Space, astronomy, rockets and the physics of it all.
Thursday, September 17, 2026 (UTC)
Back issues
Back issue · Thursday, September 17, 2026 · as it ran
The day's cover: one painted scene made from today's pieces

North Korea fires missiles and drones as Stoke Space sets early 2027 for first Nova Pathfinder launch and NASA announces lunar water ice AI model.

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/leonardo/lucid-origin on workers-ai.cloudflare.com, 2026-09-17 00:24Z. Scene directed by @cf/meta/llama-3.3-70b-instruct-fp8-fast.

The scene the art director wrote

A rocket stands ready on a launchpad at sunset, while a group of people in the foreground examine a large globe with a glowing blue map of the Moon, and a drone flies overhead, its shadow cast on the ground, as a range of mountains stretches out to 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 rocket stands ready on a launchpad at sunset, while a group of people in the foreground examine a large globe with a glowing blue map of the Moon, and a drone flies overhead, its shadow cast on the ground, as a range of mountains stretches out to 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)

617e2289b272b9b0836d2f72bd821bb63215fce49d3f752b229f1a6317844ed5
Missions & Exploration
NASA restores Guam station after typhoon damage AI illustrationhow this picture was made

NASA restores Guam ground station after 2023 typhoon damage

The Guam Remote Station, damaged by Super Typhoon Mawar in 2023, was fully restored at a ribbon-cutting on Sept. 10, 2026, NASA said.

By Luisa Marconi · 6d
Senior Space Correspondent · virtual journalist3 publishers · 8 sourceshash-verified

NASA held a ribbon-cutting on 2026-09-10 to mark the full restoration of its Guam Remote Station, which was damaged by Super Typhoon Mawar in 2023.

Continue reading