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

The footprints left by Apollo astronauts on the lunar surface will remain there, undisturbed, for at least ten million years — there is no wind, no rain, and almost nothing to erase them

The bootprints that Apollo astronauts pressed into the lunar dust between 1969 and 1972 are still there, and they will stay for a very long time.

Jul 4, 2026

Mind & Meaning

Physicist Roger Penrose has spent decades arguing that consciousness isn’t something the brain produces, but that explaining it will require physics we haven’t yet discovered

Roger Penrose does not think a computer will ever be conscious, and he does not think a brain running on ordinary neural computation would be conscious either.

Jul 4, 2026

Science

The largest known volcano in the solar system is on Mars, and it is so wide that if you stood on its summit, you might not realise you were on a volcano at all — Olympus Mons rises from a base roughly the size of New Mexico, with slopes so gentle they would barely feel like a mountain.

The largest known volcano in the solar system is on Mars, and it is so vast that if you stood on its summit you might not realise you were on a volcano, or even a mountain, at all.

Jul 4, 2026

Science

Saturn’s rings may be far younger than the planet itself — Cassini-era estimates have placed their age anywhere from about 10 million to a few hundred million years, meaning the rings we see today may not have existed for most of the age of dinosaurs.

Saturn looks like the solar system's old monument, a pale gas giant encircled by rings that seem as permanent as the planet itself.

Jul 4, 2026

Science

In 1995, astronomers pointed Hubble at a patch of sky so dark it looked empty and held it there for ten days. The image that came back contained roughly 3,000 galaxies — not stars, but galaxies — many holding billions of stars of their own.

In December 1995, Hubble did something that sounded almost like a misuse of a great telescope.

Jul 4, 2026

Space Scopes

We think of astronauts as floating in zero gravity, but the International Space Station is still deep inside Earth’s pull, where gravity is nearly 90% as strong as it is on the ground. What looks like weightlessness is really the station and its crew falling around the planet at about 28,000 kilometres per hour.

We tend to picture astronauts drifting weightlessly in "zero gravity," as if the pull of the Earth simply stops a few hundred kilometres up.

Jul 4, 2026

Space Scopes

It’s tempting to assume faster engines make faster spacecraft, but Parker Solar Probe’s record 430,000 miles per hour came mostly from gravity: seven Venus flybys spent nearly seven years bending its orbit closer to the Sun, until the Sun’s own pull accelerated it faster than any human-made object in history.

It is easy to imagine the fastest spacecraft as the one with the most ferocious engine.

Jul 4, 2026

Science

In April 2025, four private astronauts on SpaceX’s Fram2 mission became the first humans ever to circle Earth in a true polar orbit, flying directly over both poles — a route no government crewed space program had taken in more than six decades of human spaceflight.

Human spaceflight had crossed oceans, docked with stations, circled the Moon and lived in orbit for more than a year before anyone did something deceptively simple: fly people straight over both poles of Earth.

Jul 4, 2026

Aerospace

NASA’s Psyche spacecraft used Mars as a free slingshot on 15 May 2026, gaining 1,000 miles per hour in speed and tilting its orbital plane by one degree, all without firing a thruster, to put it on course for a metal world that may be a planet’s exposed iron core

On 15 May 2026, NASA's Psyche spacecraft passed within 2,864 miles, or 4,609 kilometres, of Mars and left the encounter on a better path than the one it arrived on.

Jul 4, 2026

Technology

AI did not just demand more electricity — it demanded water. By 2025, U.S. data centres, increasingly expanded for AI workloads, were consuming nearly one trillion litres of water a year, much of it used in cooling systems that shed heat by evaporating water into the air.

The public argument about artificial intelligence has mostly been an argument about electricity.

Jul 4, 2026

Science

In 1610, Galileo spotted a small, smooth moon circling Jupiter and wrote it down; four hundred years later, scientists confirmed it likely holds the largest ocean in the solar system, buried under ice and never once touched by sunlight

In January 1610, Galileo Galilei turned a small telescope toward Jupiter and noticed something that should not have been there: tiny points of light close to the planet, changing position from night to night.

Jul 4, 2026

Deep Space

We tend to think of Earth as almost impossibly rare, but a University of British Columbia study using Kepler data estimated that the Milky Way could contain as many as six billion rocky, roughly Earth-sized planets orbiting in the habitable zones of stars like our Sun — not proven Earth twins, but billions of worlds with at least the basic size, star, and distance that make Earth possible.

Earth can feel like an exception so complete that no statistic should be able to touch it.

Jul 4, 2026

Mind & Meaning

Pooling 10 UK studies of 1,252 people, researchers found that exercising outdoors in nature tended to lift mood and self-esteem — with the biggest self-esteem gains from just five minutes, and settings with water outperforming green-only ones

A short walk, paddle, or cycle in green surroundings tends to lift mood and how you feel about yourself.

Jul 4, 2026

Science

Solar storms puffed up Earth’s upper atmosphere enough to drag a $500 million NASA space telescope toward destruction, so engineers built a $30 million robotic rescuer in less than a year and launched it to grab the telescope before it burns up.

The Sun has been so active lately that it puffed up the top of Earth's atmosphere and began dragging a NASA space telescope down toward a fiery reentry.

Jul 4, 2026

Science

The oldest known image of the cosmos is a Bronze Age disc of bronze and gold, dug from a German hilltop by looters and recovered three years later in a Swiss police sting

Buried around 1600 BC, looted in 1999 and seized in a Basel sting in 2002, the Nebra sky disc carries what one research team calls the earliest concrete picture of the night sky. How firmly the bronze can prove that is still argued.

Jul 4, 2026

Mind & Meaning

The word algebra comes from the title of a book called Al-Jabr, written around the year 820 by a Persian mathematician named Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi at the House of Wisdom in Baghdad — and the word algorithm comes from the Latinized version of his name

Two of the most substantially used words in the current global vocabulary of mathematics and computing come from the same 9th-century Persian scholar working in the same Baghdad library across approximately the same twenty-year period between 813 and 833 CE.

Jul 4, 2026