HeyJaredBrendan Brown
- Indexed articles, last 90 days
- 63
- Latest publication
- Sep 23, 2026
- Outlet visibility, for Space Daily
- Top 5K sites
- Earliest in this view
- Jul 26, 2026
Latest articles
In 2001, Taco Bell anchored a 40-foot floating target off Australia and promised every American a free taco if the falling Mir space station hit it — and the company took out an insurance policy against a direct strike before the 130-ton station came down (opens the original)
Read excerpt
In March 2001, one of the largest objects humans had ever put in orbit was about to fall out of the sky, and a fast-food chain saw a marketing opportunity in the wreckage. The object was Mir, the Russian space station — about 130 tonnes of hardware that had circled Earth for 15 years. Russia had run out of money to keep it up, so engineers were steering it down for a controlled, fiery death over the empty South Pacific. And floating out there in the ocean, waiting for it, was a giant bullseye th
German sailors threw thousands of bottles overboard between 1864 and 1933 to chart ocean currents, and in 2018 a woman walking an Australian beach picked one up, 132 years after a captain logged it going over the rail — and the note's details matched the ship's journal exactly (opens the original)
Read excerpt
On a January morning in 2018, Tonya Illman was walking through the dunes north of Wedge Island, on the coast of Western Australia, when she spotted a bottle half-buried in the sand. She picked it up because it was pretty — a dark glass bottle with raised lettering that she thought would look nice on a bookshelf. It turned out to be the oldest message in a bottle ever found: 131 years and 223 days out of human hands, thrown from a German ship in 1886. Illman nearly missed it entirely. She and a f
In 1920, the New York Times ridiculed rocket pioneer Robert Goddard in an editorial claiming rockets could never work in the vacuum of space, and 49 years later — the day after Apollo 11 lifted off for the moon — the paper printed a three-sentence correction (opens the original)
Read excerpt
On January 13, 1920, the New York Times decided to put a physics professor in his place. Robert Goddard — the Massachusetts scientist now remembered as the father of American rocketry — had just published a modest treatise suggesting that a rocket could reach extreme altitudes, and even, one day, the moon. The Times’ anonymous editorial writer found the idea laughable, and said so in print. The mockery would take 49 years, a world war, and a crewed flight to the moon to walk back. The editorial’
In 1967, NASA's Surveyor 3 probe landed on the moon and fell silent, and two and a half years later Apollo 12 touched down just 600 feet away so two astronauts could walk over, photograph it and cut off its camera to carry back to Earth (opens the original)
Read excerpt
In April 1967, a robotic NASA lander called Surveyor 3 settled onto the Ocean of Storms, scooped at the lunar soil, sent home more than 6,000 photographs, and then went quiet as the two-week lunar night fell. It was never heard from again. Two and a half years later, a spacecraft with two men aboard came down out of the black sky and landed close enough to walk to it. That closeness was the whole point of the mission. Four months earlier, Apollo 11 had made history but missed its target zone by
Nearly every silicon chip on Earth begins its life in a crucible of ultra-pure quartz, and almost all of that quartz comes from mines outside Spruce Pine, a North Carolina town of about 2,200 people, because almost no other deposit yet found is clean enough to melt semiconductor-grade silicon (opens the original)
Read excerpt
The device you are reading this on contains a silicon chip. That chip almost certainly began its existence as molten silicon, sitting in a bucket-shaped vessel called a crucible. And that crucible was almost certainly made from quartz dug out of the ground near Spruce Pine, North Carolina — population about 2,200. It is one of the strangest chokepoints in the modern economy: the entire digital world funnels, at one invisible step, through a small Appalachian town most people have never heard of.
Publishing over time
Last 90 days. Choose a month to open its work.
Recurring subjects
Named in the text we hold. One piece can cover several.
Audience
Top 5K sites
For Space Daily, the outlet · Measured Aug 1, 2026
Website popularity band, not a count of readers or article views.
About this data
Counts cover the work we have indexed. Tone needs enough text and a confident classification. Excerpts and episode notes are not full articles or transcripts.
Identity or attribution wrong? Suggest a correction.