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.

Cosmology

There is a cloud of alcohol drifting through the constellation Aquila that is 1,000 times the diameter of our solar system and contains enough ethanol to make 400 trillion trillion pints of beer — and nobody has any commercial way to reach it, which is probably for the best

In 1995, a team of British radio astronomers led by Dr Tom Millar pointed one of the world's largest radio telescopes at a faint patch of sky in the constellation Aquila — the Eagle.

May 21, 2026

Science

When the first draft of the Neanderthal genome was published in 2010, researchers found that most people with recent ancestry outside Africa carry between 1 and 4 percent Neanderthal DNA — meaning a human group whose physical traces vanished around 40,000 years ago still survives, in fragments, inside the cells of billions of people alive today

When the first draft of the Neanderthal genome was published in 2010, researchers found that most people with recent ancestry outside Africa carry roughly 1 to 4 percent Neanderthal DNA.

May 21, 2026

Human Behaviour

Every year, 27.7 million tons of Saharan dust crosses the Atlantic Ocean and settles on the Amazon rainforest, delivering roughly the exact amount of phosphorus the rainforest loses to runoff, which means the world’s most productive forest is fertilised, year after year, by the slow erosion of the planet’s largest desert thousands of miles away.

The connection is one of those facts about the planet that nobody designed and almost no one outside the relevant atmospheric science literature knows about.

May 21, 2026

Psychology

NASA’s Curiosity rover has found organic molecules on Mars that may be billions of years old — and the scientists studying them are being careful about what they say next

Thirteen years after landing in Gale Crater, NASA's Curiosity rover has produced what may be its most significant scientific result to date.

May 21, 2026

Constellations

A comet drifted alone between the stars for up to 11 billion years before entering our solar system last year — and the water inside it is unlike anything scientists have ever seen in our own

A team of researchers led by Luis Salazar Manzano and Teresa Paneque-Carreño of the University of Michigan Department of Astronomy has measured the water…

May 21, 2026

Human Behaviour

Interstellar’s most-discussed scene is treated as exotic science fiction, but the family-separation problem it dramatises is one of the more actively studied subjects in long-duration mission planning.

The scene that has stayed with most viewers of Christopher Nolan's Interstellar is not the wave-planet, or the visualised black hole, or the climactic library of moments.

May 20, 2026

Science

A few rocks spotted near a pond in northeastern Thailand in 2016 have just been confirmed as a 27-tonne, 27-metre sauropod — the largest dinosaur ever found in Southeast Asia

In 2016, during the dry season when water levels in a communal pond in northeastern Thailand had receded enough to expose its edges, a local resident in Chaiyaphum province noticed a pile of large bones along the bank.

May 20, 2026

Human Behaviour

Most people who say they want to be alone are not actually wanting solitude but a particular kind of presence around them that does not require them to perform

The statement is one that most adults will, at some point, have made. They want to be alone.

May 20, 2026

Science

The deepest part of the human gut contains a peripheral nervous system of about 500 million neurons — more than the spinal cord — operating with enough independence that researchers sometimes call it the “second brain,” and the body’s emotional responses are frequently well underway in the gut before the conscious mind has been informed about whatever it is responding to

The standard cultural framing of where one's nervous system is located tends to assume that the nervous system is, in any meaningful sense, all in the head.

May 20, 2026

Deep Space

The Earth’s magnetic field has reversed itself completely roughly 183 times in the last 83 million years — the last reversal happened about 780,000 years ago — and during the transition the field’s strength drops to a small fraction of normal, leaves the planet briefly more exposed to solar radiation, and creates auroras at latitudes where they otherwise never appear.

The Earth's magnetic field is, by every available measurement, the structural feature that protects the surface of the planet from most of the solar radiation that would otherwise sterilize it.

May 20, 2026

Science

The most accurate atomic clocks in operation now lose less than one second every 30 billion years — and the reason this matters isn’t precision for its own sake, it’s that gravity itself slows time slightly, and these clocks are now sensitive enough to measure the difference between sitting on the floor and standing upright in the same room.

There is a particular fact about the most precise atomic clocks currently in operation that the wider cultural register has, on the available evidence, not yet adequately absorbed.

May 20, 2026

Constellations

The Mars helicopter Ingenuity completed 72 flights in an atmosphere less than one percent as dense as Earth’s before rotor blade damage grounded it in 2024, and JPL had originally designed it for just five test flights, and the lessons from its overperformance are shaping NASA’s next generation of Mars aircraft

NASA's Ingenuity Mars Helicopter was designed to attempt up to five experimental test flights over thirty days.

May 20, 2026

Constellations

Richard Nixon’s White House had a speech prepared in case Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin became stranded on the lunar surface, and the speech written by William Safire begins “Fate has ordained that the men who went to the moon to explore in peace will stay on the moon to rest in peace,” and the contingency plan had NASA ending communications with the lunar module, leaving Michael Collins as the only Apollo 11 astronaut able to return to Earth.

Two days before Apollo 11's lunar landing on 20 July 1969, William Safire, a speechwriter in the Nixon White House, sent a short memo to the President's Chief of Staff, H.R.

May 20, 2026

Constellations

Astronauts who walked on the moon reported that the dust tracked back into the lunar module smelled like spent gunpowder, and more than fifty years later scientists still cannot fully explain why, though the leading theory involves regolith that had sat undisturbed in vacuum for four billion years suddenly meeting oxygen and moisture inside the cabin for the first time.

Every astronaut who walked on the moon and returned to a pressurised cabin noticed a smell.

May 20, 2026

Science

The Mars rovers carry no clocks set to Earth time, so the engineers driving them shifted their entire lives to a 24-hour-39-minute Martian day, and within weeks JPL staff were sleeping during California afternoons, eating breakfast at midnight, and quietly developing a kind of jet lag no human had experienced before.

The two NASA rovers currently working on Mars, Curiosity in Gale Crater and Perseverance in Jezero, run on a day that is 24 hours and 39 minutes long.

May 20, 2026

Military Space

There is a single satellite launched by the US Navy in 1964 that is still in orbit, still transmitting, and still being used by amateur radio operators around the world — and nobody at the Navy has been in charge of it for decades

On December 28, 1964, a Thor-Able-Star rocket lifted off from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California and put a small US Navy satellite into a low polar orbit.

May 20, 2026