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.

Constellations

A meteorite that fell near the Australian town of Murchison in 1969 was found to contain grains of stardust up to around 7 billion years old — the oldest solid material ever identified on Earth, formed long before the Sun or planets existed.

On 28 September 1969, a meteorite broke up in the sky over Murchison, a small town in Victoria, Australia.

May 25, 2026

Science

Every GPS satellite is launched with a clock deliberately set to run slow, because Einstein’s relativity speeds it up by about 38 microseconds a day once in orbit — and without that built-in correction, your phone’s location would drift by roughly ten kilometres a day.

Every satellite in the GPS constellation carries atomic clocks, and before launch those clocks are deliberately set to tick at the wrong rate.

May 25, 2026

Constellations

Olympus Mons on Mars is a volcano more than two and a half times the height of Everest, but its slopes rise so gradually over hundreds of kilometres that a person standing on it might not realize they were on the tallest volcano in the solar system at all.

Olympus Mons is a volcano on Mars, in the Tharsis region of the planet's western hemisphere.

May 25, 2026

Science

French scientist Michel Siffre spent two months alone in a cave with no clock, no calendar, and no sunlight — and when his team finally told him the experiment was over, he thought he still had nearly a month left underground

On 16 July 1962, a 23-year-old French speleologist named Michel Siffre climbed down into the Scarasson cavern, an underground glacial cave in the Ligurian Alps, and stayed there for about two months.

May 25, 2026

Science

Helium was discovered on the Sun 27 years before anyone found it on Earth — spotted as an unexplained yellow line in sunlight during an 1868 eclipse and named after Helios, the Greek sun god, long before the gas was identified in any mineral on this planet.

On 18 August 1868, the French astronomer Pierre Janssen observed a total solar eclipse from Guntur, in India.

May 25, 2026

Constellations

In 1990, after years of lobbying by Carl Sagan, Voyager 1 turned its camera back toward home from about 6 billion kilometres away and photographed Earth as a pale blue speck smaller than a single pixel — an image NASA had repeatedly resisted because it offered little scientific value, but that became one of the most famous photographs ever taken.

On 14 February 1990, the Voyager 1 spacecraft turned its cameras back toward the inner solar system and photographed the planets it had left behind.

May 24, 2026

Constellations

Voyager 1 is now so far from Earth that a signal traveling at the speed of light takes more than 22 hours to reach it — so when engineers send a command, they can wait nearly two days to know whether the spacecraft responded

Sending a command to Voyager 1 is closer to mailing a letter than placing a phone call.

May 24, 2026

Psychology

Almost half of women in their 60s and 70s in Japan now prefer getting personal advice from AI rather than another human — the only age group in the survey to make that choice — and the country’s elderly isolation crisis is the unstated context

The Japan Institute for Promotion of Digital Economy and Community published, in late May 2026, the results of a survey conducted online in mid-January.

May 24, 2026

Space Travel

China is sending an astronaut to its space station for a full year — a national record — as Beijing races toward a 2030 crewed moon landing, two years behind NASA’s target

At 11:08 p.m. local time on Sunday, May 24, 2026, the Long March-2F Y23 carrier rocket is scheduled to lift off from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in northwest China, carrying the Shenzhou-23 vessel and three astronauts to China's Tiangong space station.

May 24, 2026

Military Technology

The price tag on Trump’s “Golden Dome” missile shield just jumped to $1.2 trillion in a new congressional analysis — seven times the administration’s number — with a quiet caveat that the system may not actually do what it was pitched to do

The Congressional Budget Office released, on May 12, 2026, a new analysis of the projected cost of the Trump administration's signature missile defense project, the so-called Golden Dome for America.

May 24, 2026

Aerospace

The first all-female spacewalk in history did not happen until October 2019, fifty-eight years after Yuri Gagarin orbited Earth — and an earlier all-female attempt seven months before was reassigned because only one medium spacesuit torso was ready on the station

A “medium-size hard upper torso” is a rigid fiberglass shell that forms the chest and shoulders of the spacesuit worn outside the International Space Station.

May 24, 2026

Psychology

There is a moment, in most adults’ lives, when intuition turns out to have been right about something important, and another moment, often in the same lives, when intuition turns out to have been catastrophically wrong, and the neuroscience that has begun to explain the difference is one of the more useful things the cognitive sciences have done in the last two decades.

Most adults, on examination, can recall both. They had an intuition that turned out to be right, often about something important.

May 24, 2026

Constellations

The Voyager Golden Record carries greetings in 55 languages — a deliberate attempt to send a small sample of human voices into deep space long after the spacecraft fell silent.

In April 2026, engineers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory switched off another instrument on Voyager 1 — the Low-energy Charged Particles experiment, which…

May 24, 2026

Constellations

Before he climbed the ladder for the last time, the final astronaut to walk on the Moon knelt and traced his daughter’s initials into the lunar dust with one finger — three letters that, with no wind or rain to disturb them, may sit there undisturbed for fifty thousand years.

On 14 December 1972, near the end of the final moonwalk of the Apollo programme, the commander of Apollo 17, Gene Cernan, knelt on the surface and traced three letters into the lunar dust with one finger.

May 24, 2026

Constellations

A NASA satellite launched in 1976 carries a Carl Sagan–designed plaque sealed inside its core, mapping Earth’s continents 268 million years ago, at launch, and 8.4 million years from now — and that last date is no accident, because it’s roughly when the satellite is expected to fall back to Earth and finally be opened.

On 4 May 1976, NASA launched a satellite called LAGEOS-1 from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California.

May 24, 2026

Science

The asteroid that ended the dinosaurs struck what is now Mexico with such force that it blasted molten ejecta high above the atmosphere before it rained back down across the planet, and many of the survivors were small, sheltered creatures — including early mammals on the line that would eventually lead to us.

About 66 million years ago, an asteroid roughly 10 to 15 kilometres across struck the shallow sea covering what is now the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico.

May 24, 2026