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The sky is being privatised and divided - before anyone got a vote. Deeply reported films on who is quietly claiming low orbit, the radio spectrum, and the Moon, and what that land-grab costs the rest of us on the ground.
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For billions of years, the Moon’s almost airless surface has been exposed to the solar wind, letting helium-3 become trapped in its soil — making the Moon the most tempting nearby reservoir of a fusion fuel that is almost nonexistent on Earth.
The Moon has no helium-3 mine, and no power grid on Earth is waiting for lunar fuel to arrive.
Science
Researchers linked to Washington State University proposed in 2026 that salty, oxidant-rich ice on Europa’s surface could become dense and weak enough to detach and slowly sink through the moon’s ice shell — potentially carrying life-supporting chemistry down to the hidden ocean in as little as 30,000 years under the most favorable model conditions.
Europa's habitability problem has always had two directions. The moon likely has a deep ocean beneath its ice shell, but the chemistry that might help life is not produced only in that ocean.
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Mind & Meaning
The psychology of ambition, isolation, and meaning under extremes — and what frontier life teaches us about being human.
Just 18 light-years away, astronomers have found one of the best nearby targets in the search for life: a candidate super-Earth called GJ 251 c, sitting in the habitable zone of a red dwarf star. Future giant telescopes may be able to image it directly — and look for clues that it has water, air, or even biology.
Astronomers used to assume galaxies formed first and slowly grew the black holes at their centres. But JWST is now finding objects in the early universe where the black hole appears to have arrived first — already enormous before a full galaxy had grown around it.
In 2008, Cassini skimmed past Enceladus’s south pole and flew straight through a plume of icy material erupting from cracks in the moon’s surface. The encounter lasted only minutes, but nearly two decades later, data from that flyby is still revealing new organic chemistry from an ocean hidden beneath the ice.
For billions of years, the Moon’s almost airless surface has been exposed to the solar wind, letting helium-3 become trapped in its soil — making the Moon the most tempting nearby reservoir of a fusion fuel that is almost nonexistent on Earth.
What’s up in
Science
Physics, climate, planetary science, and the research that shapes how we understand the universe.
For billions of years, the Moon’s almost airless surface has been exposed to the solar wind, letting helium-3 become trapped in its soil — making the Moon the most tempting nearby reservoir of a fusion fuel that is almost nonexistent on Earth.
Researchers linked to Washington State University proposed in 2026 that salty, oxidant-rich ice on Europa’s surface could become dense and weak enough to detach and slowly sink through the moon’s ice shell — potentially carrying life-supporting chemistry down to the hidden ocean in as little as 30,000 years under the most favorable model conditions.
Only one spacecraft has ever visited Uranus or Neptune: Voyager 2, which flew past Uranus in 1986 and Neptune in 1989. Nearly four decades later, no mission has returned, leaving many of the biggest questions those flybys raised — about the planets’ interiors, strange magnetic fields, rings, and moons — still unresolved.
Scientists took one of the naked mole rat’s longevity tricks — a gene that helps it produce unusually protective hyaluronan — and put it into mice. The result: the mice lived longer, had less inflammation, and were more resistant to tumours.
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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