Power in space · Generation, transmission, storage, use · Government and first-party sources
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Image of the Day · 2026-07-04

Banking Perihelion

A ladder of blue flasks fills at perihelion so the comet can carry summer out into the dark.

An artistic imagining, not real hardware. Flat-plane illustration on a mid steel blue field: a bank of molded storage cells, all cut from one identical rounded shell silhouette, scattered across the frame at five sizes that step by a factor of ten. The largest cell fills the left of the picture, a dark navy shell holding a broad flat plane of bright cyan charge with a pale level line across it, standing in an exposed splayed rod cradle whose feet are planted on the icy limb of a comet cropped by the bottom of the frame. Smaller cells, each less full than the one it feeds, are strung across the field on a visible cable harness with red clamps, running up toward a very small pale sun at the top right. Each larger cell carries a small ochre collector panel held square to the light on a boom, with pale rays reaching from the sun to the panels. The comet shows a bright lit rim along its sunward edge, a soft coma halo, dark surface pits, and pale outgassing plumes at the right. A strut mast and distribution beam anchor the bank to the comet surface, with two spare shells racked on the beam. Purely procedural geometry; no text; nothing depicted exists.
An artistic imagining, rendered procedurally, of energy storage aboard a station riding a long-period comet: molded charge cells in a strict ten to one size ladder drink the light at perihelion and bank it for the long outbound leg. Solar flux falls with the square of distance and a long-period comet gets only a brief window near the Sun before decades in the cold, so anything riding one really would have to charge hard at closest approach; no such station exists. Image: poweringspace.com. Artistic imagining.
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