Space, science, and the human mind. Since 1995.
Est. 1995
Space Daily Editorial Team
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

At its birth, Earth had no Moon. Then something perhaps the size of Mars slammed into the young planet, flinging molten debris into orbit that became the companion world now pulling our tides, steadying our seasons, and perhaps helping make Earth stable enough for life to flourish.

Earth began without a Moon. The young planet, barely formed, had no companion in orbit, and how it came by one is a question that took most of a century, and a set of returned Moon rocks, to answer with any confidence.

Jun 23, 2026
Science

Between 2006 and 2014, a NASA balloon experiment floating above Antarctica picked up two bizarre radio signals coming up from beneath the ice at angles that should have been impossible — and more than a decade later, no physicist has been able to explain what the signals actually were, with some researchers suggesting they may have been caused by a particle currently unknown to science

Twenty years ago, somewhere above the Antarctic ice, a balloon-borne radio antenna recorded an event that, by every available standard of contemporary physics, should not have happened.

Jun 23, 2026
Science

A giant barrel sponge growing on a Caribbean reef off the island of Curaçao was estimated to be roughly 2,300 years old when it was photographed by researchers — meaning it began growing at the bottom of the ocean during the lifetime of Hannibal and survived as a single continuous living organism, filtering seawater on that exact spot, from before the founding of the Roman Empire until it died of disease in 2012

Hannibal was 28 years old, still a few years away from leading 37 war elephants over the Alps to invade Italy, when somewhere beneath the warm shallow water…

Jun 22, 2026
Marsdaily

Musk’s original 2001 Mars plan was almost childishly simple: land a small greenhouse on the red planet to reignite public excitement for space, the seed idea that grew into SpaceX

Before SpaceX existed, Elon Musk spent late 2001 trying to buy refurbished Soviet missiles in Moscow to land a minibar-sized greenhouse on Mars. The plan, called Mars Oasis, was designed not to do science but to broadcast a single image — a green shoot against red dirt — back to Earth. When the Russians wouldn't sell cheap, Musk built the rocket company instead.

Jun 22, 2026
Science

In 1986, John Gottman and Robert Levenson built an apartment-style lab at the University of Washington, wired hundreds of couples to heart-rate monitors during arguments, and found that the moment a partner’s pulse crossed 100 beats per minute the conversation effectively ended — and 85 percent of the people who went silent were men

Inside John Gottman's Love Lab at the University of Washington, couples wired to heart-rate sensors revealed a pattern: when the pulse crossed 100 beats per minute, the conversation shut down. In heterosexual couples studied, 85% of the partners who went silent were men — and the body, not the mind, made the call.

Jun 22, 2026
Internet Space

Walter Isaacson’s biography of Elon Musk describes how one private decision kept Starlink dark near Crimea in 2022, leaving Ukrainian sea drones suddenly offline before they reached Russia’s Black Sea Fleet

Walter Isaacson's biography of Elon Musk recounts a September 2022 night when Musk personally ordered Starlink coverage withheld near Crimea, leaving Ukrainian sea drones offline mid-mission — the cleanest case yet of a private citizen flipping a switch in a shooting war.

Jun 22, 2026
Disaster Management

In March 1977, two Boeing 747s collided on a fog-bound runway in Tenerife and killed 583 people, partly because a junior pilot who doubted the takeoff said so once and then deferred to his captain — the same reflexive silence space agencies now spend months screening out of crews bound for Mars

Long-duration spaceflight crew selection now screens for the fawn stress response — the reflex to appease authority rather than challenge it — because on a sealed vehicle with seven people and no exit, a silenced crewmember is a silenced quarter of the crew's judgment.

Jun 22, 2026
Science

In 1971, Apollo 14 astronaut Stuart Roosa carried hundreds of tree seeds around the Moon in a metal canister inside his personal kit. When the seeds returned to Earth, many were germinated by the U.S. Forest Service and planted as “Moon Trees” — ordinary-looking trees that, decades later, showed no discernible difference from trees whose seeds had never left Earth.

The story sounds like it should end with a twist. An astronaut carries tree seeds around the Moon, the seeds are planted back on Earth, and the trees that grow are, in every way anyone has measured, just trees.

Jun 22, 2026