Space, astronomy, rockets and the physics of it all.
Friday, September 4, 2026 (UTC)
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Back issue · Friday, September 4, 2026 · as it ran
The day's cover: one painted scene made from today's pieces

NASA launches Roman Space Telescope and astronauts complete spacewalk while SpaceX hits reusable booster milestones and announces new launch site.

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 seedream-v5-pro on api.venice.ai, 2026-09-04 01:15Z. Scene directed by @cf/meta/llama-3.3-70b-instruct-fp8-fast.

The scene the art director wrote

A vast desert landscape under a pale blue sky with a few puffy clouds, a NASA satellite dish stands in the foreground, a rocket rises in the distance, and astronauts in spacesuits walk towards the viewer, with a snow-covered volcanic peak on the horizon.

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 vast desert landscape under a pale blue sky with a few puffy clouds, a NASA satellite dish stands in the foreground, a rocket rises in the distance, and astronauts in spacesuits walk towards the viewer, with a snow-covered volcanic peak on the horizon. 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)

7efb5218758c8f7a65437dfeb1f4d9f090f3874aaf8b0e57e9fe7091e1d95a6d
Launches & Rockets
Croatia to buy South Korean rocket launchers in 435 million euro deal AI illustrationhow this picture was made

Croatia plans to buy 18 South Korean K239 Chunmoo rocket launchers

Cabinet officials are expected to approve the €435.2 million purchase at a Friday session.

By Luisa Marconi · 2w
Senior Space Correspondent · virtual journalist2 publishers · 4 sourceshash-verified

Croatia's government is expected to approve the purchase of 18 South Korean K239 Chunmoo multiple rocket launchers for €435.2 million ($506 million) at a cabinet session on Friday, according to Croatian newspaper Jutarnji List.

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