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.

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

Science

For nearly forty years, scientists aimed lasers at the Moon and got nothing back from the Soviet rover Lunokhod 1 — then in 2010, a pulse bounced straight back from a reflector that had been sitting in the lunar dust the whole time

LRO images helped APOLLO researchers relocate Lunokhod 1 in 2010, allowing its long-lost lunar laser reflector to return a strong signal.

Jun 26, 2026

Banking

In 2016, Singapore moved to shut BSI Bank’s local operation after 1MDB-linked accounts moved hundreds of millions of dollars through private-banking structures, and Switzerland’s regulator said the 143-year-old Lugano bank had treated suspicious wealth like a premium client relationship

How a Seychelles shell company, a 143-year-old Swiss private bank, and roughly $700 million in 2009 transfers became the institutional case study that ended BSI — and what the Singapore regulator's 2016 shutdown revealed about the plumbing of global private banking.

Jun 26, 2026

Science

In July 2025, a planetary-defence telescope in Chile built to watch for dangerous asteroids accidentally became the instrument that discovered only the third interstellar object ever seen — a comet now thought to be older than the solar system, sweeping through on a path it will never repeat.

ATLAS, a NASA-funded asteroid warning system, first reported 3I/ATLAS on July 1, 2025, revealing the third known interstellar object.

Jun 26, 2026

Science

On 28 September 1969, a fireball broke apart over a small Victorian farming town called Murchison and scattered black, carbon-rich rocks across the paddocks — and those rocks turned out to contain grains of stardust formed 7 billion years ago, older than the Sun, older than Earth, and the oldest solid material any human has ever held

The Murchison meteorite preserved presolar silicon carbide grains that formed before the Sun, with some dated to roughly 7 billion years old.

Jun 26, 2026

Science

We tend to imagine the Moon as a barren, resourceless rock, but the permanently shadowed craters near its south pole hold something future astronauts may prize more than gold: water ice, confirmed by NASA missions, that could one day be split into oxygen to breathe and hydrogen for rocket fuel.

Permanently shadowed craters near the lunar south pole can trap water ice, a resource that could support life support, oxygen production, and future propellant systems.

Jun 26, 2026

Science

In one drilled Martian rock, Curiosity found 21 organic molecules — seven never before detected on Mars — including a nitrogen-bearing ring structure that belongs to the same chemical family as precursors to RNA and DNA.

Curiosity's Mary Anning 3 sample contained the most diverse collection of organic molecules yet found in a Martian rock, including seven first detections on Mars.

Jun 26, 2026

Science

Harry Harlow gave infant rhesus monkeys a choice between a wire mother that could feed them and a soft cloth mother built for warmth and comfort. Again and again, the monkeys clung to the cloth mother, going to the wire one only when they needed milk — a finding that helped overturn the idea that love was just hunger in disguise.

Harlow's wire-and-cloth mother experiments challenged the idea that early attachment could be explained by feeding alone, while leaving a difficult ethical legacy.

Jun 25, 2026

Science

Astronomers thought Solar System comets gave us a fair sample of comet water, but interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS has blown that idea open: its water carries over 30 times more heavy hydrogen than typical comets formed around our Sun, hinting that our own comet family may be the local oddball — not the cosmic rule.

An ALMA-based analysis reports that water in interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS is enriched in deuterium by more than 30 times typical Solar System comet values.

Jun 25, 2026

Science

In 1909, the chemist Fritz Haber pulled a few millilitres of ammonia out of ordinary air in a Karlsruhe laboratory, and the reaction he started now supplies the nitrogen atoms in roughly half the protein inside every human body alive today

In 1909 the German chemist Fritz Haber found a way to pull nitrogen out of thin air. A 2008 Nature Geoscience paper calculates that roughly half the nitrogen atoms in the protein and DNA of every living human now trace back to that single reaction — a fact with a feeding history, a war history, and a chemistry that still runs on natural gas.

Jun 25, 2026

Science

Astronauts on the Moon, with no atmosphere above them, looked up and saw a white sun — the yellow colour we see from Earth is not the sun’s real colour but an artefact our own atmosphere paints onto it by scattering blue wavelengths sideways into the sky

The yellow Sun of ordinary Earth life is partly an atmospheric effect: Rayleigh scattering sends blue light into the sky and leaves the direct solar beam warmer.

Jun 25, 2026

Aerospace

In June 2026, Amazon, Iridium, Globalstar and Telesat launched a trade group in Washington to represent the non-geostationary satellite industry, and the dominant operator they pointedly left out, SpaceX, already runs roughly 22 times as many satellites in that orbit as all four founding members combined

A new trade association representing non-geostationary satellite operators launched in Washington this week without the participation of the company that dominates the segment it claims to represent.

Jun 25, 2026

Science

The most powerful telescope ever built by human beings sits permanently parked 1.5 million kilometres from Earth, sheltered from the Sun by a folded shield the size of a tennis court — keeping one side of the spacecraft at minus 233 degrees Celsius while the other side reaches 85 degrees above zero, a temperature difference of more than 300 degrees across a single instrument that nobody can ever fly out to repair

No human being has ever been as far from Earth as the James Webb Space Telescope is right now.

Jun 25, 2026

Science

Some of the water sitting in your glass is older than the Sun having formed inside interstellar clouds billions of years before the solar system existed

A 2014 Science paper argued that a substantial fraction of solar-system water was inherited from interstellar ice that predates the Sun.

Jun 25, 2026

Science

For decades, scientists repeated as established fact that bacteria in the human body outnumber human cells ten to one — a 2016 study by the Weizmann Institute of Science reviewed the original source and found the actual ratio is closer to 1:1, making the figure one of the most widely cited errors in modern biology

For a long time, one number did a great deal of work in popular accounts of human biology.

Jun 25, 2026

Science

Less than a third of the world’s ocean floor has been mapped to modern standards, meaning humanity currently knows more about the surface of Mars than about the seabed covering two thirds of its own planet

The Seabed 2030 project has lifted global ocean-floor coverage from 6% to approximately 28.7% since its launch in 2017. Four years remain to close the rest of the gap, and the physics of deep-ocean mapping make that a formidable task.

Jun 25, 2026