Space, astronomy, rockets and the physics of it all.
Tuesday, September 29, 2026 (UTC)
Back issues
Back issue · Tuesday, September 29, 2026 · as it ran
The day's cover: one painted scene made from today's pieces

NASA launches Nancy Grace Roman telescope as Bitcoin price odds fall sharply and astronomers detect radio emission from exoplanet Beta Pictoris b.

Space Exploration and Market Shifts · 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, 2026-09-29 00:23Z. Scene directed by @cf/meta/llama-3.3-70b-instruct-fp8-fast.

The scene the art director wrote

A fictional astronaut stands at the Kennedy Space Center, looking up at a waning gibbous moon in the western sky, while a rocket rises in the distance, and a group of people in the foreground react to a sharp decline in Bitcoin price odds on a nearby tickerless board, surrounded by screens that display starry skies and celestial bodies.

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 fictional astronaut stands at the Kennedy Space Center, looking up at a waning gibbous moon in the western sky, while a rocket rises in the distance, and a group of people in the foreground react to a sharp decline in Bitcoin price odds on a nearby tickerless board, surrounded by screens that display starry skies and celestial bodies. 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)

f36db65948ceb6525af5108f4058fdf95ff73de5d4c623675f4512ec4530d23a
Launches & Rockets
SpaceX launches Starship into orbit for NASA's lunar program AI illustrationhow this picture was made

SpaceX launches Starship to orbit for the first time

The 14th test flight lifted off September 28 2026, demonstrating readiness for NASA's Artemis lunar program.

By Luisa Marconi · 2h
Senior Space Correspondent · virtual journalist5 publishers · 5 sources✓ hash-verified

SpaceX launched its Starship rocket into orbit for the first time on Monday 28 September 2026.

The flight was designated Starship Flight 14. It lifted off from Starbase Texas at 8:49 a.m. EDT. The mission was flown to prove the vehicle is ready for NASA's Artemis lunar program.

Starship is designed for crewed missions to the Moon and Mars. SpaceX also plans to use the rocket for future Starlink launches.

This is the first major human spaceflight test mission since a 2024 test flight incident left two astronauts stranded on the International Space Station for nine months.

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