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

In the 1970s, Africa still held around 90,000 lions. Today, only about 20,000 to 25,000 remain — a collapse of roughly three-quarters in half a century — and the species now survives in less than 8% of the land it once roamed.

In the 1970s, Africa still held on the order of 90,000 lions. Today only about 20,000 to 25,000 remain, a collapse of roughly three-quarters in half a century…

Jul 6, 2026

Science

A horse can destroy a human in a sprint, but over a brutal long haul in summer heat, Daniel Lieberman argues the advantage can flip: humans keep cooling themselves through sweat, while a horse’s larger body struggles to shed heat fast enough.

In a sprint, it is no contest. A horse would leave a human far behind before either had gone a hundred metres.

Jul 6, 2026

Science

Titan’s atmosphere is so dense and its gravity so weak that a person with the right winged suit could plausibly glide through its sky — and those same conditions make Titan one of the most forgiving large worlds in the solar system for a spacecraft to descend onto, even if the surface itself is colder than Antarctica by almost 100 degrees Celsius.

Titan's air is so thick, and its gravity so gentle, that a person wearing the right pair of wings could plausibly push off the ground and glide through its sky.

Jul 6, 2026

Science

The highest mountain on Earth is not the closest mountain to outer space — because the planet bulges outward at the equator, the summit of a volcano in Ecuador called Chimborazo sits farther from the center of the Earth than Mount Everest does, even though Everest is much taller

The specific highest point on the planet Earth, measured by the standard elevation metric of height above mean sea level, is the summit of Mount Everest — the…

Jul 6, 2026

Constellations

James Webb has found evidence for thick water-ice clouds on Epsilon Indi Ab, one of the closest Jupiter-like worlds we can study directly — a discovery that didn’t overturn every atmospheric model, but exposed how many of them had been leaving out the very thing now shaping the planet’s sky.

The James Webb Space Telescope has found evidence for thick water-ice clouds high in the atmosphere of Epsilon Indi Ab, one of the closest Jupiter-like worlds we can study directly.

Jul 5, 2026

Constellations

In March 2025, Australia’s new SKA-Low telescope photographed 85 galaxies using just 1,024 of its planned 131,072 antennas — less than one percent of its full power, and the image was already beyond what scientists hoped for

In March 2025, Australia's new SKA-Low telescope took a picture of the sky dotted with 85 galaxies.

Jul 5, 2026

Science

Sharks have survived every mass extinction for roughly 450 million years, outlasting the dinosaurs by a vast margin — yet a 2025 global study found that more than a third of shark species alive today are severely threatened, mostly by fishing nets and finning

Sharks have been swimming in Earth's oceans for roughly 450 million years. They were here long before the dinosaurs, they survived every great mass extinction that followed, and they outlasted the dinosaurs by a vast margin.

Jul 5, 2026

Mind & Meaning

The word ‘spam’ for unwanted email comes from a 1970 Monty Python sketch set in a diner where every dish contained Spam — Spam and eggs, Spam and bacon, Spam and sausage — while Vikings at a nearby table chanted the name over and over, a joke internet users borrowed 20 years later

On the evening of Tuesday, 15 December 1970, at approximately 10:00 p.m. Greenwich Mean Time, the BBC1 television network in the United Kingdom broadcast the…

Jul 5, 2026

Mind & Meaning

On an island in the Indian Ocean about the size of Manhattan, roughly 50 to 200 people known as the Sentinelese live in complete voluntary isolation — hunting with bows and arrows, speaking a language no outsider has ever understood, and killing every visitor who has come ashore, including an American missionary in 2018

On Saturday, 17 November 2018, at around 3:00 in the afternoon local time, a 26-year-old American evangelical missionary named John Allen Chau was killed on…

Jul 5, 2026

Mind & Meaning

Between 2002 and 2012, at least six people were killed in the Philippines while singing Frank Sinatra’s 1969 song My Way at karaoke bars — a phenomenon that came to be known internationally as the My Way killings, and that prompted many Filipino karaoke bars to quietly remove the song from their playlists

In February 2010, the American journalist Norimitsu Onishi, then serving as the Manila bureau chief of the New York Times, filed a 1,200-word feature story…

Jul 5, 2026

Mind & Meaning

When the American national soccer team arrived in Brazil for the 1950 World Cup, its 11 players were a school teacher, a hearse driver, and a Haitian dishwasher from Manhattan who had never played together and had trained together only once — and on June 29 in Belo Horizonte, they beat the mighty English team 1 to 0

On Thursday, 29 June 1950, at around 3:00 in the afternoon, the eleven starting members of the United States football team took the pitch at the Estádio…

Jul 5, 2026

Science

The James Webb Space Telescope has detected the same unexplained absorption signal on the surfaces of Pluto and Titan — two frozen worlds with very different environments but methane-and-nitrogen chemistry in common — and so far, scientists cannot match it to any confirmed molecule in the lab.

The James Webb Space Telescope has picked up the same unexplained absorption signal on the surfaces of two very different frozen worlds, Pluto and Titan.

Jul 5, 2026

Mind & Meaning

In 1914, the British explorer Ernest Shackleton set sail from London for Antarctica with 28 men and a ship called the Endurance — and 22 months later, after the ship was crushed by pack ice and the men had lived on drifting ice floes and a barren island for nearly two years, every one of them came home alive

On Saturday, 8 August 1914 — five days after the British declaration of war against the German Empire that would produce the subsequent four-year catastrophe…

Jul 5, 2026

Mind & Meaning

For the 2014 film Interstellar, director Christopher Nolan hired Caltech physicist Kip Thorne as his science consultant — and the visual simulations Thorne helped design for the film’s black hole were so mathematically accurate that they generated two peer-reviewed scientific papers and became the model for how astrophysicists visualize black holes today

In late 2012, the American film director Christopher Nolan formally took over a Warner Brothers science-fiction project that had been drifting through…

Jul 5, 2026

Mind & Meaning

During the Second World War, the American company Hormel shipped more than 100 million pounds of canned Spam to Allied soldiers on every front from the Pacific islands to the Soviet Red Army — and after the war, Nikita Khrushchev wrote in his memoirs that without American Spam, the Soviet Union would not have been able to feed its army

In July 1937, the George A. Hormel and Company meatpacking plant in Austin, Minnesota — under the direction of Jay Hormel, the 44-year-old First World War…

Jul 5, 2026

Mind & Meaning

In 1912, the German meteorologist Alfred Wegener proposed that the continents of the Earth had once been joined and were slowly drifting apart — a theory geologists ridiculed for the next 50 years, until three decades after his death, when new evidence from the ocean floor proved him right

On the evening of Saturday, 6 January 1912, in the meeting hall of the Frankfurt Geological Association, a 31-year-old German meteorologist named Alfred…

Jul 5, 2026