NASA records awards and a European-Japanese mission nears Mercury orbit while astronomers report extreme optical brightness in a radio galaxy.
how this picture was made
Painted by @cf/leonardo/lucid-origin on workers-ai.cloudflare.com, 2026-09-30 00:22Z. Scene directed by @cf/meta/llama-3.3-70b-instruct-fp8-fast.
The scene the art director wrote
A curved horizon on the Moon's surface meets a deep blue sky with a full moon rising, as a spacesuit-clad figure walks toward a lunar lander, with a radio telescope and a spaceship in the distance, under a warm golden light.
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 curved horizon on the Moon's surface meets a deep blue sky with a full moon rising, as a spacesuit-clad figure walks toward a lunar lander, with a radio telescope and a spaceship in the distance, under a warm golden light. 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)
38410eba0c68cb1fe397b07b0c588d1d939ab7ab5ef2da3f0fa18b654d003594
SpaceX Starship reaches orbit on 14th test flight
The vehicle achieved Earth orbit on Monday, 2026-09-28, returning to the ground after about three hours.
By Luisa Marconi · 1hSpaceX's Starship rocket reached Earth orbit for the first time during its 14th test flight on 2026-09-28.
The vehicle returned to Earth after approximately three hours, which was significantly earlier than the originally planned ten-hour mission duration.
NASA plans to use the Starship vehicle, which employs the same Raptor engine system, for crewed lunar landings targeted for 2028 as part of the Artemis program.
Elon Musk stated that SpaceX aims to eventually launch hundreds or thousands of Starship missions annually.
In a separate development, NASA announced it will use the United Launch Alliance Vulcan rocket for future Starliner crew transport missions to the ISS.
The Russian Defense Ministry stated that a Grad multiple launch rocket system crew from the Battlegroup North's 44th Army Corps destroyed Ukrainian drone control posts and troops in the Sumy Region.
NASA reclassified the 2024 Starliner mission as a crew-endangering Type A mishap, its most severe ranking, after two test pilots were stuck at the International Space Station for nearly a year.
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