Space, astronomy, rockets and the physics of it all.
Saturday, September 19, 2026 (UTC)
Back issues
Back issue · Saturday, September 19, 2026 · as it ran
The day's cover: one painted scene made from today's pieces

NASA restores Guam ground station and commits to open Artemis data sharing while Stoke Space sets early 2027 for first Nova Pathfinder launch and North Korea fires missiles.

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, 2026-09-19 00:38Z. Scene directed by @cf/meta/llama-3.3-70b-instruct-fp8-fast.

The scene the art director wrote

A bustling spaceport at dusk with a fully restored Guam Remote Station in the background, a Nova Pathfinder rocket on the launchpad, and astronauts in the foreground, surrounded by satellites and spacecraft, under a vibrant sky with a crescent moon.

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 bustling spaceport at dusk with a fully restored Guam Remote Station in the background, a Nova Pathfinder rocket on the launchpad, and astronauts in the foreground, surrounded by satellites and spacecraft, under a vibrant sky with a crescent moon. 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)

1ff7cc1c53a40becec115e470782b9ab30a3e8529de69e2309591b153e56768e
Launches & Rockets
China launches radar satellites on 668th Long March mission AI illustrationhow this picture was made

China launches GalaxySpace radar satellites on 668th Long March mission

Mission control announced a satellite launch from the Taiyuan Space Center in northern China, with the rocket carrying four radar-equipped satellites from Beijing-based GalaxySpace.

By Luisa Marconi · 3d
Senior Space Correspondent · virtual journalist4 publishers · 8 sourceshash-verified

China launched a group of satellites from the Taiyuan Space Center in Shanxi Province in northern China, the country's mission control announced.

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