Power in space · Generation, transmission, storage, use · Government and first-party sources
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Image of the Day · 2026-04-21

A Ninetieth of a Sun

A ninetieth of a sun, bought back in area: eighteen sheets of film stack their thin takes of light until the pile is bright enough to run a works.

An artistic imagining, not real hardware. A dark violet field built entirely from flat overlapping planes, with no gradients, no outlines and no curves anywhere. In the upper left corner a small white nine sided plate stands for the sun, ringed by a stepped, off centre flare of paler violet plates, and a shallow rake of parallel pale bands crosses the whole picture from it. Strung along one dominant diagonal that runs from that corner down to the right are eighteen translucent film sheets, every one the same quadrilateral at the same tilt and only rescaled, small and crowded near the sun and very large in the foreground, where two of them run off the frame edges entirely. Each sheet carries a bright pale rim along its sunward edge, a hard black stiffening spar along its far edge, and a small dark bus box on the end of that spar. Where sheets cross, the violet tint accumulates and the overlap is the only depth cue in the frame. From sixteen of those bus boxes, tapered pale beams converge on a single point right of centre and low, piling into a near white cone at a small opaque collector hub with two heat rejection fins and a bright absorber plate turned square to the incoming light. From that hub one hard bright line runs down and across to the lower left, where a low works stands: a long deck, two towers, a stepped roof, a receiving absorber plate on a mast, and eight small amber windows, the only warm colour in the picture. In the upper right hangs Saturn, its globe a faceted polygon crossed by flat bands and a dark ring shadow, its rings drawn as opened elliptical annuli of pale violet passing behind the globe on one side and in front of it on the other. Small square star grains are scattered across the field. No text, no insignia, no lettering of any kind. Nothing shown here exists.
An artistic imagining, not existing hardware: a swarm of gossamer thin film reflectors in orbit around Saturn, each sheet taking a thin catch of light and beaming it to one collector hub, which sends the gathered power down a single trunk line to a works. Sunlight at Saturn is about a ninetieth of what falls on Earth, roughly 15 watts per square metre against 1361, which is the physical reason a solar plant out there is answered with sheer collecting area rather than with better cells. Image: poweringspace.com. Artistic imagining.
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