Power in space · Generation, transmission, storage, use · Government and first-party sources
poweringspace
Image of the Day · 2026-05-27

Ten Sails, One Throat

Ten mirrors, one throat: a whole sky of sunlight folded into a single bright mouth, and the mouth feeds the works on the rock.

An artistic imagining, not real hardware. A line drawing on warm bone coloured ground, made entirely of ruled strokes with no filled shapes anywhere. Ten tilted discs hang across the upper two thirds of the square, each one a reflective sail: a heavy dark rim, a face ruled with close amber battens, a blank unruled crescent where the sun glares off it, a braced boom across the face and a short mast ending in a small ring. They vary from one very large disc at the left to small ones near the edges, and five paler grey sails recede toward the top right corner. Short amber shafts of sunlight run in from the upper right and stop dead on the sail faces. From every sail a ribbon of amber rulings runs inward and down, and all ten ribbons converge on one point low in the frame, tightening as they go and stopping at the flared mouth of a collector, so the inside of that funnel and its rounded throat are left as bare unprinted ground and are the brightest thing in the picture. The collector stands on short braced legs on a lumpy asteroid built from overlapping circles, its shaded side hatched, its sunward side left clean, with crater arcs scattered over it. A heavy vermilion line runs from the throat down the tower to the surface, turns along the rock as a busbar, and drops into the works at the lower right: a large drum hatched in graded rows with two stave lines, a small tap on its shoulder throwing short vermilion flame strokes, and a small product tank. A ruled conveyor runs from a hatched pit at the lower left into the drum. Fine dark tether lines run from the sails down to three anchor pads on the rock.
An artistic imagining, not existing hardware: a farm of thin reflective sails moored to a near-Earth asteroid, each one steered so the sunlight it catches lands in the same collector throat, and the heat that gathers there runs down the tower and along the busbar into the works on the rock. Sunlight near 1 AU carries roughly 1361 watts per square metre, and metallised sail films a few micrometres thick have already been flown and steered in space, which is the real point behind the picture: a concentrator does not have to be rigid glass, only flat enough and aimable. Image: poweringspace.com. Artistic imagining.
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