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Space Travel
In June 2025, a 65-year-old former NASA astronaut named Peggy Whitson became the oldest woman ever to orbit Earth — taking off aboard a SpaceX Crew Dragon as commander of the privately funded Axiom Mission 4 — and during her 18-day stay on the International Space Station, she pushed her career total past 695 cumulative days in space, the most of any American astronaut and the most of any woman who has ever lived.
The numbers behind Peggy Whitson's career do not, by themselves, capture the unusual shape of it.
Mind & Meaning
The Greenland shark lives roughly 400 years — longer than any other vertebrate on Earth — and when scientists sequenced its genome in September 2024, they found the species' extraordinary lifespan appears to rely on enormous quantities of duplicated DNA-repair genes, in a biological strategy still keeping individual sharks alive that were born during Shakespeare's lifetime.
Somewhere in the cold dark water below the Arctic ice, several individual Greenland sharks alive today were almost certainly already…
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Mind & Meaning
The psychology of ambition, isolation, and meaning under extremes — and what frontier life teaches us about being human.
The ocean produces roughly half of Earth’s oxygen — not the rainforest, which uses up most of what it makes — through photosynthesis by phytoplankton, microscopic marine organisms so abundant that a single teaspoon of seawater can contain as many as a million of them.
The smell of the ocean — that sharp, clean scent people travel thousands of kilometres to breathe — is not salt, which has no real smell, but partly dimethyl sulphide: a sulfur gas released when compounds made by microscopic marine algae are broken down by bacteria, death, and grazing in the sea.
A space telescope that has spent 22 years detecting the most powerful explosions in the universe is now falling toward Earth, and a startup in Arizona built its rescue craft in seven months flat — a schedule Science described as almost unheard of for a NASA mission
In 1971, Apollo 14 astronaut Stuart Roosa carried hundreds of tree seeds around the Moon in a metal canister inside his personal kit. When the seeds returned to Earth, many were germinated by the U.S. Forest Service and planted as “Moon Trees” — ordinary-looking trees that, decades later, showed no discernible difference from trees whose seeds had never left Earth.
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Science
Physics, climate, planetary science, and the research that shapes how we understand the universe.
Between 2006 and 2014, a NASA balloon experiment floating above Antarctica picked up two bizarre radio signals coming up from beneath the ice at angles that should have been impossible — and more than a decade later, no physicist has been able to explain what the signals actually were, with some researchers suggesting they may have been caused by a particle currently unknown to science
The ocean produces roughly half of Earth’s oxygen — not the rainforest, which uses up most of what it makes — through photosynthesis by phytoplankton, microscopic marine organisms so abundant that a single teaspoon of seawater can contain as many as a million of them.
A giant barrel sponge growing on a Caribbean reef off the island of Curaçao was estimated to be roughly 2,300 years old when it was photographed by researchers — meaning it began growing at the bottom of the ocean during the lifetime of Hannibal and survived as a single continuous living organism, filtering seawater on that exact spot, from before the founding of the Roman Empire until it died of disease in 2012
The Greenland shark lives roughly 400 years — longer than any other vertebrate on Earth — and when scientists sequenced its genome in September 2024, they found the species' extraordinary lifespan appears to rely on enormous quantities of duplicated DNA-repair genes, in a biological strategy still keeping individual sharks alive that were born during Shakespeare's lifetime.
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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