Power in space · Generation, transmission, storage, use · Government and first-party sources
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Image of the Day · 2026-06-12

The Sun, Printed Again

Out here the Sun is only a star, so the relay prints it again - one wavefront block, four passes, each in a shifted ink, each thrown further out.

An artistic imagining, not real hardware - nothing shown here exists. A four-colour print-style illustration on a mid-violet field ruled with a faint square register grid. At the lower left corner a small hard white star; a narrow gold wedge widens out of it across the field and ends on a large elliptical dish set low and left of centre, seen at an angle, its bowl shading from a warm lit crescent along one rim to deep blue-grey at the other. Three unequal struts cross the dish's mouth to a small pale receiver box just outside its edge. Behind the dish an open braced truss runs up and to the right, carrying two unequal rectangular radiator panels ruled with fins, one on each side and at different stations along the spine. At the far end of the truss a short tapered throat opens into a smaller ring-rimmed aperture whose lit face is the brightest thing in the picture. From that aperture a fan of concentric hard-edged arcs expands up and to the right and runs off the top-right corner - the same fan printed four times over, in yellow, magenta, cyan and violet, each pass slightly larger and swung a few degrees off the others, so the arcs cross and overprint into green, hot red and deep blue where they meet, with clean gaps where the beam pattern nulls. Every edge of the station carries a thin coloured fringe, as if the four printing passes were slightly out of register. Small, near the top right, a second dish and panel of the same design stand in the path of the arcs. No text, no insignia, no lettering - entirely procedural geometry.
An artistic imagining of a power-beaming relay at the outer edge of the solar system, drawn as a four-pass process-colour plate after Bradbury Thompson. Wireless power beaming is real - kilowatt-scale microwave transfers have been demonstrated over metres and over a kilometre, and Caltech's MAPLE experiment beamed detectable power in orbit in 2023 - but a relay chain reaching into the Oort cloud is speculation: here the Sun is only a star in the corner, one dish catches what is left of the beam, and the aperture at the other end of the truss strikes it outward again, the same wavefront printed four times in four inks, each throw a little further out. Image: poweringspace.com. Artistic imagining.
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