Power in space · Generation, transmission, storage, use · Government and first-party sources
poweringspace
Image of the Day · 2026-05-22

Stock on Hand

A fuel depot you can audit in one look: every vessel is glass, and every level is showing.

An artistic imagining, not real hardware. A tank farm scattered across the sunlit surface of a small asteroid, printed as one coarse four colour magazine halftone with the dots plainly visible. The sky behind the curved horizon is a flat mid grey with no stars at all, and a single small white sun sits high at the left. Twenty three storage vessels stand across the rock in no rows at all, some standing cylinders and some bullet tanks lying on their sides, all of them close to the same size and all of them transparent, so the propellant inside shows as a solid gold body with one flat surface: a few are nearly full, several are part full at every level in between, and two or three are almost empty and read as pale vapour. Each vessel is outlined in a heavy black keyline, stands clear of the ground on short legs over its own hard shadow, and carries a ladder to a small access deck on one flank and a vent stub on the other. A gold pipe weaves through the feet of the field and rises into each tank by a short riser. Three tanks trail a small pale plume at the crown where they are being filled. On the skyline at the upper left, four tilted solar panels of unequal size stand on the limb, wired across to a squat processing block whose foot glows gold and whose conveyor runs down into the regolith. At the lower left a tanker lander stands on three splayed legs, cropped by the frame edge, its own tank transparent and about a third full, with a loading arm plugged into its fill port and a soft gold cloud of boil off at the coupling. Two small tanker vehicles sit on the ground for scale.
An artistic imagining, not existing hardware: a propellant depot on a near-Earth asteroid where every vessel is glass, so the whole day's stock can be read at a single glance and a lander at the near edge is filling from it. Carbonaceous near-Earth asteroids really do hold water in hydrated minerals, confirmed by the samples that NASA's OSIRIS-REx returned from Bennu and JAXA's Hayabusa2 returned from Ryugu, and splitting that water into hydrogen and oxygen propellant is a serious proposal for refuelling in space. Image: poweringspace.com. Artistic imagining.
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