Space, astronomy, rockets and the physics of it all.
Wednesday, September 2, 2026 (UTC)
Back issues
Back issue · Wednesday, September 2, 2026 · as it ran
The day's cover: one painted scene made from today's pieces

SpaceX plans Starship launch site and Artemis III mission proceeds as asteroid detection and lunar survival data are revealed.

Space Expansion Plans Unfold · 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, 2026-09-02 01:08Z. Scene directed by @cf/meta/llama-3.3-70b-instruct-fp8-fast.

The scene the art director wrote

A massive Starship rocket stands tall on a launchpad in southern Louisiana, surrounded by astronauts in suits, with a large asteroid visible in the sky, as a lunar base model glows in the foreground, under a warm sunset light with a range of blues and oranges.

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 massive Starship rocket stands tall on a launchpad in southern Louisiana, surrounded by astronauts in suits, with a large asteroid visible in the sky, as a lunar base model glows in the foreground, under a warm sunset light with a range of blues and oranges. 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)

aa97b286220936023110bafd45363cf28a1eae797f5fbcad26deed36540ba7a7
Launches & Rockets
Engineers prepare payload for orbital launch AI illustrationhow this picture was made

Funding aims to give Diffraqtion flight heritage in orbit

Officials plan to launch a hosted payload on an unnamed spacecraft using new capital.

By Luisa Marconi · 2w
Senior Space Correspondent · virtual journalist2 publishers · 2 sourceshash-verified

The latest funding will enable Diffraqtion to get flight heritage in orbit as officials plan to launch a hosted payload on an unnamed spacecraft.

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