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.

We tend to think of Earth’s atmosphere as a vast protective shield, but astronauts looking back from the ISS see something far more fragile: a thin blue-green line, like the skin of an apple wrapped around a basketball, separating every living thing we know from the complete inhospitality of space.

From orbit, Earth's atmosphere can look less like a shield than a thin line of colour marking the narrow conditions that make known life possible.

Jun 24, 2026

In September 2025, NASA announced that a Perseverance sample from a Mars rock called Cheyava Falls contained one of the strongest potential biosignatures yet found on the planet: evidence of ancient water, organic carbon, and chemical reactions that could have supplied energy for microbes, all preserved in a dried-up river valley.

NASA's September 2025 Cheyava Falls announcement is one of Mars science's strongest potential biosignature claims, but not a life detection.

Jun 24, 2026

When Michel Siffre emerged from a lightless cave in 1962 after 63 days alone, he was stunned to learn the real date. Cut off from clocks, calendars, and sunlight, he believed it was only August 20 — nearly a month earlier than it really was. His sense of time had compressed so dramatically that two months underground had felt like little more than one.

Michel Siffre's 1962 cave experiment showed how human time perception can drift when light, calendars, clocks, and ordinary daily markers disappear.

Jun 24, 2026

China’s high-speed rail network now stretches more than 50,000 kilometres across the country — longer than the combined high-speed rail networks of every other nation on Earth put together — and the entire system was built in roughly 17 years, beginning with a single line opened for the 2008 Beijing Olympics, and now connects 33 of the country’s 34 provincial-level divisions with trains running at routine commercial speeds of 350 kilometres per hour

The year an American president signs a major infrastructure bill, a Chinese provincial governor breaks ground on three high-speed rail lines in the same week.

Jun 24, 2026

Astronauts returning from spacewalks report that space carries a distinct smell of seared steak and hot metal that clings to their suits once they climb back inside

Astronaut accounts of a burnt-metal smell after spacewalks are less about smelling vacuum than about what suit surfaces bring back into a repressurised airlock.

Jun 24, 2026

In 1977, a Hawaii guru named Chris Butler broke from the Hare Krishna movement and built a parallel sect whose members were instructed to enter politics under their own names

After his guru Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada died in 1977, the young Hawaiian surfer-turned-yoga-teacher Chris Butler broke from the Hare Krishna movement and founded the Science of Identity Foundation — a closed sect whose devotees, unusually, were encouraged to run for office under their own legal names.

Jun 24, 2026

Hundreds of preserved dinosaur footprints — left by giant sauropods and a meat-eating Megalosaurus walking across a soft muddy lagoon roughly 166 million years ago — were uncovered in Oxfordshire, England in 2025, in tracks so well preserved that paleontologists can measure the individual stride lengths of animals that walked the Earth before the first flowers had ever evolved

The dinosaurs that left the tracks at Dewars Farm Quarry were walking across Oxfordshire approximately 166 million years ago, in the Middle Jurassic period…

Jun 24, 2026

In the Arctic wilderness near Russia’s border with Norway, sealed beneath a welded steel cover bolted into the ground, sits the deepest hole human beings have ever drilled into the Earth — a 9-inch-wide shaft called the Kola Superdeep Borehole, plunging 7.6 miles down through 2.7 billion years of rock, abandoned in 1992 when the temperature at the bottom reached 356°F and the rocks themselves began to flow like plastic

Across the same two decades in which the United States and the Soviet Union were competing to send rockets and astronauts further and further out from Earth, a…

Jun 24, 2026

In April 2026, the Pentagon asked Congress to more than double the U.S. Space Force’s budget, from roughly $31 billion to $71 billion, even as a new Mitchell Institute report warned that no one could yet agree where competition in orbit ends and open conflict begins

Somewhere in geostationary orbit, a satellite is shadowing an American one. Somewhere closer to the ground, a navigation signal is being jammed.

Jun 24, 2026

In the limestone mountains of the Black Sea coast, deep beneath a single mountain range in the Caucasus, sits a vertical chasm called Veryovkina that plunges 2,212 metres into the Earth — roughly seven times the height of the Eiffel Tower straight down — and reaching its bottom requires a four-day descent through near-freezing waterfalls, vertical shafts, and absolute darkness so complete that explorers report their brains begin hallucinating light in the deepest chambers.

The entrance to Veryovkina Cave is, in physical terms, unimpressive. A roughly square opening about three metres wide and four metres long, sitting on the side…

Jun 24, 2026

There are roughly 4,400 tiny explosions happening inside your body every second, as atoms of radioactive potassium quietly decay in your muscles and tissues right now — you have been faintly radioactive your entire life, and you will be for all of it

The human body is, in molecular terms, mostly water, mostly carbon-based organic compounds, mostly the same elements that compose every other multicellular organism on Earth.

Jun 24, 2026

The default mode network burns 20% of the brain’s energy doing nothing in particular — and Marcus Raichle only found it in 2001 because PET scanners kept showing the same regions lighting up between tasks

The default mode network burns about a fifth of the brain's energy maintaining the inner narrative of the self. Marcus Raichle named it in 2001 after PET scans kept showing the same regions lighting up the moment subjects stopped working.

Jun 24, 2026

The universe is not only expanding — its expansion is accelerating. After decades of searching, physicists still do not know what is causing it. The name they gave the mystery, dark energy, is less an explanation than a placeholder for one of the biggest gaps in modern cosmology.

That the universe is expanding has been known for nearly a century. Galaxies are flying apart, and the more distant ones recede faster, as Edwin Hubble worked out in the 1920s.

Jun 24, 2026

We tend to think of Neanderthals as a species that went extinct, but a Princeton geneticist found evidence of three waves of interbreeding over 250,000 years, leading him to argue Neanderthals didn’t disappear — they were absorbed into us

We are used to saying that Neanderthals went extinct, around forty thousand years ago, edged out by modern humans.

Jun 24, 2026

Nikola Tesla wrote in 1900 that an automaton might one day appear to think for itself — the surprise is not that he predicted modern AI perfectly, but that he understood how quickly a machine that responds, adapts, and acts could begin to disturb the boundary between mechanism and mind

In June 1900, Nikola Tesla published an essay in The Century Magazine titled "The Problem of Increasing Human Energy.

Jun 24, 2026

Astronauts aboard the International Space Station can see flashes of light even with their eyes closed — not from light entering the eye, but from high-energy space particles passing through their body and triggering the retina or visual pathway directly.

Float in a darkened module on the International Space Station, close your eyes, and wait.

Jun 23, 2026