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

The Comet Pays Out

Sunlight comes down the diagonal, comet ice comes up the same diagonal, and the machine sends full tanks out the side.

An artistic imagining built as a torn-paper collage on a light cream ground ruled faintly like a ledger. A large brown harvesting machine stands on tracks across the center, seated on a dark rubble crust that runs along the bottom of the frame. Its boom reaches down to the left, ending in dark wedge-shaped teeth that bite a bright pale ice mound; chips of ice fly up from the cut and arc into a hopper on the machine's shoulder. A single red panel glows at the machine's core, with a toothed radiator fin above it. From the upper right, flat gold bars of sunlight run down a shallow diagonal onto a long perforated collector panel tilted on the machine's mast, and small gold squares step down the mast to the red core. On the right, gold squares run level out of the machine into a perforated sheet of nine tank cells, two of them already torn away, the sheet struck through by a double-ring cancellation mark with wavy bars. Two small dark craft climb away at upper right, each carrying a gold cell. A pale plume of ice fragments rises from the crust behind the depot. No text appears anywhere.
An artistic imagining, not real hardware: a harvester works the ices of a comet nucleus, rendered as a Merz collage of torn paper. Sunlight comes down one diagonal and cut ice goes up the same one; between them a single hot cell turns four-billion-year-old frost into propellant, which leaves as tanks torn off a sheet like stamps. Image: poweringspace.com. Artistic imagining.
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