In 2006, the International Astronomical Union held a meeting in Prague and voted to demote Pluto. Roughly 424 members were in the room when the vote happened. The world’s planetary scientists, the people who actually study planets for a living, were not consulted in any binding way. Within hours, textbooks were rewritten, classroom posters were […]

The post Pluto has glaciers, an atmosphere, and probably an ocean. Why isn’t it a planet? appeared first on Space Daily.

When people imagine where alien life might be, they tend to look outward. Exoplanets. Distant star systems. Some half-mythical planet around a star we’ll never visit. But here’s the strange truth most people never sit with. Scientists think life might exist right here, in our own solar system. Not little green men. Not Star Trek. […]

The post 5 places in our own solar system where scientists think life might actually exist appeared first on Space Daily.

Mark Zuckerberg’s company just made one of the most unusual energy deals in tech history. On April 27, Meta announced a first-of-its-kind agreement to source up to one gigawatt of electricity from satellites in geosynchronous orbit, energy that will eventually flow to the AI data centers that increasingly define its business. The partner is Overview […]

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Elon Musk is suing the company he helped found for $134 billion. He also happens to own its largest competitor. That uncomfortable fact sits at the center of the trial that opened in San Francisco this week, where Musk is asking a court to remove Sam Altman, unwind OpenAI’s corporate restructuring, and block its planned […]

The post The Governance Architecture on Trial: What Musk v. OpenAI Reveals About Nonprofit-to-Commercial Pivots appeared first on Space Daily.

When Iran threatened to close the Strait of Hormuz earlier this year, energy markets twitched and global headlines lit up. A narrow stretch of water, a handful of tankers, and suddenly the world economy was holding its breath. Now imagine the same chokepoint dynamic playing out a quarter of a million miles away. That comparison […]

The post Forget the Strait of Hormuz. The Pentagon’s next chokepoint problem could be on the way to the moon appeared first on Space Daily.

A manufacturing issue involving a European company has resulted in corrosion in modules produced for both the lunar Gateway and Axiom Space’s commercial space station.

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I keep a folder on my laptop labeled \"missions that justified themselves.\" Cassini-Huygens lives at the top of it. Not because the science was prettier than other deep-space program

The post The complete story of Cassini-Huygens: how a twenty-year mission to Saturn rewrote what we thought we knew about ocean worlds appeared first on Space Daily.

ESA has selected six new Fellows to pursue their own independent research in space science in 2026. The Research Fellowships in space science represent one of the highlights of the ESA Science programme.

Early career postdoctoral scientists are offered the unique opportunity to carry out advanced research related to the space science areas covered by ESA Science missions at one of three ESA establishments (ESAC, ESTEC or STScI) for a period of up to three years.

The 2025 Research Fellows in space science are, Emma Esparza-Borges, Ekaterina Ilin, Gregor Rihtaršič, Peter Stephenson, Paola I. Tiranti, and Jiří Žák.

Their research spans

Astrobotic has pushed rotating detonation rocket engine technology past one of its most stubborn barriers, completing a 300-second continuous hot fire of its Chakram prototype at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center — potentially among the longest sustained burns any RDRE has logged to date. Across two prototype units, the Pittsburgh-based lunar lander company accumulated more […]

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