Iridium just bought out the company tracking 190,000 flights a day, and the $367 million price tag is really a bet that GPS is quietly becoming unreliable

NASA still maintains some of the Voyager spacecraft code in a 1970s-era programming language that almost nobody on Earth fully understands anymore, and the handful of engineers who do are now in their 80s

The popular version of this story has hardened into a fixed shape. NASA still runs the Voyagers on software written in a programming…

By Lachlan Brown · May 16, 2026

India's Mars orbiter cost less than the movie Gravity and reached its destination on the first attempt, and what that says about who actually owns the future of space exploration.

In November 2013, the Indian Space Research Organisation launched its Mars Orbiter Mission from Sriharikota on a Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle.

By Space Daily Editorial Team · May 16, 2026

Why do we explore, anyway

When I was twenty-something and working in a corporate job, I started looking at the people who were ten and fifteen years ahead of me on the ladder.

By Mal James · May 16, 2026

The Katy Perry flight wasn't a vanity project. It was the moment the space industry finally admitted who its real customer is — and the backlash, however satisfying it felt, missed the point entirely.

On 14 April 2025, six women boarded a Blue Origin New Shepard capsule at Launch Site One in West Texas and rode it past the Kármán line for ten minutes and twenty-one seconds.

By Kiran Athar · May 15, 2026

Why Chris Hadfield argues that fear is a knowledge problem, and how we might apply it to our own lives

"Okay, I can't see, but I can hear, I can talk, Scott Parazynski is out here with me.

By Mal James · May 15, 2026

What’s up in

Space

Industry news, exploration, and the engineering of getting humans and machines beyond Earth.

The Robinhood co-founder just filed plans for 20,000 satellites — and the real bet isn't space, it's that grid interconnect queues have broken AI infrastructure on Earth

By Space Daily Editorial Team

Internet Space

The same precision sensor that kept Webb locked on galaxies 13 billion light-years away has been quietly miniaturized — and it's about to solve the navigation problem nobody wanted to discuss on the way to the Moon

By Space Daily Editorial Team

A Falcon 9 upper stage burned up over Europe last February, and German scientists just caught it doing something to the atmosphere nobody had directly measured before

By Space Daily Editorial Team

SES just quietly killed two satellites Intelsat already paid to build, and the cancellation says more about the death of geostationary economics than any earnings call ever could

By Space Daily Editorial Team

What’s up in

Mind & Meaning

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

NASA's inspector general called the Space Launch System unsustainable at $4.1 billion per flight. House appropriators just added another billion above what NASA itself asked for, and forbade reallocation.

By Space Daily Editorial Team

Constellation

JWST resolved a galaxy from 800 million years after the Big Bang while NEO Surveyor — the only NASA mission Congress has required by statute — remains roughly 30 years behind its city-killer catalog deadline, and the gap is a lesson in what makes a problem fundable inside the same agency

By Space Daily Editorial Team

NASA imaged the Kuskokwim ice breakup at Aniak this spring; a year earlier the EPA had clawed back a $20 million erosion grant from Kipnuk, fifty miles downriver and a delta over

By Space Daily Editorial Team

Mind & Meaning

I'm 37 and I watched my parents retire with everything they worked for — a paid-off house, savings, good health — and then slowly, year by year, become two people who sit in separate rooms scrolling their phones because they forgot how to be interesting to each other

By Lachlan Brown

What’s up in

Science

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

Climate Science

Abandoned coal mines may be releasing hidden carbon into the air, but researchers think the same drainage could also point toward a cheaper kind of climate fix

By Space Daily Editorial Team

Psychology suggests people who still navigate by memory instead of relying on GPS usually aren't being stubborn — they've kept a relationship with the physical world that the rest of us quietly outsourced about fifteen years ago and haven't quite figured out how to replace

By Space Daily Editorial Team

The clearest sign you're talking to a high-level thinker is that they'll change their mind in front of you mid-conversation — and most people will not do that in public at any cost

By Daniel Moran