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.

Constellations

When Soviet cosmonaut Sergei Krikalev launched to Mir in May 1991, the country that sent him was still the USSR; by the time he returned in March 1992 it no longer existed, his home city of Leningrad had become Saint Petersburg, and even the spaceport that launched him — Baikonur — was now inside newly independent Kazakhstan, forcing Russia to renegotiate access to the machinery of its own space program

Sergei Krikalev launched from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in May 1991 as a Soviet citizen.

May 21, 2026

Science

Scientists may have finally cracked why 90% of humans are right-handed — and the answer has nothing to do with our hands, it has to do with our legs

One of the more durable mysteries in evolutionary biology is why, across every human culture ever studied, approximately 90 percent of the population prefers to use their right hand.

May 21, 2026

Science

T. rex didn’t evolve tiny arms because its body got bigger — it evolved tiny arms because its jaws got more powerful, according to a new study of 82 meat-eating dinosaur species that found the same pattern repeating across giant predators

The standard cultural framing of Tyrannosaurus rex's famously tiny arms has, for over a century, treated them as one of the small jokes evolution has played on an otherwise terrifying animal.

May 21, 2026

Science

The deepest hole humans ever drilled into Earth reached 7.6 miles beneath Soviet Russia, where unexpected heat helped defeat the drill and left the Kola Superdeep Borehole capped in rusting steel

The deepest hole humans have ever drilled into the Earth bottoms out at 12,262 metres, roughly 7.6 miles, in the Murmansk region of northern Russia.

May 21, 2026

Constellations

A joint European-Chinese satellite just went up on Vega-C, and the images it returns could change how scientists understand Earth’s magnetic shield

A joint European-Chinese satellite designed to image Earth's magnetic shield in X-rays for the first time reached orbit early Tuesday, opening a new front in…

May 21, 2026

Constellations

SpaceX’s IPO filing isn’t just about rockets: the prospectus points to an AI infrastructure pivot that could reshape how investors value the company

SpaceX filed an S-1 registration statement with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission on May 20, opening the books on a company that booked $18.7 billion in 2025 revenue and is now seeking to raise up to $80 billion at a $2 trillion valuation.

May 21, 2026

Human Behaviour

The astronauts on the International Space Station see 16 sunrises and 16 sunsets every day, and the question of when to sleep, when to pray, and when to celebrate birthdays has caused genuine philosophical problems for every space agency that has ever sent humans up there

Astronauts have described watching a sunrise from the cupola of the International Space Station, and then, before finishing their coffee, watching another one.

May 21, 2026

Constellations

The satellite industry is betting on multi-orbit resilience, but a San Francisco startup says the real future may be switching between LEO networks instead

The satellite industry's favorite word right now is resilience. The argument sounds simple enough: if one orbit fails, use another.

May 21, 2026

Constellations

The FCC just gave Lynk and Anterix a small 900 MHz test from orbit, and it could redraw how utility networks reach remote America

The Federal Communications Commission has approved a narrow but revealing experiment: Lynk Global will test satellite direct-to-device links using Anterix’s…

May 21, 2026

Climate Science

The Parker Solar Probe is still flying through the Sun’s corona at 430,000 miles per hour, fast enough to cross the continental United States in about 20 seconds, because a 4.5-inch carbon-foam shield keeps the spacecraft in the shade

The Parker Solar Probe is still the fastest object ever built by human hands, flying through the Sun's outer atmosphere at roughly 430,000 miles per hour.

May 21, 2026

Constellations

The Hubble Space Telescope’s main mirror was ground to the wrong shape by 2.2 micrometers, about one-fiftieth the width of a human hair, and the error was only caught after launch because the device used to verify the mirror on the ground had itself been built wrong

The Hubble Space Telescope's primary mirror, a 2.4-meter disc of ultra-low-expansion glass, was ground to the wrong shape by roughly 2.2 micrometers at its outer edge.

May 21, 2026

Constellations

The Pioneer 10 and 11 spacecraft were found to be decelerating slightly more than gravity could explain, and for thirty years physicists wondered if Newton was wrong before realizing in 2012 that the answer was the probes’ own waste heat gently pushing them backward at a billionth of Earth’s gravity.

Two NASA probes built in the early 1970s spent three decades drifting slightly off course, decelerating by about 8.74 x 10⁻¹⁰ metres per second squared more…

May 21, 2026

Human Behaviour

The Sumerians wrote down complaints, love letters, lullabies, and arguments about the price of copper on clay tablets 4,000 years ago — and the things they were worried about are almost indistinguishable from the things people post online today

Around 1750 BC, in the city of Ur, a man named Nanni paid for a delivery of copper that turned up substandard.

May 21, 2026

Cosmology

There is a cloud of alcohol drifting through the constellation Aquila that is 1,000 times the diameter of our solar system and contains enough ethanol to make 400 trillion trillion pints of beer — and nobody has any commercial way to reach it, which is probably for the best

In 1995, a team of British radio astronomers led by Dr Tom Millar pointed one of the world's largest radio telescopes at a faint patch of sky in the constellation Aquila — the Eagle.

May 21, 2026

Science

When the first draft of the Neanderthal genome was published in 2010, researchers found that most people with recent ancestry outside Africa carry between 1 and 4 percent Neanderthal DNA — meaning a human group whose physical traces vanished around 40,000 years ago still survives, in fragments, inside the cells of billions of people alive today

When the first draft of the Neanderthal genome was published in 2010, researchers found that most people with recent ancestry outside Africa carry roughly 1 to 4 percent Neanderthal DNA.

May 21, 2026

Human Behaviour

Every year, 27.7 million tons of Saharan dust crosses the Atlantic Ocean and settles on the Amazon rainforest, delivering roughly the exact amount of phosphorus the rainforest loses to runoff, which means the world’s most productive forest is fertilised, year after year, by the slow erosion of the planet’s largest desert thousands of miles away.

The connection is one of those facts about the planet that nobody designed and almost no one outside the relevant atmospheric science literature knows about.

May 21, 2026