Comment by verzali
14 hours ago
It is really hard, and it is something you need to take into careful consideration when designing a satellite.
It is really fucking hard when you have 40MW of heat being generated that you somehow have to get rid of.
14 hours ago
It is really hard, and it is something you need to take into careful consideration when designing a satellite.
It is really fucking hard when you have 40MW of heat being generated that you somehow have to get rid of.
It's all relative. Is it harder than getting 40MW of (stable!) power? Harder than packaging and launching the thing? Sure it's a bit of a problem, perhaps harder than other satellites if the temperature needs to be lower (assuming commodity server hardware) so the radiator system might need to be large. But large isn't the same as difficult.
Neither getting 40MW of power nor removing 40MW of heat are easy.
The ISS makes almost 250KW in full light, so you would need approximately 160 times the solar footprint of the ISS for that datacenter.
The ISS dissipates that heat using pumps to move ammonia in pipes out to a radiator that is a bit over 42m^2. Assuming the same level of efficiency, that's over 6km^2 of heat dissipation that needs empty space to dissipate to.
That's a lot.