Conflict, strategy, and defense technology.
Space War Editorial Team
Editorial Team

Space War Editorial Team

Editorial Team

The Space War Editorial Team produces Space War's coverage of military space and defense technology. We report on missile defense and space-based systems, nuclear weapons and arms control, drones and directed-energy weapons, and the great-power competition shaping security beyond Earth. Articles reflect our team's collective editorial process, source verification, drafting, technical review, and editing, rather than a single writer's work. Space War takes editorial responsibility for content under this byline. For more on how we work, see our editorial policy.

Super Computers

Training compute for notable AI models is doubling roughly every five months, dataset sizes for large language models every eight months, and the electrical power required to train them roughly every year, according to Stanford’s 2025 AI Index

Stanford's AI Index finds training compute for frontier AI models doubles every five months, datasets every eight, and training electricity every year — a pace roughly four times Moore's Law, already reshaping grids and data centers.

Sep 21, 2026
Climate Science

In 1980, Mount St. Helens in Washington devastated 230 square miles of forest and buried the North Fork Toutle valley in debris, and ecologists tracking the blast zone since have watched pocket gophers, lupines and returning elk shape recovery across areas left to natural succession

The May 18, 1980 eruption of Mount St. Helens flattened 230 square miles of forest and buried the North Fork Toutle valley under volcanic debris. Forty-six years later, ecologists tracking the untouched blast zone have watched pocket gophers, prairie lupines and returning elk rebuild a living ecosystem — without a single human replanting.

Sep 17, 2026
Climate Science

How does breaching a dike and removing a tide gate on a Pacific Northwest estuary let salt water back into diked pasture and bring juvenile salmon and sculpins into fields that had grown hay for decades?

Removing a single derelict tide gate on a Pacific Northwest estuary breaks a 140-year seal, lets salt water reclaim diked hayfields within one tidal cycle, and reopens miles of blind channels that juvenile Chinook, sculpins, and Dungeness crab colonize in their first migration season.

Sep 16, 2026
Flora And Fauna

Sandhill cranes stage on Nebraska’s Platte River each March in flocks approaching 1 million birds, roosting shoulder to shoulder on shallow sandbars the river only maintains because upstream irrigation withdrawals stop short of erasing its braided channel

Each March, more than a million sandhill cranes pack the shallow sandbars of Nebraska's Platte River in the single largest gathering of any crane species on Earth — a spectacle that depends on a braided channel the river barely still maintains.

Sep 15, 2026
Flora And Fauna

Manatees in Florida’s Crystal River gather by the hundreds each winter around freshwater springs that stay at a constant 72 degrees Fahrenheit, a thermal refuge that protects them from potentially fatal cold stress when Gulf water falls below 68 degrees

Every winter, hundreds of Florida manatees crowd into Crystal River's freshwater springs, where water flowing from the Floridan aquifer holds a constant 72 degrees. The margin between survival and cold stress is only four or five degrees, and the springs are what keeps them alive.

Sep 14, 2026
Earth

Alligators in Florida’s Everglades dig depressions through muck and peat, often down to the limestone bed, during the dry season, and the water-filled holes they maintain concentrate fish, turtles and wading birds so densely that ecologists count them as critical dry-season refuges across the southern marsh

During the Everglades' dry season, American alligators excavate and maintain water-filled depressions in the limestone that concentrate fish, turtles and wading birds — a piece of animal-built infrastructure that ecologists increasingly treat as central to how the southern marsh works.

Sep 14, 2026
Constellations

SN 1987A exploded 160,000 light-years away in the Large Magellanic Cloud and was first spotted from Earth in February 1987; nearly four decades later, the James Webb Space Telescope has finally caught evidence of high-energy emission from what appears to be the neutron star left at its core

Nearly four decades after SN 1987A lit up southern skies from the Large Magellanic Cloud, the James Webb Space Telescope has caught the first strong signature of the neutron star buried in its debris — argon and sulphur ionised by a hidden high-energy source at the centre of the remnant.

Sep 11, 2026
Flora And Fauna

In 2011, a male wolf known as OR-7 walked from northeastern Oregon into California, becoming the first confirmed wild wolf in the state since 1924, and his descendants now form breeding packs in Siskiyou and Lassen counties more than a century after the species was extirpated

In December 2011, a collared Oregon wolf named OR-7 crossed into California — the first wild gray wolf in the state since 1924. His descendants now form breeding packs across five northern counties.

Sep 10, 2026
Water World

Why did a Southwestern desert river that had usually run dry below the U.S.-Mexico border for decades briefly reach the sea again in 2014, and what did biologists find growing in the wetted corridor by season’s end?

On March 23, 2014, engineers opened the gates of Morelos Dam on the Arizona–Mexico border and released 105,392 acre-feet of Colorado River water into a channel that had been dry for most of five decades. Within weeks, cottonwood and willow seedlings anchored in the wet silt, and by mid-May a thin ribbon of river reached the Sea of Cortez for the first time in a generation.

Sep 9, 2026