
A Brazilian researcher just found a 153-day route to Mars inside a file that…
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…
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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

For roughly the last three billion years, half of the Moon has been hiding. Earth's gravity caught the Moon early in its existence and slowed its spin until…
Jun 24, 2026

Canadarm2 has been bolted to the outside of the International Space Station since April 2001, working in shifts measured in years rather than hours.
Jun 24, 2026

Imagine throwing a refrigerator at a mountain travelling 135,000 kilometres per hour through deep space, after a ten-year flight, and asking the refrigerator to land softly enough to keep ten scientific instruments intact.
Jun 24, 2026

In approximately five years, if everything goes to plan, a small sealed canister containing roughly two pounds of Martian dirt and rock will arrive on Earth —…
Jun 24, 2026

Astronauts returning from long ISS rotations consistently describe a half-step-outside-themselves sensation that flight surgeons recognize as part of the post-mission readjustment curve — a perceptual cost of spending six months in a body that had to learn a different world.
Jun 24, 2026

Get in a car. Point it at the sky. Drive at the speed limit. You would reach the official boundary of outer space — the line at which Earth's atmosphere thins…
Jun 24, 2026

The next-generation observatory arrived in Florida on June 21 to begin a roughly 70-day march to the pad. NASA is targeting liftoff no earlier than Aug. 30 on a SpaceX Falcon Heavy.
Jun 24, 2026

Einstein's special theory of relativity, published in 1905, made a number of strange predictions about how time and motion interact, several of which sounded…
Jun 23, 2026

{"content":"On 15 December 1970, a 500-kilogram steel sphere about the size of a beach ball slammed into the night side of Venus at roughly 17 metres per second, bounced, rolled, and came to rest o
Jun 23, 2026