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

A Central African frog fights off predators by driving the sharp bones of its own toes out through its skin to form claws, a defense biologists first described in detail in 2008

The claws are not made of the usual material. They are naked bone, hidden under the skin, that the frog forces outward through the soft tissue of its own foot when something grabs it.

Jun 30, 2026

Science

A black coral colony discovered in the fjords of New Zealand has been growing for an estimated three to four centuries, and despite its name the living coral is actually white, with only its skeleton turning black

A black coral colony measuring approximately 4 metres tall and 4.5 metres wide has been found in the waters of Fiordland, New Zealand, making it one of the largest specimens on record in New Zealand's marine environment.

Jun 30, 2026

Science

Earth reaches its farthest point from the Sun on July 6, in the middle of northern summer, and the backward timing is the clearest sign the seasons don’t come from distance

Aphelion lands in the heat of July every year. Why summer still feels like summer says almost everything about what actually drives the seasons.

Jun 30, 2026

Science

We think of Mount Everest as the ultimate mountain, but Olympus Mons on Mars rises nearly three times as high and spreads across a footprint roughly the size of Italy, making Earth’s tallest peak look almost local by comparison.

Mount Everest has become the human shorthand for height. It is the mountain people name when they want to say that something has reached the limit of what Earth can offer.

Jun 30, 2026

Mind & Meaning

For more than a decade the benchmark for human heat survival has been a wet-bulb temperature of 35 degrees Celsius sustained for six hours — researchers have now found that deadly conditions occur well before that threshold is reached

In all six events, the paper found conditions that exceeded HEAT-Lim's non-survivable thresholds for older people in direct sun.

Jun 30, 2026

Science

Sharks are roughly 450 million years old — older than trees, older than forests, older than the first broad leaves. When they first appeared, life on land was still mostly low, simple mats of early plants, and nothing had yet learned how to grow into a forest.

To say that sharks are older than trees sounds like one of those comparisons made for effect.

Jun 30, 2026

Aerospace

In June 2026, China pulled 34 universities, institutes and startups into a single alliance built around very low Earth orbit, the band below 300 kilometers that drags an ordinary satellite down within weeks, where one of its experimental craft has held a steady orbit for more than two years

China has formalized its push into very low Earth orbit, establishing a national alliance of 34 universities, research institutes and commercial space…

Jun 30, 2026

Constellations

Carl Sagan spent years trying to persuade NASA to take a picture many saw as scientifically pointless: Earth from more than 6 billion kilometres away, reduced to a pale blue dot smaller than a pixel. Voyager 1 finally captured it in 1990 — and that tiny speck became one of the most haunting images in human history.

In 1990, with its tour of the outer planets finished, Voyager 1 turned its camera back the way it had come and photographed the Earth from about six billion kilometres away.

Jun 30, 2026

Mind & Meaning

In August 1965, a tiny island called Singapore was forcibly expelled from Malaysia with no natural resources and a population poorer than most African nations — and within sixty years had transformed into one of the wealthiest countries on Earth

Lee Kuan Yew cried on national television. The press conference of 9 August 1965 — the most famous footage in modern Singaporean political history — preserves…

Jun 30, 2026

Mind & Meaning

In April 2025, the state of California officially surpassed Japan to become the fourth-largest economy in the world — a single American state with 40 million people generating more annual economic output than the entire country of 124 million Japanese citizens, behind only the United States, China, and Germany in the global ranking

A single American state with 40 million people generates more annual economic output than the entire country of 124 million Japanese citizens.

Jun 30, 2026

Earth News

Earth’s inner core may have quietly reversed course: after decades of spinning slightly faster than the surface, seismic waves from repeating earthquakes show it slowed around 2010 and began drifting backward relative to the rest of the planet.

More than 5,000 kilometres beneath your feet, Earth's solid inner core has spent the past few decades turning slightly faster than the planet wrapped around it.

Jun 30, 2026

Psychology

Korean children begin learning nunchi at age three — and the ancient social-perception practice their grandmothers taught by instinct is now being studied in labs as a measurable cognitive skill

Nunchi — the Korean practice of reading a room before speaking in it — is taught to children from age three and is now being broken into measurable components by developmental researchers from England to Bhutan.

Jun 30, 2026

Science

When the Soviet Union launched Laika aboard Sputnik 2 in 1957, the world was told she had survived for days. Decades later, the truth emerged: she had died within hours, after the capsule overheated in orbit.

On 3 November 1957, the Soviet Union launched a small stray dog named Laika aboard Sputnik 2, making her the first living creature to orbit the Earth.

Jun 30, 2026

Mind & Meaning

In January 2026, scientists reported that the human brain processes spoken language in a sequence that closely mirrors the layered architecture of advanced AI language models — suggesting that biological brains and artificial networks may build meaning through surprisingly similar step-by-step computations.

In January 2026, researchers reported that the order in which the human brain makes sense of spoken language, from raw sound up to meaning, lines up closely with the layer-by-layer way large language models process text.

Jun 30, 2026

Space Scopes

In June 2026, a SpaceX Falcon 9 first stage designated B1085 lifted a 15,400-pound SiriusXM broadcasting satellite off a Cape Canaveral pad on its seventeenth flight — the same booster that had carried Crew-9 to the space station, Firefly’s Blue Ghost lander toward the Moon, and nine separate Starlink batches into orbit

On the night of June 28, 2026, a Falcon 9 first stage that had already lifted off and landed sixteen times pushed a 15,400-pound SiriusXM broadcasting satellite away from Cape Canaveral.

Jun 30, 2026

Science

Finnish researchers tracked babies napping outdoors at minus 5°C and found they slept up to 90 minutes longer than indoors

Across Finland, Sweden and Norway, parents have parked prams in sub-zero air for nearly a century in the belief that babies sleep longer and breathe cleaner outside than in. The physiology of cold-air sleep, croup, and the Nordic outdoor-napping tradition.

Jun 30, 2026