Space, science, and the human mind. Since 1995.
Est. 1995
Space Daily Editorial Team
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

The Cassini spacecraft was deliberately flown into Saturn in 2017 because its fuel was running low and engineers refused to risk it drifting into Enceladus, a moon with a subsurface ocean, and the final 22 orbits were designed to thread a 1,500-mile gap between Saturn and its innermost ring that no spacecraft had ever attempted.

On September 15, 2017, NASA deliberately destroyed the Cassini spacecraft by flying it into Saturn at 76,000 mph. Engineers chose a fiery end to prevent any chance the dying orbiter could one day drift into Enceladus, the tiny moon whose subsurface ocean Cassini itself had discovered.

May 18, 2026
Psychology

Nobody tells you that the most important relationship you’ll have in midlife is the one with the version of yourself you were 25 — and the work of going back, apologizing to her, and thanking her for getting you here is something the rest of your adult life is going to be quietly built around

Nobody tells you, in any of the standard accounts of what midlife is going to involve, that the most important relationship you will have during it is the one with the version of yourself you were at twenty.

May 18, 2026
Psychology

There’s a particular freedom that arrives the first time you say no to something you would have said yes to a decade ago — and the freedom isn’t from the no itself, it’s from the realization that the yes was costing you something you finally have the language to name

There is a particular small experience that happens, in most adult lives, somewhere in the late thirties or early forties, that the wider cultural register has not, on the available evidence, given precise language to.

May 18, 2026
Psychology

There’s a particular kind of peace that arrives in your 60s and 70s when you finally stop trying to be understood by people who haven’t been listening — and the peace isn’t sad, it’s the structural truth of someone who has stopped negotiating with audiences that weren’t going to give her what she was asking for

There is a particular kind of peace that appears in the lives of some adults somewhere in their sixties and seventies, and that the wider cultural register has not, on the available evidence, given particularly precise language to.

May 18, 2026
Aerospace

The James Webb Space Telescope is parked a million miles from Earth at a gravitational sweet spot called L2, and the only way to refuel or service it is to send another spacecraft on a one-way mission that hasn’t been designed yet, which means every photograph it takes for the rest of its life is being captured by an instrument we’ve already accepted we can’t save

The James Webb Space Telescope is, as of this writing in 2026, orbiting a point in space called L2, somewhere around a million miles from Earth.

May 18, 2026
Constellations

The Pioneer 10 and 11 probes carry gold plaques designed by Carl Sagan in three weeks, and the diagram of the naked woman is missing a single anatomical line that earlier sketches included, quietly erased by Sagan himself because he was sure NASA would reject anything more explicit

Carl Sagan, Frank Drake, and Linda Salzman Sagan designed the gold plaques bolted to Pioneer 10 and 11 in about three weeks before launch. The figures they engraved are still moving outward, billions of miles from the Sun.

May 18, 2026
Constellations

The Galileo spacecraft was deliberately crashed into Jupiter in 2003 because mission planners feared a drifting probe could contaminate Europa’s hidden ocean, forcing engineers to destroy the machine that revealed why Europa had to be protected

On September 21, 2003, NASA deliberately steered the Galileo spacecraft into Jupiter at 108,000 miles per hour to keep its plutonium-powered hull from ever reaching Europa. The mission's success had made its continued existence dangerous to the science that would come after it.

May 18, 2026
Constellations

The Soviet Venera probes are still sitting on the surface of Venus, slowly being crushed and corroded by 900-degree sulfuric acid clouds, and the photographs they sent back in 1975 remain the only images humans have ever taken from the surface of another planet other than Mars.

The Soviet Venera landers that photographed the surface of Venus between 1975 and 1982 are almost certainly still there, deformed but recognisable, and their images remain the only photographs humans have ever taken from the surface of a planet other than Mars.

May 18, 2026