The SpaceNexus Desk

Labels

Three bylines, used the same way everywhere

Every piece on SpaceNexus, and every item in our emails and feeds, carries exactly one of these. There are no invented reporters and no team names for staff we do not have.

SpaceNexus Desk

Words drafted by AI: articles, analysis, mission debriefs, guides, the SpaceNexus AM email and the Lunar Week (which the editor approves before it publishes). The method is described below.

SpaceNexus Data

Computed by code from SpaceNexus data. No AI writes the words or the numbers. The weekly economy, hiring and regulatory briefs, the chart of the week, rankings, indexes and release editions are built by code that counts, sums and compares rows in our own tables, with the method printed beside the figures. If a number is wrong, the code or the data is wrong, and we fix it in public on the corrections page.

A person’s own name

Only on something that person wrote and signed, such as the editor’s note. Nothing generated ever carries a person’s name.

Sponsored and partner content is never any of these. It is labelled as sponsored before you read it, lives in its own slot, and never feeds the desk or the data.

Priors

The standing view

Analysis is never neutral, so here is what the desk believes before it reads anything. These are the priors baked into how stories get picked and how claims get weighed. They are meant to be arguable, if one of them is wrong, the pieces built on it are wrong too.

• Cadence is the honest measure of a launch company. Announcements are not flights, and a manifest is not a record.
• Cost per kilogram is a marketing number until someone publishes a price list. We quote prices, and say when we are quoting an estimate.
• Schedules slip. We track the slip rather than reprinting the newest date as though the last one never existed.
• Hiring is the least-gameable public signal a private space company emits. Job counts move before press releases do.
• Government demand still underwrites most of this industry. A commercial market that depends on one anchor customer should be described that way.

Method

How a piece gets written

1. 1.Selection

   A daily job at 01:00 UTC (retried at 07:00 UTC) reads the last 24 hours of the aggregated news pool plus our own structured data (launch records, hiring snapshots, funding rounds, regulatory filings) and picks the stories worth an analysis piece. Titles published in the previous 14 days, including ones that were rejected, are shown to the selector so killed stories stay killed.

2. 2.Drafting

   Claude Sonnet writes the draft against the selected sources. It is given the source articles and our data; it is not given a house line to argue.

3. 3.Fact-check

   A second, separate model pass checks every claim in the draft against the cited sources and returns one of three verdicts: pass, minor issues, or major issues.

4. 4.Publication gate

   Pass and minor-issues drafts publish automatically. Major-issues drafts are held as pending_review and emailed to the founder, who approves or rejects each one by hand. Nothing with a major-issues verdict reaches the site unread by a person.

5. 5.Sourcing

   Every published piece lists the sources it was written from, and each carries a confidence badge derived from how many independent sources it stands on.

The output of that pipeline is what you read at /ai-insights. Every piece there carries the desk byline and a link back to this page.

Accountability

Who checks it

SpaceNexus is a one-person company. Jay Griffiths, the founder, is the responsible editor: he receives the held-article queue, approves or rejects every major-issues draft, and answers corrections.

That is a small amount of human attention spread over a lot of machine output, and we would rather say so than imply a newsroom that does not exist. The practical consequence: treat a desk piece as a well-sourced starting point, follow its citations, and tell us when it is wrong.

Corrections

How to correct a piece

• →Tell us what is wrong and, if you can, what the right figure or date is and where it comes from.
• →Factual errors are fixed in place and the piece gets a dated correction note at the foot. We do not quietly re-edit a claim out of existence.
• →If a piece is wrong in its premise rather than its details, it is withdrawn and the URL says so instead of 404ing.
• →Corrections are handled by the founder directly, not by the pipeline that wrote the piece.

Opinion

The opinion column

A signed opinion column, written by a person and published when there is one. We do not promise a schedule we are not yet keeping. It is the deliberate opposite of the desk: one person, named, arguing a position. No model drafts it and no model checks it, because an opinion is not a claim you fact-check: it is a claim its author defends.

Related

The rest of the record

• AI Insights: the desk’s daily output.
• Rankings: dated, methodology-first league tables from our own data.
• Data sources: every external feed the site reads.
• SpaceNexus AM: the weekday morning brief and its archive.