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.

Technology

In 1971, the founder of Hyundai named Chung Ju-yung walked into the London headquarters of Barclays Bank carrying a photograph of an empty Korean beach and a 500-won banknote depicting a 16th-century Korean ironclad warship — and persuaded the British lender to finance the construction of the shipyard that within just over a decade would become the largest shipbuilding operation on Earth

Chung's pitch to the British financial establishment in the autumn of 1971 was, by every reasonable measure of the available business case, absurd.

Jun 29, 2026

Aerospace

Humanity has spent well over a billion dollars bringing asteroid pieces back to Earth — and all the material returned by Hayabusa, Hayabusa2, and OSIRIS-REx combined weighs about 127 grams, less than a small apple.

Hayabusa, Hayabusa2 and OSIRIS-REx have returned roughly 127 grams of asteroid material, showing why sample return is about context and cleanliness, not bulk mass.

Jun 29, 2026

Science

Microsoft’s experimental AI diagnostic system, MAI-DxO, correctly solved up to 85.5% of 304 difficult medical cases adapted from the New England Journal of Medicine — far above the 20% average achieved by 21 experienced physicians under benchmark conditions.

Microsoft's headline number is striking: in a new diagnostic benchmark, its experimental MAI Diagnostic Orchestrator, or MAI-DxO, correctly solved up to 85.5 percent of 304 difficult medical cases adapted from the New England Journal of Medicine.

Jun 29, 2026

Earth Observation

On 29 April 2020, a single bolt of lightning stretched 768 kilometres across Texas, Louisiana, and Mississippi in one continuous flash, far enough to reach from New York City to Columbus, Ohio before the thunder from its first end had finished rolling

On 29 April 2020, a single cloud-to-cloud lightning bolt stretched 768 kilometres across Texas, Louisiana and Mississippi in 7.39 seconds — a flash longer than the drive from Boston to Cleveland, certified by the WMO as the longest ever measured at the time.

Jun 29, 2026

Earth Observation

Satellites can now tell a palm oil plantation from native rainforest by the precise angle its fronds bend the sunlight, reading the near-perfect planted lattice against the chaos of wild canopy — and the European Union’s 2023 deforestation regulation now leans on their ability to do exactly that

{"content":"From 700 kilometres up, an oil palm plantation looks almost nothing like the rainforest it replaced — and the difference is not just colour or texture, but the precise angle at which su

Jun 29, 2026

Science

In the mudstones of a place called Bright Angel, Perseverance detected complex carbon molecules hundreds of times across two rocks, a find researchers called the only detection of macromolecular carbon on a natural rock surface on Mars

On the edge of an ancient river valley in Jezero crater, at an outcrop the mission team named Bright Angel, NASA's Perseverance rover ran its instruments…

Jun 29, 2026

Constellations

Euclid, the European telescope built to map the dark universe billions of light-years away, spent a single 26-hour stretch staring into the crowded center of the Milky Way and resolved more than 60 million stars, handing NASA’s Roman mission a reference map for the planet hunt it begins after launching in late August

The European Space Agency's Euclid telescope has captured a highly detailed image of the visible light at the center of the Milky Way, resolving more than 60 million individual stars in a region so crowded that most instruments see only a glowing blur.

Jun 29, 2026

Science

In July 2025, the ATLAS sky survey in Chile spotted a faint comet racing through the solar system at roughly 130,000 miles per hour — and follow-up orbit calculations quickly showed it was not bound to the Sun at all, but had arrived from interstellar space.

On July 1, 2025, the ATLAS survey telescope in Rio Hurtado, Chile, reported a faint moving object to the Minor Planet Center.

Jun 29, 2026

Science

Neuroscientists long believed you are born with all the neurons you will ever have — in 2025, researchers found newly formed neurons in the brains of adults as old as 78, overturning decades of settled thinking

For most of the twentieth century, the rule seemed simple. You are born with all the neurons you will ever have, and the adult brain makes no new ones.

Jun 29, 2026

Science

Shown its reflection in a mirror, a small reef fish scraped at a mark it could see only there, behaving as if it recognized itself – though the researchers stopped short of calling it self-aware

When a cleaner wrasse spotted a colored mark on its own throat only by looking in a mirror, it tried to scrape the mark off, a response that meets the textbook criteria of the mirror mark test. The scientists who ran the experiment still declined to call the fish self-aware.

Jun 29, 2026

Aerospace

South Korea’s military built a solid-fuel rocket to put spy satellites in orbit on short notice, and the full four-stage version is set to make its first flight

After three test flights off Jeju Island, South Korea's Agency for Defense Development is preparing to fly the complete version of a launcher designed to send small radar satellites over North Korea whenever the military needs them.

Jun 29, 2026

Science

The James Webb telescope picked out 16.5 million individual stars in the Cigar Galaxy — a neighbor forming stars ten times faster than the Milky Way, in a burst estimated to last only a few hundred million years

Webb's infrared camera pierced the dust of Messier 82 and resolved 16.5 million stars, a fraction of the galaxy's true population, in a starburst astronomers think a galaxy merger set off and that cannot keep burning for long.

Jun 29, 2026

Science

A 1959 programming language still quietly runs modern finance: COBOL handles ATMs, card networks, bank ledgers and government payments, with an estimated $3 trillion in commerce passing through it daily. Now, as the specialists who understand that old code retire, banks are paying premium rates just to keep it from breaking.

The strange thing about COBOL is not that it is old. Many things in finance are old.

Jun 29, 2026

Science

In February 2023, a detector 3.5 kilometres beneath the Mediterranean caught the aftermath of the most energetic neutrino ever seen — a 220-petaelectronvolt ghost particle, roughly 16,000 times beyond CERN’s strongest collisions, with no confirmed source anywhere in the sky.

In February 2023, a single particle crossed a detector resting on the floor of the Mediterranean, and it carried more energy than any neutrino ever recorded.

Jun 29, 2026

Science

A 2025 solid-state lithium–sulfur study hit about 505 Wh/kg at the cell level, and a Tsinghua quasi-solid-state battery reached 604 Wh/kg, more than double many conventional lithium-ion cells. If either chemistry survives the jump from lab to mass-produced EV packs, it could mean the same range with a much lighter battery, or far longer range without the extra weight.

The first thing to say about a 604 Wh/kg battery cell is that it is not a 604 Wh/kg electric vehicle pack.

Jun 29, 2026

Science

We tend to think the US is safely ahead in the new Moon race, but China has already put its Lanyue lander through simulated lunar landing and takeoff tests — then fired its Mengzhou crew capsule away from a Long March 10A prototype at maximum aerodynamic pressure, in an integrated abort-and-recovery demo that NASA’s expendable Space Launch System was never designed to match.

It is comfortable to assume that the United States is safely ahead in the return to the Moon.

Jun 29, 2026