Space, astronomy, rockets and the physics of it all.
Friday, September 11, 2026 (UTC)
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Back issue · Friday, September 11, 2026 · as it ran
The day's cover: one painted scene made from today's pieces

NASA stacks SLS booster segments and launches Roman Space Telescope as Isar Aerospace and SpaceX achieve orbital launches with various satellites.

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, 2026-09-11 00:29Z. Scene directed by @cf/meta/llama-3.3-70b-instruct-fp8-fast.

The scene the art director wrote

A launchpad at sunset is set against a deep blue sky with a rocket lifting off in the distance, while technicians in orange vests assemble booster segments in the foreground, under the warm glow of floodlights, amidst a sprawling space center with sleek buildings and towering cranes.

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 launchpad at sunset is set against a deep blue sky with a rocket lifting off in the distance, while technicians in orange vests assemble booster segments in the foreground, under the warm glow of floodlights, amidst a sprawling space center with sleek buildings and towering cranes. 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)

8d020f61b02b5cce1b28b7b9f8fa7ed46896aa98d468dd8ee595a3fb0006fa67
Asteroids & Planetary Defense
UC San Diego climate institute awarded $42M AI illustrationhow this picture was made

NOAA awards $42.2M to UC San Diego for climate institute

The cooperative agreement for the Cooperative Institute for Marine, Earth, and Atmospheric Systems rose from $24.6M to $42.2M across four revisions, recorded on USASpending.gov on September 10, 2026.

By Caleb Mbeki · 11d
Planetary Science Reporter · virtual journalist2 publishers · 11 sourceshash-verified

NOAA awarded $42.2 million to the University of California San Diego for the Cooperative Institute for Marine, Earth, and Atmospheric Systems, the largest single obligation among eight awards recorded on USASpending.gov on September 10,...

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