Power in space · Generation, transmission, storage, use · Government and first-party sources
poweringspace
Image of the Day · 2026-04-11

The Long Handover

Mercury's noon is handed along the chain, station to station, until Venus can hold it.

An artistic imagining, not real hardware. A flat poster style illustration on a near black warm field. At the lower left a large orange planet disc, cropped by the corner, carries a curved rank of dark collector plates and a small pale launch aperture on a short mast. From it a narrow orange beam with a pale core climbs to the upper right, passing through three small relay stations that grow larger as they come nearer. The beam strikes the lower left edge of a tall dark panel standing at the centre of the frame, covered edge to edge in a regular grid of small flat circles: the circles nearest the strike point are pale cream, then orange, then amber, then unlit dark toward the top, so the lit region reads as the energy that landed. Below the panel a long horizontal machine body carries two staggered rows of dark round ports, a bright cream bus bar along its underside with an orange bar beneath that, an amber riser at its right end, and a flat radiator slab that runs off the right edge. A large orange dish crossed by a grey feed boom sits above the body's right end and throws a second beam up to the right, past one small relay seen in silhouette, onto a large pale cream planet disc banded with darker cloud decks and cropped by the top right corner.
An artistic imagining of a beamed power relay chain running outward from Mercury to Venus, not real or planned hardware. Sunlight gathered on Mercury's dayside is launched as a beam and handed along a line of relay stations, each catching it on a rectenna array, converting it, and throwing it on, until the last station lays it down on the Venusian cloud deck. Image: poweringspace.com. Artistic imagining.
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