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

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.

NASA's Mars rovers run on a 24-hour-39-minute Martian sol, and for the first 90 sols of every mission the engineers at JPL shift their entire lives to match, producing a jet lag no human had experienced before.

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

Constellations

The Senate just installed a deputy administrator who thinks NASA’s job is beating China to the moon — and the 46-43 vote tells you everything about what the agency is becoming

Matt Anderson, the retired Air Force colonel who told senators that beating China to the moon should be NASA's top priority, was confirmed Monday as the…

May 20, 2026

Cosmology

Scott Kelly spent a year in orbit while his identical twin brother stayed on Earth, and when he came home NASA discovered his gene expression had changed in ways that didn’t fully reverse

When Scott Kelly returned from 340 days aboard the International Space Station, NASA's twin study revealed that roughly seven percent of his gene expression had shifted in ways that never fully returned to baseline.

May 20, 2026

Science

Octopuses have nine brains, three hearts, and blue copper-based blood, with roughly two-thirds of their neurons spread through their arms, allowing each arm to taste, move, and react with a startling degree of local control

An octopus carries roughly 500 million neurons, two-thirds of them distributed down eight arms that taste, decide and react in under 100 milliseconds without consulting the central brain. The result is nine semi-independent minds, three hearts, and blue copper-based blood, all working in negotiation.

May 20, 2026

Cosmology

The bacteria living in and on your body outnumber your own cells, which means that by strict cellular count you are not majority human — and the ratio shifts noticeably depending on whether you’ve just been to the bathroom

By raw cell count, the human body is a minority partner in its own biology — and the precise composition of that partnership depends, in part, on how recently you've emptied your colon.

May 20, 2026

Constellations

In April 2019 the Israeli spacecraft Beresheet crashed into the lunar surface carrying thousands of dehydrated tardigrades inside a “lunar library” — and later impact tests put the survival cutoff for tardigrades at around 900 metres per second, almost exactly Beresheet’s crash speed, meaning we still don’t know whether Earth life is now lying dormant on the Moon with no water to revive it.

In April 2019, the Israeli spacecraft Beresheet crashed into the lunar surface carrying thousands of dehydrated tardigrades inside a "lunar library". Later…

May 20, 2026

Psychology

Radioactive iron from an ancient stellar explosion has been found in 80,000-year-old Antarctic ice, confirming that the Solar System is passing through the remnant debris of a supernova

A team led by researchers at the Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf (HZDR) has found traces of iron-60 in Antarctic ice cores dating back between 40,000 and…

May 20, 2026

Human Behaviour

Technology spent 15 years removing every small resistance from your day — and a growing body of research suggests that was not as good for your brain as it was for their engagement metrics

Over roughly the past decade and a half, the dominant design logic of consumer technology has been to remove friction.

May 20, 2026

Science

In 2007 the European Space Agency exposed dried tardigrades to the open vacuum of space for 10 days aboard the FOTON-M3 mission, and most survived the combination of vacuum and cosmic radiation, with some even surviving direct solar UV — then revived back on Earth and produced viable offspring.

In September 2007, the European Space Agency exposed dried tardigrades to the open vacuum of space for 10 days aboard the FOTON-M3 mission.

May 20, 2026

Cosmology

Japan sits on the intersection of four tectonic plates and experiences roughly 1,500 earthquakes a year, which is why the country’s building codes are the strictest on Earth — and why the Tokyo Skytree, the second-tallest structure in the world, is designed to sway rather than resist

Japan endures roughly 1,500 earthquakes a year on the seam of four tectonic plates, and the Tokyo Skytree's 634-meter answer to that problem is not stiffness but a deliberate, controlled sway borrowed from a building technique that is more than a thousand years old.

May 20, 2026

Science

The Antikythera mechanism was recovered from a Roman-era shipwreck in 1901 with at least 30 hand-cut bronze gears inside, and no comparable machine survives for centuries after it, as if a whole engineering tradition dropped out of history

Recovered from a Roman-era shipwreck in 1901, the Antikythera mechanism used hand-cut bronze gears to predict eclipses and planetary positions, and nothing of comparable complexity appears in the archaeological record for the next fourteen centuries.

May 19, 2026

Cosmology

China’s Chang’e 5 mission returned lunar rocks dated to 2 billion years old — 800 million years younger than anything Apollo brought back — which means the Moon was geologically active hundreds of millions of years later than every textbook had assumed, and most of those textbooks haven’t been updated yet

On December 17, 2020, a small Chinese spacecraft called Chang'e 5 landed in the Pacific Ocean carrying approximately 1.731 kilograms of lunar material.

May 19, 2026

Science

About 60 percent of the human body’s mass is water, but a much more interesting figure is that roughly half of the cells in our bodies aren’t human at all — they’re bacteria, fungi, and other microorganisms whose collective genetic material vastly outnumbers our own, and emerging research suggests they’re influencing mood, sleep, and certain kinds of decision-making in ways we’re only beginning to map.

The standard cultural framing of the human body tends to treat it as a self-contained biological unit composed of cells that are, in some sense, all human.

May 19, 2026