Power in space · Generation, transmission, storage, use · Government and first-party sources
poweringspace
Image of the Day · 2026-05-17

A Light Made Elsewhere

A whole basin turned face up to drink a light that was made somewhere else.

An artistic imagining, not real hardware. A wide view across the floor of an ancient impact basin on the Moon's far side, rendered in warm bone greys with a cool ash sky. Ranks of dark rectangular receiving panels stand on single posts and recede in perspective toward a low eroded rim, each throwing a long shadow across the pale regolith. One much larger panel stands left of centre as the field's primary aperture, its face divided into unequal cells, planted on a thick canted spine with two braces. A column of light descends out of the dark sky at the right and lands as a bright waist on the field, and the panels nearest that light carry blazing rims. A low boxy converter stands inside the lit patch with a row of glowing louvres at ground level, and a single low cable runs from it to a small junction box at the lower left. A slender relay mast with an asymmetric boom stands far off at the left. The whole picture carries one continuous rubbed wood grain and a blotted mineral crust laid flat across regolith, machinery and sky alike.
An artistic imagining of a rectenna field filling a basin on the Moon's far side, catching power beamed to it from somewhere it can never see. Wireless power transfer by microwave beam and rectenna is real and long demonstrated, and beamed power is studied for lunar work because the fourteen day night starves anything solar; the hardware and the basin here are invented. Image: poweringspace.com. Artistic imagining.
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