Space, astronomy, rockets and the physics of it all.
Sunday, October 11, 2026 (UTC)
Back issues
Back issue · Sunday, October 11, 2026 · as it ran
The day's cover: one painted scene made from today's pieces

NASA and SpaceX prepare for new launches while asteroid research and lunar surface findings emerge and astronauts return to Earth after long duration missions.

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, 2026-10-11 00:17Z. Scene directed by @cf/meta/llama-3.3-70b-instruct-fp8-fast.

The scene the art director wrote

Astronauts in orange suits float near a massive lunar module in a dark blue space background with stars and planets visible as a spaceship launches in the distance under a bright sunny sky with a few clouds.

Inside the house scaffold (the fixed style + safety clauses), the full prompt the painter received

Sprawling painted editorial illustration for a newspaper front page: Astronauts in orange suits float near a massive lunar module in a dark blue space background with stars and planets visible as a spaceship launches in the distance under a bright sunny sky with a few clouds. 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)

5002e13a48203602cb2fa00b7042b31d32c9d2fe3a9d4948cdde6d0cac906276
Launches & Rockets
SpaceX gears up for satellite mobile network launch AI illustrationhow this picture was made

SpaceX obtains spectrum for 15,000-satellite mobile connectivity plan

The airwave acquisition will enable two-way data links between orbiting satellites and consumer mobile devices.

By Luisa Marconi · 2h
Senior Space Correspondent · virtual journalist2 publishers · 2 sources✓ hash-verified

SpaceX has secured radio spectrum to support its planned satellite mobile connectivity service.

The acquisition grants the company up to 14 megahertz of paired airwaves, suitable for two-way data transmission between satellites and ground devices.

SpaceX aims to launch 15,000 next-generation satellites to operate the network.

Read with its sources →