Power in space · Generation, transmission, storage, use · Government and first-party sources
poweringspace
Image of the Day · 2026-07-20

The Flag of Noon

The elevator hoists the sun like a flag — one gold ribbon run from sea to counterweight, every panel a stripe of noon.

An artistic imagining, not real hardware. Flat-plane emblem poster in perfect bilateral symmetry on a mid-value slate-blue field: one enormous flat gold sun disc, ringed by a burst of twenty-four alternating pale-gold and deep-amber ray blocks, is threaded on a dead-vertical space-elevator ribbon running the full height of the square. Inside the disc the ribbon's stacked photovoltaic cells invert to dark navy silhouette with thin gold slits between them, like a film strip punched through the sun; below the disc the cells brighten step by step from bronze to gold as they climb, with a small gold-ringed climber bead on the line; above the disc pale charged cells rise to a dark counterweight disc in a gold ring that eclipses the topmost ray. At the bottom a gently curved dark ocean limb with a thin gold horizon line carries a small dark anchor pylon where the ribbon meets the sea. Purely procedural flat geometry; no text; nothing shown exists.
An artistic imagining, rendered procedurally, of a space elevator whose tether is itself the solar power plant — a photovoltaic ribbon hoisted from sea anchor to counterweight like the flag of noon, its cells dark where they slice through the sun and gilding step by step as they climb toward it. Space-elevator studies really do envision a roughly 96,000 km tether ballasted beyond geostationary orbit, and how to power its climbers remains an open problem; a photovoltaic ribbon is pure speculation. Image: poweringspace.com. Artistic imagining.
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