Power in space · Generation, transmission, storage, use · Government and first-party sources
poweringspace
Image of the Day · 2026-07-29

The Sun Under Way

A wedge of the star's own returned light drives the Sun off its course.

An artistic imagining, not real hardware. Flat-plane constructivist diagram on a dark field that shears from ink-black to deep oxide red, with no horizontal or vertical edge anywhere. A vast red star fills the lower left, banded in four flat tones — a dark crimson shaded limb on its upper right, vermilion body, and scarlet and near-white bands on the limb that faces a mirror. Standing off that limb is a colossal arc of stacked bands in bone, grey and steel, its ends stepped like segmented panels, cupping the star. A long red wedge, sharp at its tip, drives from the mirror through the star and up to the right, changing colour at every plane it crosses — pale flame where it passes over the mirror, hot orange over the star, deep red over the dark field — as a second pass of red ink would on a press. Thin dark rungs are laid across the wedge at even intervals, spaced wider toward its base. The tip arrives inside a large thin outlined circle, cropped by the right edge, the same size as the star. Slab-like axonometric plates float at wildly different scales through the field, from one cropped giant at lower right down to grain-sized ones near the top, alongside fine ruled survey lines, small circular nodes and sparse dots. Purely procedural geometry; no text, no insignia, nothing depicted exists.
This is a fully speculative artistic imagining — nothing of the kind exists, is planned, or is within any known engineering reach. It pictures a stellar engine at its wildest: a mirror the size of a planet's orbit, held up by the light it reflects, returning a share of the Sun's own output to the Sun so that the unbalanced push moves the star — and everything orbiting it — onto a new course, the wedge of returned light arriving at the empty circle the system is being steered toward. Image: poweringspace.com. Artistic imagining.
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