Power in space · Generation, transmission, storage, use · Government and first-party sources
poweringspace
Image of the Day · 2026-05-06

One Iron Artery

One iron artery laid all the way around a world, so noon on the far side can keep this side lit.

An artistic imagining, not real hardware. A pale blue engraved sky surrounds a cloud-covered world viewed off centre, with one enormous dark metallic ring sweeping from the lower left foreground around the planet and away behind its right limb. Fine lozenge lattice, fluted collars and paired cyan conductors wrap around the ring and compress with distance. A white switchgear house clamps the nearest section at lower right, where the live bus flares blue. Four narrow tether spurs run inward from bright junctions toward the planet, and three unequal sail-like panels stand on the far arc. The globe is hatched in latitude-like bands and blue cloud fields, and every ornament follows the perspective of the curved surface carrying it.
An artistic imagining, not existing infrastructure: one feeder trunk runs around an orbital ring, carrying power from the sunlit side of a world to switchgear and tether spurs on the far side. Orbital rings remain proposed structures, but any continuous powered ring would genuinely need distributed feeders, isolation and power conditioning on this scale. Image: poweringspace.com. Artistic imagining.
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