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Saturday, October 3, 2026 (UTC)
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Back issue · Saturday, October 3, 2026 · as it ran
The day's cover: one painted scene made from today's pieces

NASA's Crew-13 mission nears launch and Starcloud agrees to AI computing payload deal while astronomers set upper limit on planets in 70 Oph AB binary system.

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, 2026-10-03 00:10Z. Scene directed by @cf/meta/llama-3.3-70b-instruct-fp8-fast.

The scene the art director wrote

A crowded launchpad at dawn with a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket standing tall, surrounded by astronauts in suits, technicians, and engineers, under a sky with a thin crescent moon and a few stars, with a subtle glow of sunrise on 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 crowded launchpad at dawn with a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket standing tall, surrounded by astronauts in suits, technicians, and engineers, under a sky with a thin crescent moon and a few stars, with a subtle glow of sunrise on 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)

5ef0f9a4deb1570b8ca993b0c3c0ed02a8393418fb1e3db7c592db22df33b6a6
Launches & Rockets
Astronauts arrive at ISS in record time AI illustrationhow this picture was made

SpaceX Crew-13 sets US speed record with eight-hour flight

Four astronauts arrived at the International Space Station on October 1, 2026, after a flight lasting only eight hours, which is the fastest US mission ever recorded.

By Luisa Marconi · 1h
Senior Space Correspondent · virtual journalist5 publishers · 5 sources✓ hash-verified

SpaceX launched the Crew-13 mission to the International Space Station on Thursday, setting a new US speed record for the journey.

A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket and Dragon spacecraft launched from Space Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida on October 1, 2026.

Four astronauts arrived at the International Space Station on October 1, 2026, after a flight lasting only eight hours, which is the fastest US mission ever recorded.

The NROL-97 mission will mark the quickest turnaround between Falcon Heavy missions, following the launch of the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope for NASA on August 30.

SpaceX is setting up for a rocket launch from Florida's Space Coast on Thursday.

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