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.

Space Travel

In May 1992, after two failed attempts to capture a 4.5-tonne communications satellite with a specially built tool, three astronauts left Endeavour together and grabbed the free-flying spacecraft with their gloved hands — the first, and still only, three-person spacewalk in history

The moment people remember from STS-49 looks almost improvised: three astronauts in white suits, fixed to foot restraints and handholds around a huge black communications satellite, reaching for hardware that was not supposed to be grabbed that way.

Jul 16, 2026

Space Travel

In November 1970, a Soviet rover the size of a bathtub rolled off the Luna 17 lander and crawled across the Sea of Rains at 100 metres per hour, driven by five men in a bunker near Simferopol who had never seen the Moon and faced a 2.5-second delay between command and the wheels responding

In November 1970, the Soviet Union rolled Lunokhod 1 off the Luna 17 lander onto Mare Imbrium, becoming the first vehicle to drive on another world — steered from a control room in Simferopol through a 2.5-second radio delay, at a top speed slower than a walking human.

Jul 16, 2026

Space Travel

Cosmonaut Sergei Krikalev stayed in orbit so long that the country which launched him collapsed, and he kept doing his job in space while the world he trusted to bring him home fell apart below

Sergei Krikalev left Earth as a citizen of the Soviet Union on 18 May 1991. When he returned 311 days and 20 hours later, the Soviet Union no longer existed.

Jul 16, 2026

Space Travel

Apollo 12 was struck by lightning twice within a minute of launch and survived because one flight controller recognized an obscure electrical pattern almost nobody else in Mission Control understood

Thirty-six and a half seconds after Apollo 12 left Kennedy Space Center on 14 November 1969, lightning travelled through the Saturn V and its exhaust trail.

Jul 15, 2026

Spacemart

Space lawyers have a name for satellites claimed on paper years before a single one launches: they call them paper satellites, and the earliest filing quietly locks out everyone who comes later

The ITU's geostationary register holds thousands of satellites that never launched — filings made years in advance that quietly lock out every operator who arrives later. Tonga turned six of them into a national income stream.

Jul 14, 2026

Station News

Astronauts insist space has a smell — a mix of seared steak, hot metal and welding fumes that clings to a suit after every spacewalk

The strangest thing about the smell of space is that no one can smell space directly.

Jul 14, 2026

Space Travel

In 1957, the Soviet Union launched a metal sphere the size of a beach ball into orbit — and the panic it triggered across the country was so severe that within a year Congress poured federal money into science, maths, and foreign-language education

It was about the size of a beach ball, weighed roughly as much as a grown man, and did almost nothing.

Jul 13, 2026

Space Travel

Within hours of reaching microgravity, astronauts’ body fluids shift toward the head, dulling smell and taste — one reason NASA monitors daily nutrition so closely as crews fight the muscle loss space exercise alone cannot fully prevent

The first thing that happens to a body in orbit is that it starts to rearrange itself.

Jul 8, 2026

Space Medicine

Astronaut Don Pettit described the light flashes crossing his eyes on the International Space Station as ‘luminous dancing fairies’ — the same cosmic rays Apollo crews reported, still arriving decades later above your head tonight

Astronaut Don Pettit called them 'luminous dancing fairies' — the streaks of light that cross astronauts' vision on the ISS. They are cosmic rays punching through the hull and through the eye, the same phenomenon every Apollo crew reported from 1969 onward.

Jul 6, 2026

Rocket Science

A Brazilian researcher just found a 153-day route to Mars inside a file that asteroid trackers had already discarded as too rough to use, and it raises a reasonable question about what else is in the bin

A study published in April 2026 in the peer-reviewed journal Acta Astronautica identifies a set of Earth-to-Mars trajectories that could, in principle, cut…

Jul 2, 2026

Station News

NASA astronauts head outside the space station to replace a Canadarm2 wrist joint that malfunctioned after 25 years in orbit

During US Spacewalk 95, flight engineers Chris Williams and Jessica Meir will spend about six and a half hours swapping out a joint that drew too much current and stopped moving on May 27.

Jun 30, 2026

Space Travel

Astronauts aboard the International Space Station witness 16 sunrises and 16 sunsets every 24 hours, orbiting Earth once every 90 minutes while traveling 5 miles a second

The International Space Station orbits Earth every 90 minutes at 7.66 kilometres per second, giving its crew 16 sunrises and 16 sunsets in a single day — and forcing them to live by UTC, tunable LED lighting, and shaded sleep stations to keep their biology from unravelling.

Jun 26, 2026

Space Travel

A Russian module called Zvezda has been venting the space station’s air through cracks since 2019 — losing nearly 2 kilograms a day before NASA auditors flagged it the highest safety risk aboard

Since September 2019, the Russian-built Zvezda service module has been leaking air through hairline cracks in a narrow tunnel called the PrK — at one point losing 1.7 kilograms of atmosphere a day. NASA auditors now rate it the highest open safety risk on the entire International Space Station.

Jun 26, 2026

Space Travel

The International Space Station weighs 420 tons and stretches the length of an American football field — making it the most expensive object humanity has ever built at roughly $150 billion

The ISS weighs 420 tons, stretches the length of a football field, orbits at 17,500 mph, and cost roughly $150 billion across 13 nations and 42 launches — making it the most expensive single object ever built.

Jun 26, 2026

Space Travel

In November 2011, NASA launched a car-sized rover called Curiosity toward Mars on a planned two-year mission to look for evidence of ancient lakes and rivers — and almost 15 years later, the rover is still moving across the Martian surface, still drilling into rocks, and still transmitting data back to Earth

The Curiosity rover was given its name by a 12-year-old girl from Kansas named Clara Ma, who in 2009 won a NASA-sponsored essay contest with a submission that included the line: "Curiosity is the passion that drives us through our everyday lives.

Jun 25, 2026

Space Travel

In April 1970, three American astronauts aboard Apollo 13 were 320,000 kilometres from Earth — closer to the Moon than to home — when one of their oxygen tanks exploded, and engineers on the ground had 96 hours to solve a problem so complex the solution was eventually worked out using slide rules and read back to the astronauts to keep them alive

Apollo 13 had been launched four and a half days into a planned ten-day mission that would, if everything had proceeded as designed, have landed Lovell and…

Jun 25, 2026