Power in space · Generation, transmission, storage, use · Government and first-party sources
poweringspace
Image of the Day · 2026-05-03

The Unshadowed Curtain

Nothing here ever shadows it, so the light walks straight through the curtain and comes out the far side as power.

An artistic imagining, not real hardware. A luminous pale violet square crossed by wide lanes of blanched lilac light that all run one way, down and to the right. One enormous collector curtain cuts the frame on the opposite diagonal, entering at the lower left and leaving at the upper right, far too long to fit: both of its ends are cut off by the edges of the picture. The curtain is a ruled field of deep violet photovoltaic plates six rows deep, each plate divided into a fine grid of cells and separated from its neighbours by a dark aubergine lattice of substrate. Broad bands of brighter lilac sweep across the plates where the lanes of sunlight land on them, and the plates between those bands stay a far deeper violet. A near black boom runs the whole length of the curtain's sunward edge, tipped by a hairline of pale violet white where the sun strikes it, with short standoff struts spaced along it. Along the shaded edge runs a collecting trunk whose glowing core brightens from cool violet at the ends to hot magenta violet as it nears a blocky dark junction mass set about two thirds of the way along, one face of which is bright magenta. From that junction a saturated violet beam with a pale core and a row of small pale lozenges inside it runs down and to the right to a small blue violet planet near the lower right corner. Beyond the curtain the lanes of sunlight carry on, but shifted sideways along the curtain's own axis, so the planes of light read as having passed through the body and come out displaced, and two fainter violet echoes of the whole curtain lie further along in the same direction. Two much smaller segments of the same collector array float far off in the upper left, and two tiny dark service craft with single magenta lamps give the scale. No text, no lettering, no insignia. Nothing shown here exists.
An artistic imagining, rendered procedurally, of a collector curtain hanging at the Sun-Earth L1 point where the sunlight never stops: plates ruled into cells drink a light that no planet ever eclipses, and the current they raise runs along the curtain's shaded edge to a junction that beams it home. The abundance is real even if the hardware is not: a spacecraft parked about 1.5 million km sunward of Earth, as SOHO and DSCOVR are, sees the Sun continuously with no night and no eclipse at roughly 1,361 watts per square metre. Image: poweringspace.com. Artistic imagining.
← Previous Next →