The child who feels both terrified and relieved by the night sky isn't confused — she's experiencing the cognitive state that generates every meaningful question. That contradiction between insignificance and wonder is the engine of curiosity, not an obstacle to it.

The post A letter to anyone who looked at the night sky as a child and felt both terrified and relieved: that contradiction is the beginning of every meaningful question you’ll ever ask appeared first on Space Daily.

Commercial space station developer Vast unveiled a new docking interface the company is offering to the broader industry for future large stations and spacecraft.

The Western alliance is fracturing in real time, and Italy just delivered the clearest proof yet. When Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni suspended her country’s defence cooperation agreement with Israel, she didn’t just freeze one bilateral pact — she demonstrated that Donald Trump is losing the European allies he needs to project power in the Middle […]

The post Italy’s Defence Pact Freeze With Israel Signals a Deeper Fracture in the Western Alliance appeared first on Space Daily.

Washington Harbour Partners leads Series B funding round

The European Space Agency's 22-nation consensus model appears slow and bureaucratic, but it has produced one of the most quietly productive planetary science programs on Earth. Understanding its institutional design reveals how distributed commitment, geographic return, and mandatory science funding create missions that survive political disruptions no single nation's program could weather.

The post How the European Space Agency became the quiet power in planetary science and what its institutional model reveals about building consensus across 22 nations appeared first on Space Daily.

Each year the European Space Agency (ESA) invites small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) and midcaps to share their views and give feedback about topics which affect their work in the space sector.

An SME Forum occurs as part of the SME and Midcap Days on 8–9 June 2026 at ESA Headquarters in Paris, France. This is preceded by an online preparatory SME Forum in April and May.

Noticeable change on Mars often takes millions of years – but the European Space Agency’s Mars Express has captured a blanket of dark ash creeping across the planet in just decades.

Chinese President Xi Jinping reportedly met Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov in Beijing in mid-April and declared that the stability of China-Russia relations is “precious” — a word that, in the context of a global energy crisis triggered by the effective closure of the Strait of Hormuz, amounts to a strategic confession. Beijing is not […]

The post The Gravity of Dependence: How the Hormuz Crisis Is Pulling Beijing Into Moscow’s Orbit appeared first on Space Daily.

When the Space Force selected Blue Origin to begin final lease negotiations for Space Launch Complex 14 at Vandenberg Space Force Base, it wasn’t just handing out a construction permit. It was making a bet that the Pentagon’s most urgent vulnerability in space — its dependence on a single coast and a thin roster of […]

The post Blue Origin’s Vandenberg Play: What a West Coast Launch Pad Means for National Security Space Competition appeared first on Space Daily.