spacedaily.com

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721.
SpaceX’s IPO filing isn’t just about rockets: the prospectus points to an AI infrastructure pivot that could reshape how investors value the company
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▲ 0 · May 21
722.
The astronauts on the International Space Station see 16 sunrises and 16 sunsets every day, and the question of when to sleep, when to pray, and when to celebrate birthdays has caused genuine philosophical problems for every space agency that has ever sent humans up there
spacedaily.com · /feed
▲ 0 · May 21
723.
Astronaut Chris Hadfield says confidence on the ISS didn’t come from optimism — it came from what he calls the power of negative thinking, the practice of working out your most likely failure points before you start
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▲ 0 · May 21
724.
The satellite industry is betting on multi-orbit resilience, but a San Francisco startup says the real future may be switching between LEO networks instead
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▲ 0 · May 21
725.
The FCC just gave Lynk and Anterix a small 900 MHz test from orbit, and it could redraw how utility networks reach remote America
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▲ 0 · May 21
726.
The Parker Solar Probe is still flying through the Sun’s corona at 430,000 miles per hour, fast enough to cross the continental United States in about 20 seconds, because a 4.5-inch carbon-foam shield keeps the spacecraft in the shade
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▲ 0 · May 21
727.
The Hubble Space Telescope’s main mirror was ground to the wrong shape by 2.2 micrometers, about one-fiftieth the width of a human hair, and the error was only caught after launch because the device used to verify the mirror on the ground had itself been built wrong
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▲ 0 · May 21
728.
The Pioneer 10 and 11 spacecraft were found to be decelerating slightly more than gravity could explain, and for thirty years physicists wondered if Newton was wrong before realizing in 2012 that the answer was the probes’ own waste heat gently pushing them backward at a billionth of Earth’s gravity.
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▲ 0 · May 21
729.
The Sumerians wrote down complaints, love letters, lullabies, and arguments about the price of copper on clay tablets 4,000 years ago — and the things they were worried about are almost indistinguishable from the things people post online today
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▲ 0 · May 21
730.
There is a cloud of alcohol drifting through the constellation Aquila that is 1,000 times the diameter of our solar system and contains enough ethanol to make 400 trillion trillion pints of beer — and nobody has any commercial way to reach it, which is probably for the best
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▲ 0 · May 21
731.
When the first draft of the Neanderthal genome was published in 2010, researchers found that most people with recent ancestry outside Africa carry between 1 and 4 percent Neanderthal DNA — meaning a human group whose physical traces vanished around 40,000 years ago still survives, in fragments, inside the cells of billions of people alive today
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▲ 0 · May 21
732.
Every year, 27.7 million tons of Saharan dust crosses the Atlantic Ocean and settles on the Amazon rainforest, delivering roughly the exact amount of phosphorus the rainforest loses to runoff, which means the world’s most productive forest is fertilised, year after year, by the slow erosion of the planet’s largest desert thousands of miles away.
spacedaily.com · /feed
▲ 0 · May 20
733.
NASA’s Curiosity rover has found organic molecules on Mars that may be billions of years old — and the scientists studying them are being careful about what they say next
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▲ 0 · May 20
734.
A comet drifted alone between the stars for up to 11 billion years before entering our solar system last year — and the water inside it is unlike anything scientists have ever seen in our own
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▲ 0 · May 20
735.
Interstellar’s most-discussed scene is treated as exotic science fiction, but the family-separation problem it dramatises is one of the more actively studied subjects in long-duration mission planning.
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▲ 0 · May 20
736.
A few rocks spotted near a pond in northeastern Thailand in 2016 have just been confirmed as a 27-tonne, 27-metre sauropod — the largest dinosaur ever found in Southeast Asia
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▲ 0 · May 20
737.
Most people who say they want to be alone are not actually wanting solitude but a particular kind of presence around them that does not require them to perform
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▲ 0 · May 20
738.
The cosmos is silent, slow, vast, and almost entirely indifferent to whether we’re in it — and almost no film has ever captured that real texture of space the way Stanley Kubrick captured it in 2001: A Space Odyssey, which is why astronauts and astrophysicists keep returning to it nearly sixty years after its release
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▲ 0 · May 20
739.
The deepest part of the human gut contains a peripheral nervous system of about 500 million neurons — more than the spinal cord — operating with enough independence that researchers sometimes call it the “second brain,” and the body’s emotional responses are frequently well underway in the gut before the conscious mind has been informed about whatever it is responding to
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▲ 0 · May 20
740.
Nobody talks about why public enthusiasm for space collapsed at almost exactly the same moment that two billionaires became its most visible faces
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▲ 0 · May 20
741.
The Earth’s magnetic field has reversed itself completely roughly 183 times in the last 83 million years — the last reversal happened about 780,000 years ago — and during the transition the field’s strength drops to a small fraction of normal, leaves the planet briefly more exposed to solar radiation, and creates auroras at latitudes where they otherwise never appear.
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▲ 0 · May 20
742.
The most accurate atomic clocks in operation now lose less than one second every 30 billion years — and the reason this matters isn’t precision for its own sake, it’s that gravity itself slows time slightly, and these clocks are now sensitive enough to measure the difference between sitting on the floor and standing upright in the same room.
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▲ 0 · May 20
743.
People who are genuinely kind but feel virtually alone in the world have usually figured out something most adults haven’t admitted yet — that being warm to everyone is not the same as being known by anyone, and the small daily difference between the two adds up across decades
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▲ 0 · May 20
744.
The Mars helicopter Ingenuity completed 72 flights in an atmosphere less than one percent as dense as Earth’s before rotor blade damage grounded it in 2024, and JPL had originally designed it for just five test flights, and the lessons from its overperformance are shaping NASA’s next generation of Mars aircraft
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▲ 0 · May 20
745.
Richard Nixon’s White House had a speech prepared in case Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin became stranded on the lunar surface, and the speech written by William Safire begins “Fate has ordained that the men who went to the moon to explore in peace will stay on the moon to rest in peace,” and the contingency plan had NASA ending communications with the lunar module, leaving Michael Collins as the only Apollo 11 astronaut able to return to Earth.
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▲ 0 · May 20
746.
Astronauts who walked on the moon reported that the dust tracked back into the lunar module smelled like spent gunpowder, and more than fifty years later scientists still cannot fully explain why, though the leading theory involves regolith that had sat undisturbed in vacuum for four billion years suddenly meeting oxygen and moisture inside the cabin for the first time.
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▲ 0 · May 20
747.
The Mars rovers carry no clocks set to Earth time, so the engineers driving them shifted their entire lives to a 24-hour-39-minute Martian day, and within weeks JPL staff were sleeping during California afternoons, eating breakfast at midnight, and quietly developing a kind of jet lag no human had experienced before.
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▲ 0 · May 20
748.
There is a single satellite launched by the US Navy in 1964 that is still in orbit, still transmitting, and still being used by amateur radio operators around the world — and nobody at the Navy has been in charge of it for decades
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▲ 0 · May 20
749.
The Senate just installed a deputy administrator who thinks NASA’s job is beating China to the moon — and the 46-43 vote tells you everything about what the agency is becoming
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▲ 0 · May 20
750.
Scott Kelly spent a year in orbit while his identical twin brother stayed on Earth, and when he came home NASA discovered his gene expression had changed in ways that didn’t fully reverse
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▲ 0 · May 20