The business and technology of space.
Space Mart Editorial Team
Editorial Team

Space Mart Editorial Team

Editorial Team

The Space Mart Editorial Team produces Space Mart's coverage of the space economy. We report on satellites and constellations, the launch market, space telecom, industry deals, and the technology and ground systems behind the business of space. Articles reflect our team's collective editorial process, source verification, drafting, technical review, and editing, rather than a single writer's work. Space Mart takes editorial responsibility for content under this byline. For more on how we work, see our editorial policy.

Edible

We tend to think honey spoils like any other food, but sealed jars recovered from Egyptian tombs over 3,000 years old have been reported still edible, preserved by a combination of low water content, natural hydrogen peroxide, and a pH acidic enough to stop bacteria from growing at all

Sealed honey pots recovered from Egyptian tombs have been reported edible after 3,000 years — and the chemistry that makes it possible, from bee-added enzymes to water activity below 0.6, still shapes how modern food scientists and mānuka producers think about preservation.

Sep 1, 2026
Physics News

In 1665, Robert Hooke sliced a paper-thin sliver of cork, held it under a compound microscope of his own design, and saw rows of tiny empty compartments that reminded him of monks’ quarters, giving biology the word ‘cell’ 174 years before anyone worked out what was actually inside one

How a Royal Society polymath, a leather-tubed microscope, and a sliver of dead bark gave biology its most fundamental word — and why it took 174 years to figure out what was actually inside a living one.

Aug 27, 2026
Tech Space

Why does removing rats and stoats from a scatter of small offshore islands bring back flightless parrots and ground-nesting seabirds that had not bred on the mainland for over a century?

New Zealand's kākāpō population has climbed from 50 birds in the 1990s to over 200 today, entirely because rats, stoats and cats have been eradicated from three small offshore islands — Whenua Hou, Anchor and Chalky. Here's how removing one pressure lets an 80-million-year-old ecosystem reassemble itself.

Aug 26, 2026
Wood Pile

How did a treeless volcanic island in the North Atlantic, stripped of its birch forests by Viking axes over a thousand years ago, begin clawing woodland back onto slopes of black ash and wind?

Iceland lost more than 95% of its birch forests after Norse settlement in 874 CE, and now plants three to four million trees a year to claw woodland back onto slopes of volcanic ash. Here's how the soil chemistry, the sheep economy, and a century of forestry are rebuilding the least-forested country in Europe.

Aug 21, 2026
Water World

How does reintroducing a dam-building rodent to a drought-prone valley raise the water table, cool the stream, and store more carbon in the floodplain than the surrounding forest?

A single family of beavers on Devon's River Otter built an 80-metre dam holding a million litres, raised the water table by more than a metre, and turned a straightened ditch into a braided wetland storing more carbon than the surrounding forest — the mechanics of how one rodent rehydrates a valley.

Aug 18, 2026
Tech Space

How did a London physician stop a cholera outbreak that killed more than 500 people in ten days by mapping deaths on a Soho street grid and removing the handle from a single water pump in 1854?

In September 1854, London physician John Snow ended a cholera outbreak that killed 616 people in ten days by mapping every death on a Soho street grid, tracing the cluster to a single contaminated water pump on Broad Street, and having its handle removed — founding modern epidemiology in the process.

Aug 10, 2026
Tech Space

In 1869, a Swiss physician named Friedrich Miescher isolated a strange phosphorus-rich substance from the pus-soaked bandages of wounded soldiers at a Tübingen clinic, called it ‘nuclein’, and unknowingly became the first person to hold purified DNA in his hands, 84 years before Watson and Crick built their model

In 1868, a young Swiss physician named Friedrich Miescher scraped pus from surgical bandages inside a converted castle kitchen in Tübingen and isolated a strange phosphorus-rich substance he called 'nuclein' — the first purified DNA, 84 years before Watson and Crick.

Aug 9, 2026
Tech Space

Astronauts returning from six-month ISS missions come home measurably taller, gaining up to 5 centimetres as spinal discs decompress in microgravity, and the extra height disappears within days once gravity crushes the vertebrae back into place

Astronauts returning from six-month ISS missions can be up to 5 centimetres taller than when they launched, the result of spinal discs swelling in microgravity. The bonus height disappears within days of splashdown, often accompanied by back pain and a sharply raised risk of herniated discs.

Aug 9, 2026
Tech Space

In 1859, a solar storm now called the Carrington Event induced currents so strong in North American telegraph lines that operators disconnected their batteries and kept sending messages on the geomagnetic current alone, while auroras were reported as far south as Cuba

In September 1859, the largest geomagnetic storm on record induced currents so strong in North American telegraph lines that operators pulled their batteries and kept transmitting on solar-driven current alone, while red auroras were reported as far south as Havana.

Jul 31, 2026