Power in space · Generation, transmission, storage, use · Government and first-party sources
poweringspace
Image of the Day · 2026-06-27

Exploded View of the Belt

One exploded manual page for a machine the size of the belt: every rock in the frame is being taken apart into fuel.

An artistic imagining, not real hardware. A dark, near black page printed in two badly registered green inks in the manner of a degraded photocopy, with toner speckle, dropout, roller banding and stray platen hairs breaking every line. Scattered across the field are about twenty small refinery machines, none of them centred. Each is clamped to an irregular asteroid, biting into it with a toothed cutter head, feeding the cut rock into a boxed cracking still whose wound coil glows in bright acid green, drawing power from a finned reactor drum above, and piping the product into a tilted cylindrical tank that is hatched part of the way along its length like a fuel gauge. Waste rock sprays from a vent on each machine. The largest machine, at lower left, is drawn as an exploded assembly with its rock, cutter, still, reactor and tank pulled apart along dashed centre lines that run off all four edges of the page, and smaller machines tie into those lines. Two filled tanks are under way toward the upper right on their own nozzle plumes. Hundreds of unworked rock outlines recede into the dark behind everything.
An artistic imagining of a swarm of small refineries working the asteroid belt, drawn as one badly photocopied page from an exploded assembly manual. Each machine clamps onto its own rock, spends reactor power cutting it open and cracking the water out of it, and fills a tank with propellant that never had to be lifted out of Earth's gravity well. Image: poweringspace.com. Artistic imagining.
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