Power in space · Generation, transmission, storage, use · Government and first-party sources
poweringspace
Image of the Day · 2026-06-14

The Moon Is the Bearing

Deimos holds still so one wheel can hold the whole day.

An artistic imagining, not real hardware. An achromatic line-work drawing on a near-black field: one colossal flywheel, drawn only in strokes and never filled, stands sunk to its hub in the dusty limb of a small moon, so wide that it is cut off by the left edge of the square. Its rim is a heavy triple hoop carrying a long run of bolt ticks; across the upper rim a graduated comb of fine white radial hairs thickens to a lens-shaped blaze where the wheel is running live. Inside, twenty-two concentric hoops, each broken once at a different clock position, and seven unequal spokes fill the disc; a machined chord-hatching crosses four uneven sectors. A double-railed drive shaft cuts the whole picture on one diagonal, passing through an open journal bearing at the hub, which carries no centre mark, and running out past the rim to a finned motor-generator canister; two hairline cable runs leave the canister for a vertical bus rule in the right margin, where three half-disc gauges of decreasing size show bank charge as bundles of arcs behind a single pointer. Five heavy anchor rods splay from the lower rim into the regolith onto stacked footing plates, and two much smaller sister wheels stand on the near horizon. Top left, an open right-angle rule bracket holds a ruled tonal ramp. Everything is line density; no text, no insignia, no colour.
An artistic imagining, rendered procedurally, of energy banked as momentum: a flywheel too big for its own poster, sunk to the hub in Deimos so that the moon itself can absorb the torque, its live rim blazing as the day's surplus is spun in and the margin gauges filling behind it. Flywheel storage is a real technology used on Earth for grid frequency regulation, but a rotor anchored into a Martian moon does not exist, is not planned, and is not funded. Image: poweringspace.com. Artistic imagining.
← Previous Next →