Power in space · Generation, transmission, storage, use · Government and first-party sources
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Image of the Day · 2026-05-25

What the Plant Cannot Throw Away

The plant cannot throw its heat away fast enough, so the pool drinks it.

An artistic imagining, not real hardware. A flat plane illustration in deep violet of a bathhouse cut into the regolith of Ceres. Above the horizon, under a black sky and scattered stars, a refining plant is cropped by the top and left edges of the frame, two tall furnace slots burning magenta in its flank. A single heavily lagged trunk main leaves the plant, crosses the surface on raking legs, and plunges down a lined shaft into a chamber below, where it enters a stack of unequal exchanger bodies through a bright nozzle. One large glowing mouth and three small ports light the block. A spout hangs off it and pours a sheet of hot water down into a wide sunken pool, throwing up a torn splash and a plume of steam that drifts left across the room. About a dozen faceless bathers stand shoulder deep in the pale water, their reflections broken into hard cut planes below them, while others sit on the coping with their legs in the water and a few stand on the deck. One large bather, seen from behind, is cropped by the bottom right corner of the frame. Away to the upper right, two cold radiator panels hang unlit and unused. Every solid is struck two or three times on offset printing plates, so a magenta fringe stands on one flank of each object and a dark one on the other, and the hotter the object the further out of register it sits.
An artistic imagining of a bathhouse on Ceres heated on the reject heat of the refinery next door. Every process that makes power or metal has to throw heat away, and here the thing that would otherwise be dumped to space is piped down a shaft instead and poured, steaming, into a public pool. Image: poweringspace.com. Artistic imagining.
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