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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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Human Behaviour
The idea that a man should spend two months' salary on an engagement ring was invented by De Beers marketing — in Japan the campaign set the figure at three, rewriting wedding customs where diamond engagement rings had barely existed
A copywriter named Frances Gerety working at the Philadelphia advertising agency N.W.
Science
During World War II a US War Production Board memo accused the diamond cartel of intentionally risking Allied war production by refusing to release a stockpile of industrial diamonds America needed to machine its engines
During World War II, the United States War Production Board accused De Beers of hoarding industrial diamonds and putting Allied factories at risk to protect its monopoly.
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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 tallest volcano in the solar system is so wide that from most places on its slopes, you would never see a dramatic summit rising ahead of you — Olympus Mons is broader than some countries, and its gentle flanks curve away with Mars long before the mountain looks like a mountain at all.
GPS works because its satellites carry atomic clocks so precise that Einstein’s relativity has to be built into the system: without correcting for the roughly 38 microseconds per day that satellite clocks gain in orbit, navigation errors would build up by about 10 kilometres a day.
Enceladus, a tiny Saturnian moon only about 500 kilometres wide, is actively venting water vapour and ice grains into space from a salty ocean hidden beneath its crust — and modelling suggests that ocean may have remained warm and chemically active for geological timescales, perhaps long enough for life to have had a chance to emerge.
In late 2023, Voyager 1 began sending unreadable data from interstellar space. NASA engineers eventually traced the fault to corrupted memory in one of the probe’s computers, rewrote part of its 46-year-old software, transmitted the fix across more than 24 billion kilometres, and waited roughly 45 hours for confirmation that the patch had worked.
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Science
Physics, climate, planetary science, and the research that shapes how we understand the universe.
The tallest volcano in the solar system is so wide that from most places on its slopes, you would never see a dramatic summit rising ahead of you — Olympus Mons is broader than some countries, and its gentle flanks curve away with Mars long before the mountain looks like a mountain at all.
During World War II a US War Production Board memo accused the diamond cartel of intentionally risking Allied war production by refusing to release a stockpile of industrial diamonds America needed to machine its engines
Scientists say the West Antarctic Ice Sheet could collapse with very little additional warming and the four metres of sea level rise that would follow cannot be stopped once it begins
Two continent-sized structures named Tuzo and Jason sit nearly 1,800 miles beneath the surface of the Earth — one beneath the Pacific Ocean and the other beneath Africa — and have been holding their shape for at least 200 million years, in two of the largest single structures ever identified inside any planet, despite no one on the surface ever having seen them
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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