Comment on A million new SpaceX satellites will destroy the night sky — for everyone on Earth
fishy@lemmy.today 19 hours agoTo cool the iss they’re exchanging heat into water pumping to ammonia exchangers then radiated through infrared. The radiators for a space data center would need to be prohibitively massive as I understand it.
sunnie@slrpnk.net 15 hours ago
For real. Thermal regulation of spacecraft is a problem that current, non-data center, satellites are struggling with and increasing the load by orders of magnitude isn’t going to make things easier. You can easily calculate the area needed for radiative heat transfer for a perfect radiator and you quickly end up with some gargantuan panels. Perfect radiators are also perfect absorbers, so the whole system goes to shit if the panel isn’t facing deep space.