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

Noon, Forwarded

A share of the inner system's noon arrives as rings of light, lands on one bright dish, and leaves again as stitched arcs to every small user in orbit.

An artistic imagining, not real hardware. A square picture printed entirely in visible halftone dots on a slate blue ground. A shaft of light enters at the upper left corner as a stack of concentric pale wavefront arcs and narrows onto a large circular receiving dish left of centre, which burns white along the rim the light strikes, with a short vermilion sliver at the hottest point. The dish is built of unequal concentric colour bands in deep and bright cyan with a white band, the band sequence shifted where a diameter splits it, a dark off centre feed hub, rows of dark circular receiving modules curving across its face, a magenta crescent in its shadow, and a broken dark mounting hoop around it. A huge pale green blue planet with narrow tilted ring arcs fills the right and lower right of the frame. From the dish, curved runs made of small beads of light rather than drawn lines carry power out to four smaller banded discs and to about thirty small dishes scattered across the whole field, lit and crescent bright where they stand against space, dark silhouettes with one bright limb where they cross the planet's face, a few carrying small orange cores and three left unlit. No text appears anywhere.
An artistic imagining, not existing hardware: a downlink station in orbit around Uranus catches a power beam sent out from the inner system and stitches the arriving power out to every small user working around the planet. Sunlight at Uranus is only about 3.7 watts per square metre against roughly 1361 at Earth, about one three hundred and seventieth as much, which is the physical reason an outer system settlement would import its power on a beam rather than collect it from the sun. Image: poweringspace.com. Artistic imagining.
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