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

The reason no human being has walked on the Moon in more than half a century is not that humanity lost the capability to get there — it is that humanity lost the reason, in the moment the Cold War goal of beating the Soviet Union to the lunar surface had finally been accomplished and the political momentum behind Apollo evaporated

The popular framing of the question — why has no human walked on the Moon since 1972? — usually proceeds as though there is some technical answer to be found.

Jun 21, 2026

Space Travel

Approximately 120 private civilians have now flown to space aboard commercial rockets — roughly one-sixth of all the human beings who have ever left Earth — and the rate at which citizens are reaching space is now accelerating faster than the rate at which national space programs are sending professional astronauts

For the first forty years of human spaceflight, getting into space required being a professional astronaut or cosmonaut.

Jun 20, 2026

Space Travel

An eight-day mission to the International Space Station ended 286 days later in March 2025, when NASA astronauts Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore finally returned aboard a SpaceX capsule — abandoning the Boeing Starliner they had arrived in after it developed thruster problems too serious to fly them home

When Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore packed for their trip to the International Space Station in early June 2024, they packed for approximately a week.

Jun 20, 2026

Space Travel

The longest continuous spaceflight in history — 437 days aboard the Russian Mir space station, completed by cosmonaut Valeri Polyakov in 1995 — was specifically conducted to prove that a human being could survive a round-trip mission to Mars, in a piece of human endurance that has been waiting unused on a shelf for three decades

The record sits at the top of every list of human spaceflight endurance achievements, has been there since 1995, and is currently held by a man who has been dead for three years.

Jun 20, 2026

Econoplex

In 1908, a 27-year-old Bavarian invented a five-letter word that would fit on a watch dial in any language — and trademarked it before he had a factory to make the watches

On 2 July 1908, a 27-year-old Bavarian importer named Hans Wilsdorf trademarked a five-letter word in Switzerland for a watch company he did not yet manufacture. The word was Rolex — and the choice of letters has carried the brand for 118 years.

Jun 18, 2026