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

The Cold Side Has to Be Built

The mountain gives the heat away; only the cold side has to be built.

An artistic imagining, not real hardware. A flat-plane poster built entirely from edges that run at 0, 45, 90 or 135 degrees, on a dark red-black field of stepped value bands. In the lower left, a blazing lava lake is drawn as nested angular terraces stepping from deep maroon through orange to a white-gold centre; three black legs of unequal width and two diagonal braces plunge from a black machine hall into the molten pool, and a black tie bar crosses above it. The hall sits on the caldera rim as a hard-cut black parallelogram with a thin cream cut edge, a stepped upper deck carrying one flat cobalt-blue block, and two chimneys of unequal height capped with cream plates. From the hall a very wide signal-red band rises diagonally to the upper right and ends in an enormous right-angled arrowhead whose two edges are exactly horizontal and vertical; four smaller cream right-angled chevrons march up the band, all pointing the same way. Hanging off the lower right side of the band is a comb of twelve long radiator vanes running down and to the right, each divided along its length into six flat steps that cool from bright red at the root through maroon and plum to blue-black at the tip, the vanes shortening toward the top of the frame. The upper left is filled by a huge banded body cropped by the top and left edges, drawn as flat horizontal stripes of maroon and rose with a thin bright cream-and-orange rim along its lower right limb. Two hairline cream rules are ruled straight across the whole field parallel to the red band, one of them crossing the banded body. In the upper left a rectangular cream-bordered panel is pasted over the scene like a photographic print, showing the same tap at close range: a dark crust, a glowing diagonal fissure, and two black legs under a dark deck. No text, lettering, insignia or figures appear anywhere.
An artistic imagining of a thermal power station tapping a lava lake on Io, drawn in the plain-spoken poster language of Lester Beall: one huge arrow for the work that leaves, and a comb of radiator vanes for the heat that cannot. Io really is the most volcanically active body known, shedding on the order of a hundred trillion watts of tidal heat, and in vacuum the only way to reject waste heat is to radiate it — which is why the cold side here is the largest machine in the picture, cooling from red at the manifold to blue-black at its tips. Image: poweringspace.com. Artistic imagining.
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