Excellent Star Wars series Andor reached episode 8 on Disney Plus on Wednesdaycatching up with mercenary Cassian Andor (Diego Luna) in the wake of his being unjustly sentenced to six years in prison after a run-in with the wrong Imperial trooper. Turns out there’s just no escaping this terrible totalitarian regime.

Over on galactic capital Coruscant, rebel true believer Vel Sartha (Faye Marsay) has been tasked with killing Cassian so he can’t rat out recruiter Luthen Rael (Stellan Skarsgard). Vel doesn’t seem wild about her mission, especially since Cassian played an essential role in her mission to steal millions of credits from the Empire.

It also seems to run counter to the philosophy of Luther’s fellow rebel leader Sen. Mon Mothma (Genevieve O’Reilly), who isn’t wild about his willingness to shed innocent blood in their shadowy war against the Empire.

This episode was directed by Toby Hayneswho helmed also episodes 1, 2 and 3, as well 8, 9 and 10. He previously worked on Sherlock, Doctor Who and Black Mirror.

Andor occurs five years before Rogue Onewhich reveals the story immediately before the original Star Wars movie A New Hope. Let’s see how life in prison is treating Cassian, by checking out all those delicious episode 8 SPOILERS.

Shiny white hell

NARKINA 5 — Shipped to an ocean prison complex that looks a bit like the Raft in MarvelCassian continues to use the alias

It’s widely understood that not everything turns out the way you’d expect. Few know this better, perhaps, than contestants on the wildly popular competition show The Great British Bake Off, known in the US as The Great British Baking Show. Each week, they take a dramatic, sugar-filled journey across the uncertain and sometimes tumultuous expansion between what they planned to bake and how it turned out.

Cake sink. Buttercream icing splits. Isomalt shatters. Occasionally, someone forgets to turn on the oven, losing valuable time. But even if the sponge is “claggy” or “stodgy” (or god forbid, ends up on the floor before it makes it to a judge’s plate), there’s always a perfectly executed version of the creation viewers at home can ooh and aah at anyway.

That’s thanks to Tom Hovey, whose appetite-triggering illustrations have become a signature element of the show over the years. They’re presented on screen in a digital notebook on a mock worktop, as if the bakers had sketched them themselves.

“That points to why the illustrations are sometimes, a lot of the times, better than what it turns out in the tent, because it’s what they intended to create, not what they actually created,” Hovey said via Zoom from his studio in Newport , South Wales. GBBO’s 13th season is halfway through on Netflix. It’s already seen structurally questionable masks made of cookies; black pudding on pizza; and a coconut sponge that tasted “a bit like tanning lotion.”

Hovey, 39, has been making

Hello and welcome back to Max Q. Happy Halloween folks. Hope you’re having a very spooky day. By the way… We are counting down to TC’s Space event in December! Learn more here. In this issue:

• The satellite bus bottleneck
• Starlink for GPS?
• News from BryceTech, Quantum Space and more

Apex Spacea startup that aims to transform satellite bus manufacturing, emerged from stealth Monday with a $7.5 million seed round led by Andreessen Horowitz.

The Los Angeles-based company has set its sights on the satellite bus — the part of the spacecraft that hosts the payload — which it says is the “new bottleneck” hitting the space industry. Apex’s two co-founders, Ian Cinnamon and Maximilian Benassi, said in a blog post that they independently observed core changes to the industry that convinced them that a new satellite bus manufacturing solution was needed.

Cinnamon, a technology startup founder whose company, Synapse Technology, was acquired by Palantir in 2020, said he saw payload customers being “held back” by the long and costly process associated with building custom satellite buses. Benassi, an engineer whose career includes a six-year tenure at SpaceX and nearly a year-and-a-half at Astra, observed changes to launch economics that make mass manufacturing — rather than the bespoke engineering process that’s characterized satellite buses thus far — more sensible.

“Given this transformative change, we must begin to think about spacecraft differently and adapt to the new market conditions,” the pair said. “We cannot just build spacecraft. We must manufacture