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.

Culture

The earliest known cave paintings, recently dated to at least 45,500 years old on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi, depict a wild pig and several human-animal hybrid figures — and the discovery has pushed the timeline of complex symbolic thinking back so far that most of the standard textbook narratives about when humans started being recognizably modern are now being quietly rewritten

In December 2017, a team of researchers led by Adam Brumm and Maxime Aubert of Griffith University, working with Indonesian archaeologists, climbed into a remote limestone cave called Leang Tedongnge on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi.

May 19, 2026

Constellations

Europe and China just put a telescope in orbit to photograph something nobody has ever actually seen — the invisible shield keeping the solar wind from stripping Earth bare

Europe and China's joint Smile spacecraft reached orbit early Tuesday, opening a three-year campaign to capture the first global X-ray images of the invisible magnetic shield that has deflected solar wind from Earth for nearly four billion years.

May 19, 2026

Science

The Arecibo radio telescope broadcast a single 3-minute message toward star cluster M13 in 1974, and because M13 is 25,000 light-years away, any reply would take 50,000 years to arrive, meaning the people who sent it knew with certainty no one alive would ever hear an answer.

In 1974, scientists at the Arecibo Observatory broadcast a 1,679-bit binary message toward the globular cluster M13, knowing the signal would take 25,000 years to arrive and any reply would take another 25,000 to return. Here's what was in the message, why they sent it anyway, and where the signal is right now.

May 19, 2026

Constellations

Washington tried to blind the world to what’s happening over Iran — and instead handed Europe’s satellite industry the customer base it spent a decade failing to build

European Earth-observation companies are absorbing a surge of commercial demand for satellite imagery of Iran and the Gulf after the largest US operator withdrew its data from the open market at the Trump administration's request.

May 19, 2026

Science

The James Webb Space Telescope is parked a million miles from Earth at a gravitational balance point so precarious it has to fire its thrusters every three weeks just to stay there, and when its fuel runs out around 2040 it will drift away forever with no possibility of refueling or rescue.

The James Webb Space Telescope sits at a gravitational balance point a million miles from Earth, firing its thrusters on a regular cadence to stay in place. When its propellant runs out, no rescue mission exists to save it.

May 19, 2026

Cosmology

The James Webb Space Telescope has found galaxies that appear to have formed within 280 million years of the Big Bang, some containing heavy elements that shouldn’t have had time to form — and at least one peer-reviewed paper has now proposed that the universe might actually be 26.7 billion years old, almost twice the standard estimate

The James Webb Space Telescope wasn't supposed to find any of this.

May 19, 2026

Human Behaviour

Indigenous Amazonian shamans identified the specific combination of two plants required to make ayahuasca active orally — a pairing that stands as what may be one of the most unlikely discoveries in the history of human botany, given there are roughly 80,000 plant species in the Amazon

The Amazon contains roughly 80,000 plant species, and ayahuasca requires precisely two of them combined in a way that defies straightforward botanical reasoning — a fact that has puzzled pharmacologists for decades.

May 19, 2026

Human Behaviour

Women’s sense of smell is roughly 50% more sensitive than men’s on average, and the gap widens during pregnancy to a degree that some evolutionary biologists think is a defence mechanism for the fetus

The popular claim that women smell better than men holds up under scrutiny — but the mechanism, and the pregnancy effect, are stranger and more contested than the headline suggests.

May 19, 2026

Human Behaviour

The clearest indicator of whether a person has aged well into their seventies is not health, wealth, or relationships. It is whether they have continued to be surprised by things.

The pattern is a familiar one to anyone who pays attention to how the older people in their life have aged.

May 19, 2026

Human Behaviour

Female brains have measurably more connections between the two hemispheres, and male brains have more connections within each hemisphere — and neuroscientists still argue about whether this explains anything or nothing at all

The corpus callosum data is real and the effect size is small, but the cultural story built on top of it is doing far more work than the neuroscience can support.

May 19, 2026

Human Behaviour

Australian Aboriginal songlines encode the geography of the entire continent in song — a navigation system that predates writing by tens of thousands of years and still works today for anyone who knows the song

Across roughly 65,000 years, Aboriginal Australians built a navigation system so accurate that researchers can still walk its routes today using nothing but memorised song.

May 19, 2026

Tech Space

The Opportunity rover survived on Mars for 14 years — roughly 55 times longer than its 90-day design mission — before a 2018 global dust storm so vast it turned “day into night” across the entire planet buried its solar panels, and despite NASA sending more than 1,000 recovery commands afterward, the rover never woke up

In January 2004, a golf-cart-sized robot bounced down through the atmosphere of Mars on a cluster of airbags, rolled to a stop, and started doing what it was sent to do.

May 19, 2026

Human Behaviour

Siberian, Amazonian, and Aboriginal Australian shamanic traditions developed independently across three continents — and all three describe the same basic cosmology of an upper world, a middle world, and a lower world reached through an axis at the centre

Three shamanic traditions separated by oceans and ice caps independently arrived at the same three-tiered map of reality, and the convergence is harder to dismiss than the standard ethnographic framing allows.

May 19, 2026

Cosmology

Every breath you take contains atoms that were once inside the lungs of Julius Caesar, Cleopatra, and every other person who has ever lived — the math is unforgiving and it works out every time

The arithmetic is brutal in its simplicity: the air moving through your lungs right now has already been moved through every other set of lungs in human history.

May 19, 2026

Psychology

Submarine crews and astronauts experience the same set of psychological pressures and have evolved opposite ways of handling them, and the difference reveals something about how isolation actually works.

There is a category of psychological research that gets discussed in two largely separate literatures, even though the people doing the research are looking at the same conditions in two different uniforms.

May 19, 2026

Space Industry

Norway’s sovereign wealth fund — built entirely from oil revenue — is now the single largest investor in the global energy transition, and it owns roughly 1.5% of every publicly traded company on Earth

The world's largest pile of oil money is now quietly buying the machinery designed to replace oil, and the contradiction is more structural than hypocritical.

May 19, 2026