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.

Psychology

By 2035, the global space economy is predicted to reach roughly $1.8 trillion in annual value — up from approximately $630 billion in 2024 — driven by satellite mega-constellations, Earth observation services, commercial space stations, and the early stages of lunar resource extraction, in a quiet industrial revolution that many economists believe will exceed the speed of every previous economic transition in modern history

The thing that has happened to the global space economy over the past 25 years is the kind of phenomenon that is easier to see in retrospect than to recognise while it is occurring.

Jun 18, 2026
Science

The blue color of the sky is not a property of the air itself — air is colorless, and a glass of it would look exactly like a glass of nothing — and the blue you see overhead is sunlight being scattered by molecules of nitrogen and oxygen, which deflect short blue wavelengths much more strongly than long red ones, in the same physics that makes the Sun appear yellow and a sunset appear red

The question of why the sky is blue is one of the older questions in the history of human curiosity.

Jun 18, 2026
Energy News

The environmental impact of watching one hour of video on Netflix is approximately 36 grams of carbon dioxide, roughly equivalent to driving a car for 150 metres, in a figure substantially smaller than the popular framing has claimed and one that demonstrates that the actual environmental burden of streaming comes not from the data centres people imagine but from the screens they watch on

The popular framing of streaming's environmental cost has, for much of the past five years, treated digital entertainment as a quiet ecological catastrophe.

Jun 17, 2026
Earth Observation

In 1971, a team of Soviet geologists in Turkmenistan’s Karakum Desert set a collapsed gas crater alight and assumed the flames would burn out within weeks, but more than five decades later the pit travelers now call the Door to Hell is still throwing orange light across the dunes every night

Soviet geologists set the Darvaza gas crater alight in 1971 expecting the flames to last weeks. More than five decades later, the Door to Hell is still burning in the middle of Turkmenistan's Karakum Desert.

Jun 17, 2026
Science

The deepest point in the ocean, Challenger Deep in the Mariana Trench, sits nearly 11 kilometres below the surface — a depth so extreme that if Everest were dropped into it, the peak would still be covered by more than two kilometres of water

The Everest comparison is one of the rare scale facts that survives a careful check: at roughly 10,935 metres, Challenger Deep would bury Everest's 8,849-metre summit under more than two kilometres of water. What the picture leaves out is pressure, not distance.

Jun 17, 2026
Psychology

Research into the neuroscience of social rejection has shown that the brain regions that activate when a person is excluded, rejected, or grieving a lost relationship are the same regions that activate during physical injury, with the overlap being so substantial that a standard over-the-counter painkiller measurably reduces both kinds of pain, because the human brain has co-opted the physical pain system to register damage to social bonds

The popular framing of emotional pain treats it as something metaphorical. The broken heart of unrequited love, the sting of rejection, the ache of grief, the…

Jun 17, 2026
Aerospace

In July 1969, Buzz Aldrin pulled a packet of bread and a vial of wine from his personal preference kit aboard the lunar module Eagle and took Communion on the surface of the Moon while Houston went radio-silent, because NASA was already fighting an atheist’s lawsuit over the Apollo 8 Genesis reading

Twenty minutes after Eagle landed, Buzz Aldrin took Communion on the Moon using a chalice from a small Texas church — and NASA, then being sued over the Apollo 8 Genesis reading, asked him to keep it off the radio.

Jun 17, 2026
Human Behaviour

Your own voice sounds different to other people than it sounds to you, because the version you hear is reaching your inner ear partly through the bones of your skull, which amplify lower frequencies that everyone else cannot hear — and the recorded version that strikes most people as alien when they first hear it is in fact the only version of their voice anyone else has ever known

There is a specific moment, usually in childhood or early adolescence, when most people first hear a recording of their own voice and discover, with mild horror, that it does not sound the way they expected.

Jun 17, 2026
Science

The interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS, discovered on July 1, 2025, by a survey telescope in Chile, is now believed by astronomers at Oxford to be roughly 7 billion years old — meaning it was already drifting through the Milky Way for nearly 3 billion years before our solar system even existed — having formed in a part of the galaxy called the thick disk, where the stars are older than almost everything else humanity has ever observed

On the morning of 1 July 2025, the ATLAS survey telescope at Río Hurtado in Chile detected an unusual moving point of light against the background stars.

Jun 17, 2026
Deep Space

Roughly 100 tons of dust and small particles from outer space fall onto the Earth every single day — most of it microscopic, some of it older than our solar system — meaning the dust you find on your bookshelves and windowsills almost certainly contains, mixed in with the ordinary terrestrial dirt, a small fraction of material formed in the deaths of stars that exploded before the Earth itself was even born

The Earth, in any given 24-hour period, is being slowly snowed on by the rest of the solar system.

Jun 17, 2026
Science

Six men spent 520 days sealed inside a fake spacecraft that never moved, and by the end some had drifted so far out of sync that they were sleeping while the others were awake — exactly the kind of breakdown mission scientists were watching for.

The Mars-500 simulation sealed six men in a mock spacecraft for 520 days. A University of Pennsylvania sleep study found only two kept normal sleep; the rest drifted, one onto a roughly 25-hour day. What the result shows about long missions, and what a ground simulation cannot.

Jun 17, 2026
Space Travel

NASA is on track to put humans back on the lunar surface for the first time in roughly 56 years by 2028— followed by the establishment of a sustained human presence near the Moon’s south pole in the 2030s — in a civilizational shift that would mark the first time in human history that our species has lived continuously on another world, rather than briefly visiting and returning home

The last human being to walk on the Moon stepped off the lunar surface at 5:40 AM Coordinated Universal Time on 14 December 1972. His name was Eugene Cernan.

Jun 17, 2026