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

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 roughly 1 million miles from Earth at a gravitational sweet spot called Lagrange point 2, a place where the pull of the Sun and the pull of Earth almost cancel out.

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

Ask a shaman in the upper Amazon how his ancestors learned to combine the two specific plants that make ayahuasca work, and the answer that comes back is not the one a Western pharmacologist would offer.

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 claim that women possess a sharper sense of smell than men is one of those folk observations that turns out to be approximately correct, repeatedly replicated, and yet rarely explained with any mechanical honesty.

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

Ragini Verma, a biomedical imaging researcher at the University of Pennsylvania, published a paper in late 2013 that did something unusual for a neuroscience finding: it escaped the journal and entered the dinner-table conversation almost intact.

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

When a group of Warlpiri elders stood along a dirt track between Lajamanu and Yuendumu in the Tanami Desert in 2026, staring at a patch of ground that looked…

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

The Siberian taiga, the Amazon basin, and the Australian interior were not in meaningful contact for tens of thousands of years.

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 atmosphere is not a fresh supply. It is a recirculation system that has been running for roughly four billion years, and the breath leaving your body right…

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 standard cultural framing of Norway's sovereign wealth fund treats it as a kind of moral curiosity — a petrostate that somehow stumbled into climate virtue, banking its hydrocarbon windfall while quietly buying solar panels and wind turbines on the side.

May 19, 2026

Solar Science

The water in your coffee this morning is older than the Sun, formed in interstellar clouds before the solar system existed, and roughly half of every glass of water on Earth predates the planet it’s sitting on by about a billion years.

The water sitting in a coffee cup on a kitchen counter this morning is, in significant part, older than the Sun.

May 19, 2026

Deep Space

The supermassive black hole at the centre of the Milky Way has a mass of 4 million suns, and the entire solar system is orbiting it at 514,000 mph without anyone on Earth feeling a thing

The headline number for the object at the center of the Milky Way is four million solar masses, and the number for how fast the solar system is moving around it is roughly 514,000 miles per hour.

May 19, 2026

Science

Roughly two billion years ago, one single-celled organism swallowed another and instead of digesting it, ended up living with it permanently inside — and the bacterium that almost became a meal became the mitochondria that now power nearly every cell in nearly every plant and animal on Earth, still carrying a small remnant of their own ancient bacterial DNA, separate from ours.

Roughly two billion years ago, one single-celled organism ended up living permanently inside another.

May 19, 2026