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

We assumed humpback whales had to reach warm tropical waters before giving birth, but a 2025 UNSW-led study found newborn calves as far south as Tasmania — around 1,500 kilometres beyond the accepted calving zone — suggesting some mothers give birth mid-migration and keep swimming north with their calves.

For decades, the clean version of humpback whale migration was easy to describe.

Jun 29, 2026

Science

The record Apollo 13 set for the farthest humans had ever travelled from Earth was never meant to be a record — it was a survival manoeuvre after an explosion, and Artemis II quietly surpassed it on a clear April morning in 2026

The farthest humans had ever travelled from Earth used to be a record born out of failure.

Jun 28, 2026

Space Industry

SpaceX launched 165 Falcon 9 rockets into orbit in 2025 — nearly one every other day — accounting for roughly 85% of all U.S. orbital launches and almost twice as many orbital launches as the entire nation of China managed that year.

SpaceX flew 165 Falcon 9 missions in 2025. That is a launch roughly every other day, sustained across a full year, and it amounts to about 85 per cent of all…

Jun 28, 2026

Science

NASA has already watched dormant herpes viruses, including the one behind chickenpox and shingles, reactivate in astronauts aboard the International Space Station. Artemis II has now carried that question into deep space: more than 252,000 miles from Earth, the crew collected saliva samples to test whether radiation, isolation and distance trigger the same hidden immune response beyond low Earth orbit.

For years, NASA has used the International Space Station to watch a quiet signal of astronaut stress: dormant herpes viruses becoming detectable again during spaceflight.

Jun 28, 2026

Mind & Meaning

On November 14, 2004, a Top Gun graduate named Commander David Fravor flying off the coast of San Diego encountered a smooth white 40-foot object shaped like a Tic Tac candy that hovered above a churning patch of ocean — and when he tried to close on it, the object mirrored his flight path and accelerated beyond visual range in seconds

The most credible UFO encounter in modern American military history happened to a man who was, by every measurable standard, the last person in the United States Navy who should have been seeing things that were not there.

Jun 28, 2026

Science

The little blue pill prescribed today around the world for erectile dysfunction was originally developed in the early 1990s by Pfizer as a treatment for chest pain — and during the early trials, the male volunteers reported a side effect they were extremely reluctant to give up.

The most commercially successful pharmaceutical product of the late 20th century was, in essential respects, invented by a group of middle-aged Welsh men in a…

Jun 28, 2026

Psychology

Sister Mary, a Catholic nun who belonged to the School Sisters of Notre Dame and died at 101 with her memory and reasoning fully intact, was one of 678 nuns enrolled in a 30-year study of brain aging by the American researcher David Snowdon — and her autopsy revealed a brain riddled with the plaques and tangles of advanced Alzheimer’s disease

Sister Mary should not, by any reasonable interpretation of late-20th-century Alzheimer's neuropathology, have been able to teach seventh and eighth grades for…

Jun 28, 2026

Science

In 1977, a team of American marine geologists in a small research submarine descended to the seafloor of the Galápagos Rift and discovered something no biology textbook on Earth had ever predicted — an entire thriving ecosystem of giant tube worms, ghostly white crabs, and microbial life sustained not by sunlight but by heat and chemicals leaking out of the planet’s interior

There were no biologists on board the research vessel that day. There were no biologists on board because no one in 1977 expected to find any biology.

Jun 28, 2026

Science

For centuries, European sailors told stories of a sea monster called the kraken — a vast tentacled creature that dragged ships down into the deep — and although marine biologists confirmed in the 1850s that the kraken was a real animal they named the giant squid, no one managed to photograph a living one until two Japanese scientists succeeded in September 2004

Imagine spending two years of your life and 23 separate deployments of a self-rigged underwater camera system, lowered nearly a kilometre into the deep ocean…

Jun 28, 2026

Psychology

In 1975, an American developmental psychologist demonstrated that when a parent simply stops emotionally responding to a baby’s face for as little as three minutes — making no expression, no eye contact, no sound — the baby first becomes frantic trying to re-engage the parent and then withdraws into a hopeless silence, in one of the most replicated findings in developmental psychology

Edward Tronick — now in his eighties, Distinguished Professor at the University of Massachusetts Boston, director of its Child Development Unit, and one of the…

Jun 28, 2026

Science

In April 2026, four Artemis II astronauts flew farther from Earth than any humans in history, reaching 406,771 kilometres from home — breaking a record Apollo 13 had held since 1970, without Artemis II ever landing on the Moon.

Artemis II did not land on the Moon. It did something quieter but historically precise: it carried four people farther from Earth than any humans had ever travelled, then brought them home.

Jun 28, 2026

Science

In an ancient Martian river channel, Perseverance drilled into a mudstone called Cheyava Falls and found tiny “leopard spot” minerals tangled with organic carbon — patterns that, on Earth, can be left behind when microbes consume organic matter, though scientists still can’t rule out non-living chemistry.

A drilled rock core from an ancient Martian river channel has given Perseverance scientists one of the mission's most interesting and difficult findings: a…

Jun 28, 2026

Science

The many-worlds interpretation tackles one of physics’ hardest puzzles — why quantum objects seem to stop behaving like waves when they are measured — by arguing that they never stop at all: every possible outcome happens, but we only experience the branch we end up in.

The many-worlds interpretation begins with a refusal to add a special rule for measurement.

Jun 28, 2026

Science

The most effective anti-aging drug ever tested on a mammal was discovered by accident in 1964 in a soil sample collected from the volcanic ground of Easter Island — and the chemical, now called rapamycin, has been shown to extend the maximum lifespan of laboratory mice by up to 38 per cent

The most effective anti-aging drug ever tested on a mammal was not invented in a laboratory.

Jun 28, 2026

Mind & Meaning

The Korean alphabet, called Hangul, is the only major writing system in human history with a known inventor and a documented design rationale — created in 1443 by King Sejong of the Joseon dynasty, who designed each consonant to physically represent the position of the tongue and lips during the corresponding sound, and published a companion document explaining exactly why each letter looked the way it did

Nobody knows who invented the letter A. Nobody knows who invented the letter B, or C, or any other letter of any writing system used by any other major language on Earth.

Jun 28, 2026

Science

In 2020, something near the centre of the Milky Way switched on and off six times in radio waves, then disappeared from every follow-up search in X-rays and infrared — leaving astronomers with only the name ASKAP J173608.2−321635 and the possibility of an entirely new kind of object.

ASKAP J173608.2-321635 is not a name built for memory. It is a coordinate label, the kind astronomers use when an object has not yet earned a more familiar identity.

Jun 28, 2026