A Space Daily column

The Daily Orbit

News desk

The Daily Orbit is Space Daily's news desk. Launches, mission milestones, agency decisions, and the commercial race to orbit, reported as they happen. Most stories start from primary sources: NASA and ESA releases, operator updates, and launch broadcasts.

Tech Space

In 2025, SpaceX’s Starlink-led connectivity business generated $11.4 billion—apparently the first satellite-broadband operation ever to cross $10 billion in annual revenue—and supplied 61 percent of the company’s total sales. More strikingly, it earned $4.4 billion in operating profit while SpaceX’s rocket division lost $657 million, making internet connectivity the financial engine helping bankroll Starship.

SpaceX's 2025 accounts show Starlink-led Connectivity supplied 61% of combined revenue and $4.423 billion of operating income, helping fund Starship's expensive development cycle.

Aug 27, 2026

Moon Daily

China’s Tianwen‑2 travelled roughly one billion kilometres over 400 days before returning the first close-up image of Kamoʻoalewa in July 2026—a tiny, fast-spinning asteroid perhaps only 20 metres wide whose unusual spectrum once made it look like a fragment of the Moon, although new observations have reopened that debate.

Tianwen-2 has reached a fast-spinning asteroid that Webb estimates at only 18 plus or minus 2 metres wide, just as new spectra and models reopen its proposed lunar origin.

Aug 26, 2026

Launch Pad

Louisiana built stages of the Saturn V rockets that carried astronauts to the Moon, but has never hosted an orbital launch. SpaceX now plans a $100 billion Gulf Coast spaceport targeting its first Starship flight in 2029 — with an eventual capacity of thousands a year.

SpaceX and Louisiana have announced a 125,000-acre Starship campus targeting a first flight in 2029, but its $100 billion full-buildout plan and thousands-per-year capacity still depend on vehicle reuse, infrastructure, licensing and coastal review.

Aug 26, 2026

Space Industry

China’s water-hunting Moon mission was hours from launch on Sunday when the countdown stopped — the next window may not come until 2027

A scrubbed launch in the race to find water ice at the Moon's poles could cost China years in its push to establish the first permanent lunar base.

Aug 26, 2026

Launch Pad

The United States recorded 178 rocket launches in 2025. Trump’s new national space policy directs American ranges to support more than 1,000 launches and reentries annually by 2030—an average of nearly three spaceflight operations every day.

The White House wants American ranges capable of supporting more than 1,000 launches and reentries a year by 2030. The target is broader than the 178-launch baseline and will test ranges, airspace and regulation.

Aug 23, 2026

Tech Space

SpaceX spent $15.8 billion building AI compute infrastructure in just three months — more than four times what its entire Space division spent on capital projects throughout 2025. And Elon Musk is already warning that global chip production isn’t scaling fast enough to meet AI demand.

SpaceX's Q2 filing shows AI absorbed 86% of capital expenditure, while chip and memory supply are emerging as the physical limits on its compute build-out.

Aug 20, 2026

Tech Space

Most people think of SpaceX as a rocket company, but its 2026 S-1 revealed a different financial reality: its Starlink-driven connectivity business generated 61% of the company’s 2025 revenue and was the only one of its three divisions to turn an operating profit.

SpaceX's 2026 S-1 shows that Starlink-driven connectivity supplied 61% of 2025 revenue and the company's only positive segment operating result.

Aug 20, 2026

Launchers

On 18 August, SpaceX logged its 100th launch of 2026, hitting that mark two months faster than it did in 2024 — a company that flew 25 times in 2020 is now lifting off more than three times a week

The routinization of spaceflight is reshaping what's possible in orbit—and challenging our intuitions about technological breakthroughs.

Aug 19, 2026

Space Industry

Sophie Adenot became the first French woman to spacewalk on 18 August 2026, but the job she went outside to finish remains unfinished — stubborn electrical cables ate the time she needed to install a new antenna

A historic milestone collided with the mundane reality of spacewalking: six hours is never quite enough when old wiring fights back.

Aug 19, 2026

Culture

Rural schools in South Korea were running out of children, so they enrolled grandmothers instead — women in their seventies and eighties sitting in first grade, learning to read for the first time in their lives

As rural South Korea emptied of young people, schools found an unexpected solution: grandmothers became first-graders, reclaiming classrooms and literacy in their seventies and eighties.

Aug 15, 2026

Deep Space

NASA’s Roman telescope could find hundreds of planets without suns, but the number is a forecast with enormous uncertainty and each detection may last only hours

A forthcoming NASA telescope could revolutionize our understanding of rogue planets—if astronomers can catch their fleeting shadows before they vanish.

Aug 12, 2026

Marsdaily

A rock blasted off Mars is not a comet and is only a meteor for seconds; in space it is a meteoroid, and on the ground it becomes a Martian meteorite

The same Martian rock transforms into four different things before scientists can even study it.

Aug 12, 2026

Marsdaily

NASA proposed Mars in the 1980s and Europe once aimed for 2033; today NASA says its architecture is not a mission or manifest, which explains why no landing date is official

The gap between Mars architecture and Mars landing isn't a technical problem—it's a bureaucratic one, and it explains why NASA still won't name a year.

Aug 12, 2026

Marsdaily

Mars can snow carbon dioxide at its poles, while some of its warmest summer landscapes grow dry-ice frost overnight that vanishes back into gas after sunrise

The Red Planet's carbon dioxide cycles through fleeting transformations—frozen snow at the poles, ephemeral frost that vanishes with dawn, and daytime sublimation that skips the liquid phase entirely.

Aug 12, 2026

Tech Space

SpaceX has asked to operate up to one million AI satellites, but their direct waste heat would barely affect global temperature; the larger climate question is what launches and mass re-entry would put into the upper atmosphere

The real climate threat from a million AI satellites may not be their heat, but the cumulative impact of launching and destroying them.

Aug 11, 2026

Science

The claim that a third of humanity cannot see the Milky Way comes from a 2016 atlas, and newer studies show why producing an updated global headcount is harder than it sounds

A striking statistic about light pollution obscuring the Milky Way rests on a single 2016 study—and replacing it proves far more complicated than simply looking up.

Aug 11, 2026