: oxygen rose, cells gained new energy options, and the long route toward plants, animals and fungi opened up.

Jun 28, 2026

Science

China was effectively shut out of the International Space Station after the United States passed the Wolf Amendment in 2011, so it built its own. If the ISS retires on schedule around 2030 and no commercial successor is ready, China’s Tiangong could become the only permanently crewed outpost in Earth orbit.

The International Space Station is still the larger and more international laboratory in orbit.

Jun 28, 2026

Science

For billions of years, the Moon’s almost airless surface has been exposed to the solar wind, letting helium-3 become trapped in its soil — making the Moon the most tempting nearby reservoir of a fusion fuel that is almost nonexistent on Earth.

The Moon has no helium-3 mine, and no power grid on Earth is waiting for lunar fuel to arrive.

Jun 27, 2026

Science

Researchers linked to Washington State University proposed in 2026 that salty, oxidant-rich ice on Europa’s surface could become dense and weak enough to detach and slowly sink through the moon’s ice shell — potentially carrying life-supporting chemistry down to the hidden ocean in as little as 30,000 years under the most favorable model conditions.

A 2026 Europa model proposes that salty, weakened surface ice could founder through the shell, offering a possible path for oxidant chemistry to reach the ocean.

Jun 27, 2026

Science

Only one spacecraft has ever visited Uranus or Neptune: Voyager 2, which flew past Uranus in 1986 and Neptune in 1989. Nearly four decades later, no mission has returned, leaving many of the biggest questions those flybys raised — about the planets’ interiors, strange magnetic fields, rings, and moons — still unresolved.

Voyager 2 remains the only spacecraft to have visited Uranus and Neptune, leaving many ice-giant questions to be answered by a future orbiter or probe.

Jun 27, 2026

Science

Scientists took one of the naked mole rat’s longevity tricks — a gene that helps it produce unusually protective hyaluronan — and put it into mice. The result: the mice lived longer, had less inflammation, and were more resistant to tumours.

A Nature mouse study tested whether one naked mole-rat longevity trait, high-molecular-mass hyaluronan production through nmrHas2, could transfer healthspan benefits across species.

Jun 27, 2026

Science

A McMaster University AI model called SyntheMol-RL designed a new antibiotic candidate by searching a chemical space of 46 billion possible compounds — a scale far beyond physical lab screens, which usually test hundreds of thousands to a few million molecules.

A McMaster AI model reportedly searched 46 billion possible compounds for a new antibiotic candidate, showing how computational chemical space can exceed physical screening.

Jun 27, 2026

Science

We tend to think quantum tunnelling is a subatomic curiosity, but in 1984 and 1985 physicists at UC Berkeley showed that a superconducting electrical circuit big enough to hold in your hand could tunnel from one state to another — a discovery that won the 2025 Nobel Prize in Physics.

A look at the Berkeley superconducting circuit experiments that demonstrated macroscopic quantum tunnelling and energy quantisation, later recognised by the 2025 Nobel Prize in Physics.

Jun 27, 2026

Science

In 2018, low Earth orbit still had months of margin: if satellites stopped dodging one another, researchers estimate it could take 164 days before a catastrophic collision. By 2025, after the rise of megaconstellations, that margin had collapsed to just 5.5 days.

A proposed CRASH Clock metric estimates how low Earth orbit's recovery margin has tightened as megaconstellations have increased orbital density.

Jun 27, 2026

Science

A bowhead whale can live for more than 200 years, yet it appears unusually resistant to cancer — and its genome carries genetic changes that may help explain why. Researchers have found signs of enhanced DNA repair in bowhead cells, turning one of the Arctic’s oldest mammals into a serious model for understanding aging itself.

Bowhead whales can live beyond 200 years, and genome and cell studies point to DNA repair as one possible clue to their unusual cancer resistance.

Jun 27, 2026

Science

In 1977, Ann Druyan recorded an hour of her brainwaves and heartbeat just two days after she and Carl Sagan agreed to marry, and NASA pressed that compressed minute onto Voyager’s Golden Record as a private love letter now more than 25 billion kilometres from Earth

Ann Druyan's compressed life-signs recording on Voyager's Golden Record remains one of the mission's most intimate human details.

Jun 27, 2026

Science

For decades, marine biologists have followed a lone whale in the North Pacific known as “52 Blue” because it sings at a frequency of 52 hertz — far higher than the great baleen whales it swims among — meaning that for its entire life it has been calling out into the dark in a voice that, as far as anyone knows, no other whale has ever answered

The whale known as 52 Blue is famous for a call around 52 hertz, but the science is more careful than the myth of the loneliest whale.

Jun 27, 2026

Science

Nearly all of the internet’s international data — the messages, calls, and searches that cross continents — travels through fibre-optic cables laid on a seafloor that has never been fully surveyed, running over terrain no human eye has seen

International data mostly crosses oceans through subsea fibre cables, even though the wider seafloor remains only partly mapped and barely seen directly.

Jun 27, 2026

Science

Scientists long thought life in the deepest ocean trenches depended mostly on scraps of sunlight-fed life drifting down from above — but at 9,500 metres beneath the Pacific, researchers found whole communities of tubeworms and clams powered instead by methane and hydrogen sulfide seeping from cracks in the seafloor.

For much of modern ocean science, the deepest trenches were treated as places where life survived on leftovers.

Jun 26, 2026

Chip Tech

TSMC’s most advanced fab in Hsinchu prints transistors 25,000 times thinner than a human hair — using light that doesn’t naturally exist on Earth

Inside TSMC's Hsinchu fabs, plasma-driven extreme ultraviolet light at 13.5 nanometres prints circuit features 25,000 times finer than a human hair — using light that doesn't naturally reach Earth's surface.

Jun 26, 2026

Aerospace

SpaceX won a NASA contract worth up to $843 million to build a single machine whose only job is to drag the space station out of orbit and into the Pacific Ocean

NASA awarded SpaceX a contract worth up to $843 million in June 2024 to build a single-use vehicle whose only purpose is to deorbit the International Space Station into the Pacific Ocean around 2030, ending more than three decades of continuous human presence aboard the largest object ever assembled in orbit.

Jun 26, 2026