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.

Mind & Meaning

The Great Pyramid of Giza is described as one of the world’s oldest landmarks, but it was already more than a thousand years old by the time Stonehenge was completed — and it was older to Cleopatra than Cleopatra is to us, with the gap between her reign and the pyramid’s construction larger than the gap between her reign and the present day

The Great Pyramid of Giza is one of those structures whose age has been repeated so often that the number no longer registers.

May 30, 2026

Human Behaviour

The Library of Ashurbanipal in Nineveh burned down in 612 BC, but because its 30,000 tablets were made of clay, the fire actually baked and preserved them, and we can read Mesopotamian poetry today because someone tried to destroy it

When Nineveh fell in 612 BC, the fire that destroyed King Ashurbanipal's palace baked his library of 30,000 clay tablets into ceramic, preserving the Epic of Gilgamesh and most of what we know about Mesopotamian literature.

May 30, 2026

Human Behaviour

Frances Glessner Lee, a wealthy heiress in the 1940s, built 20 dollhouse-sized crime scenes with hand-stitched curtains and working light bulbs to train homicide detectives, and 18 of her tiny dioramas are still used in forensic training in Baltimore today

Frances Glessner Lee, heir to the International Harvester fortune, built twenty miniature crime scenes in the 1940s to train homicide detectives. Eighteen of her Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death are still used by the FBI and Harvard forensic seminars today.

May 30, 2026

Science

The Antikythera mechanism, pulled from a Greek shipwreck in 1901, was a hand-cranked bronze computer that predicted eclipses and tracked the Olympic Games calendar around 100 BC, and nothing of comparable complexity would appear again on Earth for the next 1,400 years

In 1901 sponge divers off the Greek island of Antikythera recovered a corroded lump of bronze that turned out to be a 2,000-year-old hand-cranked computer. It predicted eclipses, tracked the Moon's irregular orbit, and marked the Olympic Games, with no comparable machine appearing for the next 1,400 years.

May 30, 2026

Constellations

In the year 1054 a star exploded so brightly that Chinese astronomers recorded it shining in broad daylight for more than three weeks, and the wreckage of that blast is still expanding across the sky today as the Crab Nebula.

On 4 July 1054, astronomers in Song dynasty China recorded a new point of light near the southern horn of the constellation we call Taurus.

May 30, 2026

Constellations

The surface of the Sun is around 5,500 degrees, but its outer atmosphere is more than a million degrees hotter, and after decades of work physicists still cannot fully explain how the cooler layer heats the one above it.

The visible surface of the Sun, the photosphere, sits at around 5,500 degrees Celsius.

May 30, 2026

Constellations

Astronomers have found a cloud of water vapour around a distant quasar holding something like 140 trillion times all the water in Earth’s oceans, the largest reservoir of water ever discovered anywhere in the universe.

In July 2011, NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory announced that two teams of astronomers had detected an enormous mass of water vapour around a quasar called APM 08279+5255, more than 12 billion light-years away.

May 30, 2026

Science

More than 2,200 years ago a librarian in Egypt measured the circumference of the entire planet using nothing but a stick, a shadow, and the distance between two cities, and landed within a few per cent of the right answer.

Around 240 BCE, Eratosthenes of Cyrene, the chief librarian at Alexandria, produced an estimate for the circumference of the Earth.

May 30, 2026

Science

Mount Everest is the highest point above sea level, but because the Earth bulges at the equator, the summit of a volcano in Ecuador sits farther from the centre of the planet, making it the closest piece of land on Earth to outer space.

Mount Everest is the highest point on Earth measured from sea level. Its official height, agreed by Nepal and China in 2020, is 8,848.86 metres.

May 29, 2026

Science

Between five and six million years ago, the Mediterranean Sea nearly dried out — and when Atlantic water finally broke back in near Gibraltar, one model suggests the basin may have refilled so violently that sea level rose by metres a day.

Between roughly 5.97 and 5.33 million years ago, the Mediterranean Sea was cut off from the Atlantic and lost most of its water to evaporation.

May 29, 2026

Asia News

There is a Japanese word, mottainai, that carries the sense of regret over discarding something still useful, and a small mountain town of 1,500 people in southern Japan has spent the past twenty years building a municipal system around it, requiring residents to sort their household waste into 45 separate categories and achieving an 81 per cent recycling rate against a national average of 20 per cent.

The town is called Kamikatsu. It sits in the mountains of Shikoku, the smallest and least populated of the four main Japanese islands, about an hour's drive inland from the prefectural capital of Tokushima.

May 29, 2026

Deep Space

NASA’s next major space telescope, the Nancy Grace Roman, is expected to find roughly 100,000 new transiting planets in just five years — along with the largest catalogue ever assembled of rogue worlds drifting through the galaxy without a star to orbit

According to NASA's December 2025 announcement that construction of the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope had been completed, the observatory is on track for…

May 29, 2026

Black Holes

The James Webb Space Telescope has just captured the first direct measurement of a black hole 50 million times the mass of the Sun, sitting in an ancient galaxy where it outweighs every star around it — suggesting it may have formed first

According to the official ESA Webb announcement on 27 May 2026, two papers published the same day, one in Nature and a companion in Monthly Notices of the…

May 29, 2026

Science

The asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs may have struck a planet that was already in serious trouble — a new Johns Hopkins study has found evidence of a separate ecological crisis that began about 30,000 years before the impact, coincident with a high-volume pulse of volcanic eruptions in what is now India

A study published in May 2026 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences reports a finding that complicates the standard one-line version of the dinosaur extinction.

May 29, 2026

Constellations

When NASA deliberately crashed Apollo hardware into the Moon, the seismometers left behind recorded vibrations for nearly an hour — as if the Moon itself were ringing like a bell

Between 1969 and 1972, NASA deliberately steered spent pieces of Apollo hardware into the Moon.

May 29, 2026

Science

For 70 years, two large fossil bones sat in a University of Alaska museum drawer labeled as woolly mammoth — until radiocarbon dating, isotope analysis, and DNA testing revealed they came from two whales of two different species that somehow ended up 250 miles inland from the nearest coast, in a mystery the researchers say may never be fully solved

In 1951, gold miners at Dome Creek, a small settlement north of Fairbanks, donated a pile of fossil bones from their excavations to the explorer and naturalist…

May 29, 2026