The International Space Station orbits Earth roughly every 90 minutes, yet for years no American spacecraft could reach it — a gap a single private company stepped in to close

On July 8, 2011, Space Shuttle Atlantis lifted off from Kennedy Space Center on STS-135 carrying four astronauts and a logistics module called Raffaello, and when its wheels stopped on the runway thirteen days later NASA no longer had a way to put a human, or even a bag of groceries, on the International Space Station.

By Space Daily Editorial Team · Jun 15, 2026

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Aerospace

NASA still has no American-built way to reach the International Space Station except SpaceX's Dragon capsule — a dependency that has lasted years and shows no sign of ending soon

When Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams finally splashed down off the Florida panhandle in late March 2025 after more than nine months on the International Space Station, they came home inside a SpaceX Crew Dragon.

By Space Daily Editorial Team · Jun 15, 2026

Internet Space

At a 140,000-square-foot plant in Long Beach that the aerospace industry calls Space Beach, a former Raytheon executive is using agentic AI to turn out defense electronics in weeks instead of years — not to replace his engineers, but because the Pentagon wants far more hardware than the shrinking pool of engineers can build

Inside a 140,000-square-foot building in Long Beach that the local aerospace crowd calls Space Beach, circuit boards for spacecraft and…

By Space Daily Editorial Team · Jun 15, 2026

Science

An asteroid long thought to be a chunk of the Moon may be ordinary space rock instead, a new study finds, as China's Tianwen-2 circles it to grab a sample

For five years, the leading story about Kamoʻoalewa, a small asteroid that travels alongside Earth, was that it might be a stray piece of the Moon.

By Space Daily Editorial Team · Jun 15, 2026

Human Behaviour

The Stanford study that tracked 'follow your passion' believers found they gave up faster on hard goals — researchers in 2018 showed passion treated as fixed makes setbacks feel like proof you chose wrong

Students who believed in finding their one true passion gave up faster when things got hard.

By Space Daily Editorial Team · Jun 15, 2026

Mind & Meaning

The oldest city in the world that humans have continuously lived in is not Athens, Rome, or Cairo — it is Jericho, in the West Bank, where archaeologists have found evidence of settlement going back roughly 11,000 years, meaning people have been living in the same place since the end of the last Ice Age, before writing, before metalworking, and at the dawn of agriculture itself

The oldest city in the world that humans have continuously lived in is not Rome, not Athens, not Damascus, not Cairo.

By Space Daily Editorial Team · Jun 15, 2026

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Mind & Meaning

The psychology of ambition, isolation, and meaning under extremes — and what frontier life teaches us about being human.

Cosmology

On a September night in 1999, a 25-year-old graduate student stepped into a modest wooden shed in a Colorado parking lot and used a tiny four-inch telescope to spot a 1% dip in a star's light—a backyard experiment that proved alien planets could be tracked by their shadows and opened the floodgates to discovering thousands of worlds

By Space Daily Editorial Team

Constellations

Apollo astronauts trying to sleep on the way to the Moon kept seeing flashes and streaks in the dark, and the cause turned out to be cosmic rays from deep space passing straight through their eyes.

By Space Daily Editorial Team

Constellations

The Apollo astronauts who carried lunar dust back into the cabin kept making the same strange report — fresh Moon dust smelled like spent gunpowder — yet the smell never survived the trip home, and more than fifty years later no one has fully explained what they were breathing in up there.

By Space Daily Editorial Team

Science

Scientists drilling into sediment beneath the South Pacific Gyre pulled up microbes from seabed layers as old as 101.5 million years. Starved in one of the poorest habitats on Earth, many of the cells were still viable: when given nutrients under oxygen-bearing laboratory conditions, they repaired their metabolism, took up carbon and nitrogen, and began to multiply. They are among the oldest microbial communities ever revived from dormancy.

By Space Daily Editorial Team

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Science

Physics, climate, planetary science, and the research that shapes how we understand the universe.

Science

An asteroid long thought to be a chunk of the Moon may be ordinary space rock instead, a new study finds, as China's Tianwen-2 circles it to grab a sample

By Space Daily Editorial Team

Science

The first human trial of a therapy designed to partially reset the biological age of human cells was approved in January 2026 — using molecular switches that scientists have already shown can reverse the aging of cells in the laboratory — meaning humanity has, for the first time, formally entered the era of testing whether cellular aging can be reversed in living people.

By Space Daily Editorial Team

Constellations

In 1946, a captured German V-2 rocket launched from White Sands carried Clyde Holliday’s 35-millimetre DeVry motion-picture camera above the Kármán line and returned the first photographs of Earth from space on film recovered after the rocket crashed in the New Mexico desert

By Space Daily Editorial Team

Science

Scientists drilling into sediment beneath the South Pacific Gyre pulled up microbes from seabed layers as old as 101.5 million years. Starved in one of the poorest habitats on Earth, many of the cells were still viable: when given nutrients under oxygen-bearing laboratory conditions, they repaired their metabolism, took up carbon and nitrogen, and began to multiply. They are among the oldest microbial communities ever revived from dormancy.

By Space Daily Editorial Team

About Space Daily

Space, science, and the human side of the frontier. Since 1995.

Space Daily is an independent publication covering three connected beats: the space industry, the science behind it, and the psychology of ambition, isolation, and meaning under extremes. Founded in Tokyo in 1995, we’ve built a thirty-year archive of rigorous reporting on the people, missions, and ideas pushing humanity outward — and on the human dynamics shaped by frontier life. The same ambitions, pressures, and patterns of mind that drive humanity to the stars also shape how we live on Earth. We employ modern AI technologies to support our editorial workflows; every published piece is editorially directed and reviewed.

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The International Space Station orbits Earth roughly every 90 minutes, yet for years no American spacecraft could reach it — a gap a single private company stepped in to close

NASA still has no American-built way to reach the International Space Station except SpaceX's Dragon capsule — a dependency that has lasted years and shows no sign of ending soon

An asteroid long thought to be a chunk of the Moon may be ordinary space rock instead, a new study finds, as China's Tianwen-2 circles it to grab a sample

The Stanford study that tracked 'follow your passion' believers found they gave up faster on hard goals — researchers in 2018 showed passion treated as fixed makes setbacks feel like proof you chose wrong

Apollo astronauts trying to sleep on the way to the Moon kept seeing flashes and streaks in the dark, and the cause turned out to be cosmic rays from deep space passing straight through their eyes.

The Apollo astronauts who carried lunar dust back into the cabin kept making the same strange report — fresh Moon dust smelled like spent gunpowder — yet the smell never survived the trip home, and more than fifty years later no one has fully explained what they were breathing in up there.

An asteroid long thought to be a chunk of the Moon may be ordinary space rock instead, a new study finds, as China's Tianwen-2 circles it to grab a sample

In 1946, a captured German V-2 rocket launched from White Sands carried Clyde Holliday’s 35-millimetre DeVry motion-picture camera above the Kármán line and returned the first photographs of Earth from space on film recovered after the rocket crashed in the New Mexico desert

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