Power in space · Generation, transmission, storage, use · Government and first-party sources
poweringspace
Image of the Day · 2026-07-12

The Star Lays Rails

An orbital relay lays a railway of light down the Martian sky — power arriving on schedule like the night express.

An artistic imagining, not real hardware. Art Deco style poster in violets: across a mid-value mauve sky, airbrushed into soft bands that all run perpendicular to one diagonal, a luminous power beam descends from a blazing eight-rayed white star ringed by halos in the upper right. The beam is drawn as railway lines — five converging rails with perpendicular sleeper ties, two of them brighter like passing pulses — landing on a dark stepped receiver mast that telescopes up from a platform on the curved dusk-lit limb of Mars in the lower left, with an orderly apron of collector panels running off the frame. A tiny dark disc eclipses the star's core. Purely procedural geometry; no text; nothing shown exists.
An artistic imagining, in the manner of a 1920s travel poster, of an orbital relay beaming power down the Martian sky — the microwave corridor drawn as a railway of light, sleepers and all, arriving at a monumental surface receiver like a night express. Power beaming was demonstrated in orbit by Caltech's SSPD-1 MAPLE experiment in 2023, but no such relay operates at Mars. Image: poweringspace.com. Artistic imagining.
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