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.

Outer Planets

Astronomers at Cambridge have proposed that the galaxy may contain a vast and previously unrecognised population of habitable planets, characterised by a global liquid water ocean beneath a hydrogen atmosphere, that exist across a far wider range of stellar conditions than Earth-like worlds and that may be substantially easier to detect signs of life on than the Earth analogues that astronomers have been searching for over the past three decades

For most of the past sixty years, the search for life beyond Earth has been a search for places like Earth.

Jun 25, 2026

Psychology

Early emotional states become physically embedded in the architecture of the developing brain — and laughter, according to recent research, is one of the experiences doing that work

A new synthesis from early childhood neuroscience argues that shared laughter does specific, measurable work in the infant brain — though the full picture is more incremental than the headlines suggest.

Jun 25, 2026

Science

Astronauts on the Moon, with no atmosphere above them, looked up and saw a white sun — the yellow colour we see from Earth is not the sun’s real colour but an artefact our own atmosphere paints onto it by scattering blue wavelengths sideways into the sky

The yellow Sun of ordinary Earth life is partly an atmospheric effect: Rayleigh scattering sends blue light into the sky and leaves the direct solar beam warmer.

Jun 25, 2026

Aerospace

In June 2026, Amazon, Iridium, Globalstar and Telesat launched a trade group in Washington to represent the non-geostationary satellite industry, and the dominant operator they pointedly left out, SpaceX, already runs roughly 22 times as many satellites in that orbit as all four founding members combined

A new trade association representing non-geostationary satellite operators launched in Washington this week without the participation of the company that dominates the segment it claims to represent.

Jun 25, 2026

Psychology

At twenty, the brain processes information faster than it ever will again. In middle age, the same brain may read other people’s emotions more accurately than it ever has. By the late sixties, its vocabulary can still be climbing. The human mind does not peak once — it rotates.

Hartshorne and Germine's 2015 Psychological Science paper suggests that cognitive abilities peak on different timetables, from speed in youth to vocabulary much later.

Jun 25, 2026

Mind & Meaning

On 12 April 1961, a 27-year-old Russian fighter pilot named Yuri Gagarin became the first human being in history to leave the Earth — sealed inside a metal sphere just over two metres wide, with the spacecraft’s controls locked because nobody knew what the human brain would do in weightlessness, and instructions to open a sealed envelope only if he lost his mind during the 108 minutes he spent orbiting the planet alone

The space race that produced Vostok 1 had begun in earnest approximately three and a half years earlier, on 4 October 1957, when the Soviet Union launched the…

Jun 25, 2026

Human Behaviour

Most people don’t realize that men now entering their 70s are often being asked to discuss feelings they were raised to keep out of view

The men now turning seventy were trained inside an emotional grammar their grandsons would not recognize, and the cost of that training is only now coming due.

Jun 25, 2026

Mind & Meaning

In the summer of 1858, a lesser-known 35-year-old naturalist named Alfred Russel Wallace mailed Charles Darwin a 20-page letter from the Indonesian jungle outlining the theory of evolution by natural selection — a theory Darwin had been quietly developing for 20 years without publishing — forcing Darwin to hastily share the credit with a man he had never met

The letter's author, Alfred Russel Wallace, was 35 years old, the seventh of nine children of a financially declining English family, largely self-educated…

Jun 25, 2026

Human Behaviour

In June 1971, the New York Times began publishing excerpts from a 7,000-page classified Defense Department history that demonstrated four successive American presidents had systematically lied about the Vietnam War — leaked by a former military analyst named Daniel Ellsberg, who had spent 18 months secretly photocopying the documents in his office at night

The Pentagon Papers, in their original form, were not designed to be a public document.

Jun 25, 2026

Human Behaviour

The person who stays calm in every crisis often isn’t fearless — many of them learned in childhood that someone had to hold it together

The composed face in a crisis is rarely the product of courage — more often it is the residue of a childhood that required a small person to do an adult's job.

Jun 25, 2026

Science

The most powerful telescope ever built by human beings sits permanently parked 1.5 million kilometres from Earth, sheltered from the Sun by a folded shield the size of a tennis court — keeping one side of the spacecraft at minus 233 degrees Celsius while the other side reaches 85 degrees above zero, a temperature difference of more than 300 degrees across a single instrument that nobody can ever fly out to repair

No human being has ever been as far from Earth as the James Webb Space Telescope is right now.

Jun 25, 2026

Space Travel

In November 2011, NASA launched a car-sized rover called Curiosity toward Mars on a planned two-year mission to look for evidence of ancient lakes and rivers — and almost 15 years later, the rover is still moving across the Martian surface, still drilling into rocks, and still transmitting data back to Earth

The Curiosity rover was given its name by a 12-year-old girl from Kansas named Clara Ma, who in 2009 won a NASA-sponsored essay contest with a submission that included the line: "Curiosity is the passion that drives us through our everyday lives.

Jun 25, 2026

Space Travel

In April 1970, three American astronauts aboard Apollo 13 were 320,000 kilometres from Earth — closer to the Moon than to home — when one of their oxygen tanks exploded, and engineers on the ground had 96 hours to solve a problem so complex the solution was eventually worked out using slide rules and read back to the astronauts to keep them alive

Apollo 13 had been launched four and a half days into a planned ten-day mission that would, if everything had proceeded as designed, have landed Lovell and…

Jun 25, 2026

Science

In 1987, Costa Rica’s forest cover had collapsed to roughly 21% of the country, and the mechanism that quietly reversed it over the next three decades was not a treaty but a small line item in the national tax on gasoline, paying private landowners to let the trees grow back

By 1987, Costa Rica's forest cover had collapsed to roughly 21%. A 1996 law funded by a tax on gasoline began paying landowners to protect and regrow forest — and within a generation, tree cover nearly tripled.

Jun 25, 2026

Human Behaviour

For 24 years, the Soviet Union had used the world chess championship as proof of its intellectual superiority over the West — and the American Bobby Fischer’s defeat of Soviet champion Boris Spassky in Reykjavik in 1972 ended that argument, in front of the entire world, in a single match

It is difficult, at a remove of 54 years, to convey the institutional weight that the Soviet Union had attached to chess by the early 1970s.

Jun 25, 2026

Mind & Meaning

In 1610, the Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei pointed a small telescope at Jupiter and saw four small objects circling it — becoming the first human being in history to look at the night sky and see, with his own eyes, that the Earth was not the center of everything

On the first night, 7 January 1610, Galileo recorded what he was seeing in his observation notebook with the careful, slightly bemused understatement of a researcher who knew he was looking at something interesting but did not yet know what.

Jun 25, 2026