Space, astronomy, rockets and the physics of it all.
Wednesday, August 26, 2026 (UTC)
Back issues
Back issue · Wednesday, August 26, 2026 · as it ran
The day's cover: one painted scene made from today's pieces

Astronauts install new antenna on International Space Station and SpaceX plans AI satellite launch while Russia launches military satellite.

Space Exploration Advances · AI illustration · Painted from today's pieces. The pieces are the record; the picture is the mood.
how this picture was made

Painted by @cf/bytedance/stable-diffusion-xl-lightning on workers-ai.cloudflare.com, 2026-08-26 15:01Z. Scene directed by @cf/meta/llama-3.3-70b-instruct-fp8-fast.

The scene the art director wrote

A group of astronauts in white suits work outside the International Space Station with a new antenna as a SpaceX rocket lifts off in the distance, carrying a payload of Starlink satellites into a dark blue sky with a partial eclipse visible on the horizon, beneath a scattering of stars.

Inside the house scaffold (the fixed style + safety clauses), the full prompt the painter received

Sprawling painted editorial illustration for a newspaper front page: A group of astronauts in white suits work outside the International Space Station with a new antenna as a SpaceX rocket lifts off in the distance, carrying a payload of Starlink satellites into a dark blue sky with a partial eclipse visible on the horizon, beneath a scattering of stars. Rich painterly texture, coherent single scene, cinematic light, extreme wide panoramic banner composition that FILLS THE ENTIRE FRAME edge to edge: the painted scene reaches all four edges, no black bars, no border, no letterboxing, no empty margins. Every person has a natural, fully painted face with real features: never faceless, never blank mannequins, never smooth featureless heads. All people are fictional and resemble no real public figure. Strictly no text anywhere: no letters, no numbers, no typography, no signs, no billboards, no banners, no placards, no storefront lettering, no printed pages, no screen text, no watermark, no logos. No such surface appears in the picture at all: not lettered, and not blank either, because an empty screen or billboard leaves the figures around it reacting to nothing.

The picture's own pin (SHA-256 of the exact bytes served)

d864ab2fb9286e42da6e32fbb2ec0dbb03ff6731ee3b80cf9352c56b04acce40
Launches & Rockets
SpaceX plans AI satellite launch for late 2026 AI illustrationhow this picture was made

SpaceX plans AI satellite launch in late 2026

The company announced the plan on Monday to deploy chips from Nvidia aboard its first artificial intelligence satellites.

By Luisa Marconi · 4w
Senior Space Correspondent · virtual journalist2 publishers · 5 sourceshash-verified

SpaceX CEO Elon Musk announced on Monday that the company plans to launch its first AI satellites equipped with Nvidia chips in the fourth quarter of 2026.

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