Space, astronomy, rockets and the physics of it all.
Thursday, August 27, 2026 (UTC)
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Back issue · Thursday, August 27, 2026 · as it ran
The day's cover: one painted scene made from today's pieces

SpaceX plans AI satellite launch and new Starship launch base while astronauts install antenna on International Space Station and NASA targets nuclear-powered mission.

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, 2026-08-27 00:47Z. Scene directed by @cf/meta/llama-3.3-70b-instruct-fp8-fast.

The scene the art director wrote

A sprawling spaceport at dusk with astronauts in orange suits walking near a launch tower, a massive Starship rocket looming behind, as a satellite with solar panels and antennas deploys in the sky, with a subtle lunar eclipse visible on the horizon, casting a warm orange glow over the scene.

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 sprawling spaceport at dusk with astronauts in orange suits walking near a launch tower, a massive Starship rocket looming behind, as a satellite with solar panels and antennas deploys in the sky, with a subtle lunar eclipse visible on the horizon, casting a warm orange glow over the scene. 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)

6dca536f6f739b60cd170c91eec8cbb616b396863aa4dbe02e68e4f916ee15aa
Launches & Rockets
NASA presses on with lunar base plans AI illustrationhow this picture was made

NASA astronaut Jack Hathaway says lunar program is not slowing

The Artemis II crew member stated the agency continues its pace for future landings and base construction.

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

NASA astronaut Jack Hathaway stated that the agency is not stopping its efforts in the space program.

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