Power in space · Generation, transmission, storage, use · Government and first-party sources
poweringspace
Image of the Day · 2026-04-29

The Sky, Bolted In

The only sun these fish will ever have hangs from a cable, inside a strip of sky that had to be bolted into a mountain.

An artistic imagining, not real hardware. A square picture in flat unshaded colour, almost entirely black-brown basalt, showing the inside of a lava tube on Mars used as a fish farm. The tube runs from the upper left to the lower right and four tall glass tanks stand in a row down its descending floor, each one larger than the last, the nearest cut off by the right edge of the frame. The water in every tank stands at exactly the same height, one unbroken horizontal across the picture. Below that line the water is deep green and holds ranks of large gold fish, all facing left, spaced on a regular lattice, with columns of small pale bubbles rising from a bar on the floor of each tank. Above the line, sealed under a steel lid, the air space of every tank is a bright blue daylight sky with flat white cumulus clouds in it, and a lamp bar burning pale gold hangs inside that sky on a cable that comes down through the lid. From each lamp a hard edged wedge of light leans down to the right through the sky and into the water, brightening the fish it crosses, and continues out across the rock beyond the glass. Every wedge in the picture leans at the same angle, including one dim shaft of pale daylight falling from a collapse pit in the roof at the upper left onto bare rock, far from the tanks. At the far left a cable comes down a bored shaft in the roof to a dark switchboard with gold bars and breakers; from it a gold trunk cable runs along the roof and drops one feeder into every tank lid, an orange heat circuit runs down under the tank line to orange heater strips at each tank base, and a pale pipe from a blower runs along the floor to the bubble bars. A faceless suited figure stands on a walkway on top of the nearest tank, seen from behind, lowering a dip net with fish in it through an open hatch. A second faceless figure stands on the tube floor beside a bench of cut fish, with two crates stacked nearby. There is no text, no lettering and no insignia anywhere. Nothing shown here exists.
An artistic imagining, not existing hardware: a fish farm inside a Martian lava tube, where the sealed air space above every tank is a strip of blue daylight that had to be bought and bolted in, and the only sun the stock will ever have is a lamp bar hanging in it on a cable. Recirculating aquaculture really is an electricity business more than a feed business, since pumping, aeration and heating dominate its load and fish grow at the temperature the water is held at, while the one shaft of free Martian daylight in the picture falls on bare rock a long way from anything edible. Image: poweringspace.com. Artistic imagining.
← Previous Next →